Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The mafia-style attack on the Electoral Commission

Boris Johnson (photo: Getty)

Writing in the Observer this week about the use of dark money in right-wing thinktanks and the explosion of domestic and foreign propaganda on the web, I said there was an obvious need to protect British democracy. The Electoral Commission should be given police powers. Political parties should have the same duty as banks to check they are not laundering dirty money. Thinktanks and lobbyists should be required under pain of criminal punishment to declare who is funding them. As should social media companies running political adverts.

But come now, I concluded, ‘Do you expect a government led by Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson to open up a system that gave them power?’

True to form, and as predictably as rain on a summer’s bank holiday, Cummings and Johnson are now proposing to limit what few powers our feeble Electoral Commission possesses or abolish it. The Electoral Commission investigated Vote Leave after the Brexit Referendum. Cummings and Johnson (I put Cummings first in recognition of his seniority) are running a Vote Leave rather than a Conservative government, and its defining vice is a Mafioso’s desire for vengeance. Cross them and they will come for you with unrestrained force.

Writing in the Telegraph, Amanda Milling, one of the Conservative party’s chairs, damned the Electoral Commission as ‘unaccountable’. What? It’s an independent regulatory body, which reports to the Speaker of the House of Commons. It exists under the rule of law and is answerable to the courts. For it to be truly unaccountable, it would be like the Conservative Party and want to restrict judicial review of its decisions, or damn lawyers and journalists who question it as ‘activists’ with covert agendas. As I’m sure you have guessed, to Milling ‘unaccountable’ means ‘not under the control of Cummings and Johnson’.

‘Despite having an unclear rulebook,’ she writes, ‘the Commission is only too willing to push for the prosecution of political and party activists.

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