Author Archives: Stuart Wilks-Heeg

The Independent View: Is it time to rethink postal voting?

By Stuart Wilks-Heeg | Wed 4th May 2011 - 11:54 am

Allegations emerged recently of voters in Rochdale being asked to hand postal ballots for the local elections to party representatives to complete and submit to the Returning Officer. A decade ago, this might have made the national news, but now such stories are probably too familiar to make the headlines.

While electoral fraud is not rife in the UK, the scale of the problem is almost impossible to estimate. One thing is for sure – the Rochdale case does not represent an isolated local difficulty. Based on joint reporting by the Electoral Commission and the Association of Chief Police Officers …

Posted in Election law, Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged electoral commission, postal voting, rochdale and sayeeda warsi | 14 Comments

The Independent View: Party funding: yes, another review really is necessary

By Stuart Wilks-Heeg | Wed 20th October 2010 - 11:20 am

The next 12 months will be crucial to the coalition’s promise to reform party funding and ‘take big money out of politics’. An inquiry, to be conducted under the auspices of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, is already underway and will report in spring 2011, to be followed by inter-party talks.

It could be asked whether we need yet another review. Between 2005 and 2007, three separate reviews highlighted the need for reform, with the inter-party talks which followed the Hayden Phillips review in late 2007 coming close to securing agreement. Some, including Phillips himself, have argued …

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged hayden phillips and party funding | 7 Comments