Late 1984 the Tory government started to talk about the numbers of "minor" candidates standing at general elections. It was (they said) a significant problem that so many frivolous and joke candidates were standing. To be fair, it was more of a thing in the 80s and it was common to see as many as a dozen or more candidates in addition to the (then) big three. On the other hand, there didn't appear to be any evidence that it actually was a particularly difficult task to run an election with that number of candidates. You might spot the coincidence that electoral law has recently been tampered with to fix an alleged problem of which there was no evidence at all, and draw your own conclusions.

In 1985 they decided to fix this supposed problem and a number of proposals were made. Two ideas emerged as front-runners. First was a simple increase in the deposit required to stand as an MP. Second was that a candidate would require the support of at least a number of local signatories (I forget the actual number, but it would be down to the candidate or local party to provide the required proof that each signature was genuine and belonged to a valid voter within the constituency). This second proposal, that you need the support of, say, a hundred local voters in order to stand, seems complicated, but in fact it was all down to the candidate to do the work. Get valid signatures or no standing as an MP. It seemed to many people that this was an ideal solution, demonstrating the candidate's earnest intent, and that there was at least some local support.

Naturally enough, the deposit was raised to £500 from the existing £150. This means that a prospective national party would need to raise £325,000 just for deposits. This was a massive disincentive to any group with aspirations to national significance, other than the wealthy. For the Tory party, £325K is the kind of cash thrown at a party drinks get-together, or dinner for a few MPs. Nothing at all. Neither was it an issue for forces like the BNP with their backing from wealthy right-wingers and foreign agencies. Nor, ironically, was it a disincentive for many of the genuinely frivolous candidates who only intended to contest a single seat anyway.

It still is a huge problem for perfectly serious national parties such as the Greens. If you need convincing that using money as a way to regulate political participation is practically and morally wrong, this is a clear illustration.

Most modern democracies swiftly evolve to a form of minority rule. Many start out that way.

At the previous UK general election, the limit that could be spent per party, providing that every seat was contested, was just under £19 million. That covers advertising, expenses, the lot. The government has just increased the amount to about £34 million. The money spent on a particular seat may not exceed 1/650 of the total. Nationwide advertising is permitted and is not set against any particular seat, but the total must not be exceeded.

Similar rules were applied during the EU referendum but appear to have been massively breached by the leave campaign using techniques such as setting up bogus campaign groups with there own entitlement to account for spending by the main group, and simple under-reporting of expenditure. Two prosecutions took place for spending infringements of comparatively minor amounts (2 x £20,000) one of which succeeded and one which was set aside on appeal. 

 

Worth noting though that (based on reporting) the Remain campaign spent (significantly) more than the Leave campaign overall.

Cos it's easy to give the impression that Remain played fair and Leave bought their victory, which isn't really true.

Leave made spurious claims and ran a more manipulative campaign for sure. But it also addressed (and fanned) peoples' actual concerns (whether legitimate or not), which Remain failed to do.

(I say this as someone who's EU-ambivalent)

Yeah, on reported figures, Remain spent about half as much again. Remain about £19.3m and Leave about £13.3m. Set aside arguments about whether those are honest figures, the interesting points are about the natures of the campaigns.

Actually, that's not true. I don't really care about that. It's been said over and over and it isn't going to make one iota of difference.

What really bothers me are the actual arguments for and against, which we heard precious little of at the time. We heard a lot of vague bollocks about "stronger together" just like the devolution arguments. We heard a lot of scare stories which were a piece of piss to describe as scare stories. (several if not most turned out to be true but wtf). On the leave side we had a load of stuff about how our borders were being overrun with Turks and refugees, but very little about why we might legitimately fear the EU: the consolidation of political and economic power into every smaller and more anonymous power groups. The distancing of policy decisions from people actually affected. And so on.

Of course, the reasons are obvious - or rather, some of them are. The leaders of Leave and Remain had huge amounts in common. They both saw the anti-woke culture war as a positive force. They both wanted the forces that allow accumulation of personal wealth to remain intact. Neither side wanted to describe racial and cultural mixing as a positive. The truly incredible benefit of the EU, that it is almost impossible to have a fighting war when you share a trading union, have free movement, and elect people (including shits like Farage) to a shared parliament, was never even considered. Yeah, there was some comment about a war-free Europe, but it was pretty low key stuff. Even the old cunt Churchill knew it was a good idea. In the end, the remain side simply wanted to share the values of the leave side too much to give the arguments a decent airing. I blame Corbyn as much as anybody for this. He was horribly stuck in the anti-corporate distrust that he shared with Tony Benn. Benn always identified the loss of sovereignty as his big objection, but I don't believe this.

That's all really well put and I agree entirely.

The Turks are at the fucking gates.

Not sure how much I'd blame Corbyn, since he was really born (as a public figure) into the aftermath, but if you're saying he failed to put forward the *actual* pros and cons then, yeah. Though strategically I do think it was better to just say as little as possible about brexit at that point.