Apologies for the light posting here – I’ve been a bit busy with other things lately. This post will be some way off being a detailed bit of innovative research as well – more an observation to fill the gap.
Every candidate at the next general election will be subjected to a set of rules to cover election expenses. To ensure that these rules are adhered to, candidates have to put an imprint on all of their materials and present a bill at the end to The Electoral Commission (I think?).
This is designed to stop the outright purchase of elections. But can it be stopped in future if a lot of campaigning is done by deniable outriders? And surely orchestrated print based campaigns aren’t that much use any more? My two examples come from either side of the political divide:
- On my right, there is the Tax Payers Alliance: Not officially Tory and not even endorsing a lot of Tory policies – but doing real daily low-level damage to pro-collective action politics in general and Labour in particular
- On my left, the Unions. Many of the largest Unions are not affiliated to Labour. Some are even a bit grumpy with the current flavour of the Labour Party. But they are even less keen on the Tories and can use new media tools to increasingly damage them.
In both cases, the parties will benefit from more resources without ever showing them on the balance sheet – courtesy of negative deniable ‘swiftboating‘ campaigns. So how long will the rules continue to be relevant?
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
To a (limited) extent the law covers this, because there are rules and expense limits covering “third party” expenditure. However, those controls aren’t perfect, in particular because of the problem of deciding when general promotion of a viewpoint starts becoming campaigning to vote for / against someone.
Mark – Tom Freeman has made a similar point here: http://viva-freemania.blogspot.com/2010/03/ashcroft-missing-point.html
I don’t really know much about this – its been a while since I had to know the rules. But it seems that a lot of work these days is about campaigning *against* parties rather than *for* them. Lots of people – both inside and outside the Labour Party will be financing campaigns against the BNP in East London, for example. The net beneficiary is likely to be Labour but it many not all happen with Labour’s cash – or indeed, even with their consent.