Why are they allowed to get away with it?

The Tories are sending out malicious political propaganda disguised as driving fines, but how are they allowed to get away with it?

The Tory party have been sending out deceptive political attack leaflets in London that are designed to look like driver fines.

The leaflets have been designed to scare people into giving away their personal details to a Tory data scraping operation.

Anyone who is tricked into scanning the QR code is taken to a Tory websitethat falsely claims that Sadiq Khan is going to impose a pay-per-mile charge on London drivers, before insisting that it’s possible to "send a message to the mayor" by handing over personal details to the Tory election campaign.

The central claim that Sadiq Khan is planning to bring in pay-per-mile charges is an outright lie, and the leaflets only mention the Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall in the small print on the reverse side of the leaflet.

This profoundly deceptive and dishonest leafleting campaign is clearly designed to trick vulnerable people, however it’s likely to backfire dramatically on anyone who is capable of seeing through such a cynical ruse.

If people are falsely panicked into thinking they’ve received a driving fine, only to find out that it’s actually just a cynical Tory data-scraping exercise, they’re hardly likely to thank the Tories for tricking them and stressing them out, are they?

However, even if these cynical and deceptive tactics are likely to backfire on the Tory party when most people realise that it’s a scam, they’re still profoundly immoral and something should obviously be done to rule out this kind of political dishonesty.

The problem of course is that the Electoral Commission have been petrified of holding the Tories to account for their deceptive tactics and political lies because they know that the government can simply scrap the Electoral Commission in retribution.

This is the reason the Tories were let off for pumping 88% lies into people’s Facebook feeds in 2019, and how they were allowed to get away with blatantly illegal postering campaigns all over scores of marginal constituencies during the same election.

What the country needs is a robust set of new laws governing electoral tactics and materials.

Highly deceptive leaflets should obviously be banned, and new rules should be brought in to govern online campaigning too.

For example, targeted online ads should be classified as local spending and subject to local spending limits, and the use of dodgy shell companies to evade campaign spending limits should be treated as a criminal offense with lengthy jail terms for the perpetrators.

And nobody other than political liars should be concerned about the implementation of new rules to punish political lying either.

When candidates are found to have broken the rules, then the authorities should have the power to fine them, ban them from taking up their seats, and force by-elections.

But unfortunately robust new rules to clamp down on political dishonesty seem just as unlikely if Labour were to win the next election, given that Keir Starmer is every bit as much of a cynical political liar as Boris Johnson ever was.

So given the pathetic impotence of the Electoral Commission, and the unlikelihood of Keir Starmer bringing in new rules to prevent himself from deceiving the public even more than he already has, the best we can hope to do is warn people about these dirty Tory tactics, and hope that our vulnerable relatives don’t fall for such cynical Tory trickery and lies.

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