There is now compelling evidence that the Tories broke the law in the anxiety to beat UKIP in 2014 and 2015. Election expenses that went way beyond those permitted by law were incurred in a desperate bid to hold Farage and his cohorts at bay. In numerous seats it is clear that a Tory is sitting only because the law was broken. New elections are essential. And it is not clear what their outcome would be, except, perhaps, for Labour.
I cannot accept the FT view of this issue, where columnist Sebastian Payne has said:
It is baffling that Britain's oldest political party, which is generally professionally run and well-funded, made such basic “administrative errors”.
I hope he is being ironic, but he's so Tory sycophantic I could not be sure. The reality is, of course, that these weren't errors. There were no mistakes. These were expenses deliberately misrepresented, which is why the Electoral Commission had to go to the High Court to get evidence on them from the Conservatives, who did not want to play ball with the investigation, knowing how bad it really was.
I am quite sure that the law was wilfully broken. I am not saying the Tories were the only party to do it: Labour and the LibDems have also been fined. But the Tories, as the Electoral Commission has made clear, did it on a grander scale and tried to cover it up.
The outcome is that we have a political system where rules, laid down by these parties in parliament, have been causally tossed aside. This is not then a democracy. It's a moneyocracy, and given the nature of the funding for some parties, something becoming akin to a plutocracy. And I am a democrat to my core. I also loathe Farage. But given the choice between democratic failure and Farage I'd choose Farage any day. Principles come first. But not, as many of us have always suspected, if you're a Conservative.
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The Tories have form on electoral fraud. The 1992 election that Underpants-man won narrowly, featured uninvestigated postal ballot fraud – old people’s homes, dodgy ballot papers. There were perhaps 6 consitutencies where this happened – enough to have made a Tory-gov unworkable & certainly not able to privatise (with oh so much success) the railways etc. The Tories will go to any lengths to hang on to power – that is the only thing they are interested in.
This means that the referendum bill was passed by a government which was quite possibly only there due to electoral fraud. The referendum was swayed by lies of epic proportions by politicians who were likely to have been party to this and the version of Brexit is likely to be very different to the one even the leavers thought they were voting for. the case for annulling the vote gets ever stronger and, as Sean says, it beginning to look more and more like a bloodless right-wing coup.
If this were France, people would be on the streets by now.
I fear you are right and the Tory party sees this as the cost of doing business. There are considerable worries about the Brexit campaign also. For example the DUP funded Metro wraparound cover circulated in London https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/24/eu-referendum-spending-official-campaigns-investigation-opens-electoral-commission.
I firmly believe the Tories were always going to beat Farage in South Thanet. It was going to be close, but there were enough anti UKIP forces there to keep him out.
What this shows above all though is how paranoid the Tories got about a UKIP threat that was way overblown, and the only reason for that paranoia was the influence of the far rightwing press which has successfully and shamefully normalised Farage’s pseudo fascist views.
“Farage’s pseudo fascist views”
I see today “fascist’s” are some how people who like free speech, but “anti-fascists” want to close free speech down, remind us again about fascism?
You are very clearly deliberately and pedantically misrepresenting arguments
It almost certainly is fraud. The Skwawkbox blog has a link to (and a copy of) a 2015 Conservative Home article in which a number of Tory activists boasted about how they specifically targeted 40 marginal seats with the Battle Bus as well as individually tailored messagers in hand-written envelopes. To now pretend that this spending was ‘National’ or mistaken (as Laura Kuenssberg laughably tweeted yesterday) is preposterous.
I can’t link to the specific piece from this PC but it is under “The Longest Confession Note In History?” at skwawkbox.org.
Kuenssberg is not stupid
There was irony in that
The corruption was linked to the battle bus campaign,
The tragic death of a young man due to bullying was also linked to the battle bus campaign,
I assume investigative journalism has found no link between the first & second instances. Nontheless, surely as a caring socuety we should ban these ‘campaign batile-buses’?
Ah, Richard. How does it go? ‘…they are lower than vermin’.
And perhaps it’s helpful to remind ourselves how that speech finishes ‘…I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they’re slightly worse than they were.’
Nye was correct (I deliberately don’t use the other word!). They get worse every year. I remember his visit, with his wife, Jennie Lee, to my Welsh Border home to visit my father during the last year of Nye’s life. He was very ill, and couldn’t do or say much, so Jennie did most of the talking. But the fire was still in his eye when she spoke about the Tories. I was twelve – I still see those eyes, and hear the Welsh lilt of his voice.
Dad had met him during the War – they were both in a London Welsh male voice choir. It changed Dad from a long-term Liberal (the letters from Lloyd George went to my half-brother after Dad’s death) to a Socialist.
Jennie came to visit us twice after Nye’s death. By then, she was working to create the Open University.
Their legacy abides.
Wow: what a memory to have
Thanks for sharing