Admirers of Victorian novels need no reminding just how corrupt and expensive, even brutal, politicians of the era could sometimes be beneath the lofty rhetorical surface. The Great Reform Act of 1832 began to modernise a system more or less unchanged from medieval times. It may have ended the days of locking up voters to stop the other side getting to them, but it remains a work in progress. In the light of disruptive new technologies, the changing ways of campaigning to maximise impact in the small group of target seats, and at a time when money often flexes more muscle than fading grassroots activism, it is time for a fresh look.
The immediate cause for concern is the growing disquiet over aspects of the Conservative party campaign which carried David Cameron back to Downing Street with a small, largely unexpected majority last year. Pending police investigation in a number of hard-fought marginal constituencies, the allegations are still no more than that. But the charge, first made on Channel 4 News, is that the cost of transporting, feeding and housing Tory volunteers who were centrally directed to “micro-targeted” seats should properly have been allocated to the constituency agent’s costs, not to the national campaign. It does not involve a huge amount of money: £38,000 spread over 29 English constituencies, suggesting that 24 overspent. But 22 of those 24 were won by the Tories. They were critical to Mr Cameron’s victory.
This week, the controversy, simmering away on inside pages in a busy spring for news, was given fresh impetus by The Canary news website. It interviewed a whistleblower claiming to have worked for a market research company used by the Conservative party. Without identifying its links with a political party fighting the election, he alleged that the company engaged in what is known as “push polling”, the art of steering an interviewee to give the desired answer, in this instance towards voting for candidate Y in constituency Y.
Apart from the impropriety of leading questions (journalists do it all the time, but pollsters aren’t meant to), the issue is again one of cost allocation: whose budget, national or local, should foot the bill, always assuming the Electoral Commission gets to hear about the expenses at all, which, it is alleged, may not always have been the case.
A glance at the Electoral Commission’s rules confirms that these matters are complex, but that the official carrying the can is the agent. In the “good old days”, cynical and worldly agents often regarded the candidate as nothing more than the “legal necessity”, a burden to be borne by them for the party’s greater good. But they knew which corners could not be cut. In the high turnover, professionalised politics of today there is less experience and institutional memory. The near-obligatory presence of high-priced political consultants from abroad, bringing their own brand of American or Australian magic to the proceedings, is unlikely to enhance respect for the finer points of Gladstonian reform. American and Australian campaigns are not famous for their fastidiousness.
More than any other country in the advanced world, US politics in particular are also prey to the power of money, but Europeans cannot be too smug as they watch the unsavoury, money-driven battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton unfold. What happens there one day has a habit of catching on here, even when not directly imported in a consultant’s laptop. Only this week an academic study of UK election spending in 2015 for the Washington Post concluded that the Tories’ resources, and their ability to spend almost up to the limit in marginal seats held by the Lib Dems, was highly effective.
On its analysis, the difference between spending nothing and spending to the permitted maximum was worth 4% extra votes (although there is other research that suggests the bigger problem was the Lib Dem collapse rather than any surge in Tory support). The remarkable power of tech that allows parties to tailor a message to an individual voter is probably corrosive and certainly organisationally expensive; it further blurs the line between national and constituency campaign finance, which Lord Ashcroft’s marginal seats strategy did for years.
The allegations of expenses fraud have gained little traction at Westminster. It may be that other parties’ consciences are not entirely clear either. The Electoral Commission should make sure the public gets the full story.