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.’
The Tories cannot forgive the Electoral Commission for investigating Vote Leave. It also investigated the Remain campaign, but Milling does not mention that, for it is a feature of the Mafia-style that it resents every police investigation into its mob and ignores investigations of others. Telegraph readers would never guess as they slogged their way through her special pleading that the Electoral Commission had run nearly 500 investigations in the last five years. Only five of the 500 were challenged in the courts. In only one case – the investigation into Darren Grimes and the relationship between Vote Leave and BeLeave – was the challenge upheld. This strikes me as a decent hit rate. If the courts rebuffed the police and Crown Prosecution Service in only one in 500 cases, they would be delighted. Mind you, if the CPS were ever to prosecute Cummings or one of his associates, I have no doubt that the Tories would demand its abolition too.
Milling either does not know the record or knows it and wants to hide it from her readers. These are not just the blusters of one angry authoritarian on the comment pages. Milling is repeating the Conservatives’ submission to the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
On no account, she continues, should the commission be given powers to prosecute, even though everyone worried about fake news and unaccountable campaign spending thinks it needs them; even though the Pensions Regulator and the Financial Conduct Authority and many another regulators have exactly those powers.
Milling and the Conservative party as a whole want the police to remain the sole agency responsible for prosecuting electoral fraud. The argument would have more plausibility were it not for two objections so glaring you need to shield your eyes. The forces of law and order do not want to investigate political corruption. The Russia report revealed that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum because the intelligence services were so frightened of offending the Conservative party they looked the other way.
But the real gotcha moment comes when Billings offers the Conservative party’s ‘solution’ to a problem of its own making.
‘The Commission should also take more guidance from the party-nominated Election Commissioners, especially in the development of guidance and broader operational policy.’ The politicians are the true experts in their field, she says, ‘and their experience and expertise can and should be utilised.’
So there you have it. All the clichés about putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank and the fox in charge of the hen house apply. The Tories want politicians to ‘guide’ investigations into political fraud. And, continues Milling, if the Electoral Commission does not accept the Conservative party’s terms ‘then the only option would be to abolish it’.
I hope I am not being nostalgic when I remember that there was a time when a major political party would be ashamed of putting forward such dishonest and self-serving arguments. However much it wanted to advance its interests, it would feel duty bound to deal in facts rather than paranoid conspiracism. Every democracy in the world is grappling with how to strengthen its defences against the corruption of elections and the Conservative party is choosing this precise moment to weaken ours. As the right is the prime beneficiary of dodgy money, its motives are transparent.
If I were a Tory, who believed in limited government, I would be getting ready to pack my bags. It is not your party anymore. It is a party that defines all opposition from within and without as illegitimate, and seeks to crush anyone who tries to restrain it. Seriously, go, get out, hit the road, scram: otherwise Johnson will do to you what Corbyn did to Labour members and leave you drenched in shame.
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