In UK election expenses, the real scandal is the system

LONDON — We all know politicians are base creatures only in it for themselves, rotten to the core, crooked by their very nature and as greedy as greedy can be. Except they’re not, are they? They’re like the rest to of us, and I include journalists in that “we.” They take a few liberties, they push the rules a bit, they avoid things (like tax) rather than evade things (which is the illegal version). They “game the system” and make the most of muddy guidelines. So when the rules are too complicated, out of date and ambiguous, then you can expect trouble.

And so it is with the great election expenses scandal. All the main British parties have been slapped with penalties for flouting the rules. Fine, if you’ll pardon the pun, but the rules are designed for a 19th-century parliamentary system in a world of the internet and increasingly presidential-style politics in Britain.

In seats such as Thanet South — where Nigel Farage may yet triumph and enter the House of Commons, which represents a deep irony on too many levels — the battle appeared to be essentially a local one. In reality, though, it was a national one, and would have had that same bitterly-fought quality wherever Farage had chosen to lay his trilby down.

We have local expenses limits and national expenses limits, and we pretend that the twain shall never meet.

We have local expenses limits and national expenses limits, and we pretend that the twain shall never meet. Yet we all know that the British system has always run on who can win the “marginals,” and that seats in the Midlands of England and Lancashire are, classically, where governments are made and broken. “National” and “local” amount to the same thing there. In the days of envelope stuffing in committee rooms it was true, and in the era of targeted emails and social media it is true still.

Once upon a time it was easy, too, to link spending with political effort. The universal postal rate, with us since 1840, ensured that election addresses could be delivered to each household at an identical cost per item, and thus the parties could be treated fairly on that front at least by having an equal right to such access. But electronic media, Tweets and Facebook views are all chaotically untraceable on a constituency basis.

What, I may ask, is the imputed “value” of a visit by a party leader to a key seat in an election campaign? As soon as Jeremy Corbyn hops off the train or Theresa May emerges from her Range Rover, the local and national media are all over them. There they are, visiting a hospital ward, a car factory or a building site, the coverage all unpaid for but far more powerful (potentially) than any clunky official leafleted propaganda, which usually makes the short journey from letterbox to recycling bin with no intervening attention whatsoever.

But on Look East or in the Birmingham Post the voter is more likely to consume, if briefly, that fun image of the Tory leader being stared at by a schoolchild, or Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn waving a giant courgette around. Such photo ops are not exactly priceless, but they’re worth something and are never factored into the official election expenditure. The cost, in other words — some petrol or a train ticket — is far less than the advertising space they win. That’s why the system we have is itself a fraud perpetrated on the voters.

We also have a similar problem to the United States, where trade unions or big business can spend freely provided they don’t actually declare “Vote Labour/Tory” but merely drop the heaviest of hints as to where your X should go. When they appear on a billboard in a part of town an elector works in but doesn’t live, is that a communication with that elector, or not? The whole idea of equating the efficiency of political communication with expenditure dates back to the 18th-century practice of “treating,” where electors in favored rotten boroughs were “treated” to as much ale as they could handle in return for a vote, if they remained capable of actually casting one.

Should we operate the same rules in a world of crowd-funded, community-based campaigns as we did when the only big money came from interest groups?

It’s true that vast spending can sometimes steal an election, obviously, but it is far from an eternal truth. And funding patterns are slowly changing. Should we operate the same rules in a world of crowd-funded, community-based campaigns as we did when the only big money came from interest groups? Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign was a pioneering example of how things are changing.

British political parties have always, always, centered their campaigns on marginal seats and swing voters. To pretend otherwise is facile. Given we have that system — a direct consequence of our first past the post electoral system — and given that tracking expenditure in a digital environment increasingly makes no sense, perhaps the best thing would be to simply retain a national cap and allow the parties to flood constituencies with workers and propaganda. They still wouldn’t necessarily win — UKIP spent plenty but made a net loss of one seat in 2015 — but it is what they do anyway, we can’t stop them, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.

Let loose the dogs of electoral war.

Sean O’Grady is deputy managing editor at the Independent.