Her Majesty’s Government forced to pay £70,000 fine

By Lara, Politics and Education Editor

The UK Conservative party will be forced to pay a fine of £70,000 after overspending on local MP candidate campaigns, and subsequently inaccurately declaring their expenses. UK politics has changed dramatically over the past 22 months since the 2015 General Election, nonetheless, this will not stop a political party being fined for not properly reporting their party spending back during campaigns in the spring of 2015.

In order to maintain Britain’s traditional democratic values, there are specific legal guidelines on party campaign spending in the run-up to polling day. There are limits on a party’s spending on a national level of campaigning but also at a local level, which is where the Conservative party found a way of attempting to get around the system and assumed no one would notice their incorrect reports. Certain MPs overspent on their local MP campaigns, but the party declared the additional expenditure simply as ‘national campaigning’.

The recent commission discovered a sum total of £275,000 worth of campaign spending which the Conservative party did not accurately report (and in some, more extreme cases, failed to declare they spent at all) accumulated over the course of the 2015 general election campaign, as well as a few by-elections in 2014, all of which were covered heavily by the media.

It is clear why Britain has created these restrictions: as it prevents general elections becoming a competition of financial funding. The US notoriously do not have any limits on campaign spending, meaning many candidates end up having to withdraw from the presidential election, for fears they cannot compete with rivals who have more funding than them. So this £70,000 fine is a definite move by UK officials to prove that the country does not wish to follow the US’ free election campaigns, instead choosing to focus on creating an equal election campaign, set up to give all parties an equal chance to be elected.