Vote Leave Campaign: Electoral Law

Darren Jones Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s observation. I do not think anyone would dispute the layers of complexity and difficulty, and the greater difficulty presented by social media. For some of us who have been grappling with electoral law over many years, social media makes it a whole lot more difficult, and I suspect we all know that we will need to update our procedures to try to cope with the challenges that are posed.

[Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab)]

For many of my constituents, this feels like an obvious point. There has been a breach of the law and there should be a way in which those who are responsible are held to account through our legal system. The fact that a general, local or European election or a local referendum would, in such a case, be voided in the High Court but that this referendum has not been seems nonsensical. I agree with the point my hon. Friend just made: that the rules, therefore, clearly need updating. Would my hon. Friend support me and others in calling for an inquiry, not just to understand the problems in the referendum, but to fix the rules for the future?

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend jumps ahead a little, but entirely correctly, to my conclusions. Over the next few minutes, I will show some of the inconsistencies and the need to update our rules and laws, and I very much hope that the Minister will listen closely.

Returning to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s conclusion, that was an extraordinarily strong statement, which frankly should make anyone in any way associated with the Vote Leave campaign at least wince—they should, more properly, be deeply ashamed. I cannot help noting that the alleged point of the entire campaign was to bring control back to this Parliament—a Parliament it now treats with contempt and disdain. The sheer hypocrisy, as well as the appalling boorishness, that the campaign has exhibited takes the breath away. How dare it wave the Union Jack when it so disrespects basic British values? Millions and millions of people who voted to leave will also have been horrified by its behaviour. My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) put it succinctly when asking an urgent question on this matter in July:

“Who do these people think they are? They think they are above the law.”—[Official Report, 17 July 2018; Vol. 645, c. 227.]

Although this particular instance is controversial and unpleasant, and stinks of arrogance and an obnoxious disregard for our politics and our Parliament, over an issue that is extremely emotive for many of us, as well as highly significant for the country, it is important to remember that this is not the only occasion on which our politics has fallen short.

I have just made a pretty strong attack, so I will try to lighten the mood for a moment. In the interest of painting an accurate picture, I fully acknowledge that claims that ballots have been rigged or that electorates have been misled are hardly new or unusual. It was not just the notorious £350,000 claim on the side of the bus. [Interruption.] Million—sorry, not thousand. I have lost count of the number of constituencies I have arrived in and by-elections I have turned up to, where I have been puzzled and amused by the information being offered to the electorate by one side or another. Let me get my mea culpa in first. My party has made some interesting claims. I remember “Vote Labour or the fox gets it” dominating one parliamentary by-election. I remember Labour claiming that the Lib Dems were high on taxes and soft on drugs—that was one of my particular favourites, which I think was from Oldham and Saddleworth. In another by-election, possibly in Leicester, I remember being told that the contest was Mr Strong versus Mr Weak—neither of which candidates appeared on the ballot paper, as I recall. In general elections, the Conservatives have used the notorious double tax whammy and they have asked us, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”. Of course, whenever the Liberal Democrats are involved, it is always a two-horse race, whatever the facts might say.

Whether witty, making a reasonable point in a clever way or downright misleading, none of those statements actually broke the law, but Vote Leave did and it has been punished according to the law as it stands. However, the campaign also seriously misled the public. I and many others feel furious about the false promises that were made, but I reluctantly concede that this motley collection of attempts to at best divert and at worst mislead the electorate is, frankly, what electoral politics has always been: an unlovely struggle to achieve sometimes noble ends through too often distinctly tawdry means.

Sometimes, however, cheating does lead to a rerun. In Oldham East and Saddleworth, a by-election was triggered in November 2010 after the sitting MP, elected just months before, was reported guilty of “knowingly making false statements” about an opponent in the general election earlier in the year. After various court proceedings and an appeal, he was reaffirmed as guilty and conceded defeat. I was very sorry, because he was a Labour colleague. Interestingly, the electorate chose not to punish Labour at the ensuing by-election. There are more recent examples. In South Thanet, accusations of electoral fraud have been made that could have declared the election result in 2015 void due to overspending. The trial has been delayed. It is expected to happen in October and I therefore do not think it would be appropriate to say anything more about it.

Those who have signed the petition under consideration today may well ask: why are parliamentary election reports of wrongdoing treated so differently and so much more robustly than those relating to referendums? The answer, as I have hinted, is that electoral law is complicated, with different overlapping pieces of legislation that make it difficult to understand, even for those of us who have been struggling to work out what it means for many years. The important point here is that electoral law is different for national referendums.

In the case of a parliamentary election, there can be a challenge for one of three reasons: if there have been administrative failings that could have led to the wrong result; if a candidate is suspected of being disqualified from standing; or if there have been corrupt or illegal practices, including a candidate spending over the limit. Although there are financial limits on national spending by political parties and third-party campaigners during an election, there is no similar provision for declaring a general election result void because of overspending on the national scale. That makes the rules for referendums and parliamentary elections both complex and varied.