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.