ElectionLeaflets.org

COMMITTEE ON STANDARDS IN PUBLIC LIFE

Committee on standards in public life Michael Crick

My attention has been drawn to Michael Crick’s Written Evidence to the Eleventh Inquiry by the Committee on Standards in Public Life dated 13 April 2006:

I understand you are undertaking a review of the work of the Electoral Commission, to see how it might develop in future. Please can I make a small suggestion?

How about getting the EC to set up a library of election literature? I suggest this should involve amending the law to oblige all candidates and partiels to submit one (or more?) copies of everything they publish to the EC’s new library. I recommend that this should not just include traditional election addresses and leaflets, but also copies of all modern campaign publications – the DVDs and videos which parties often issue to voters these days; all pages on websites promoting canidates and parties; copies of posters which parties erect on public billboards; newspaper ads; and the set scripts which party phone banks use in telephone canvassing. Such a national and public collection would have a number of advantages.

First, it woudl make it much easir for the EC itself, as well as parties, candidates, the media and the general public, to monitor how much activity is going on in each constituency and nationally, and whether parties really are sticking to the rules, particularly those on spending limits. As you may know from contact I had with your committee in Lord Nolan’s time, I believe spending limits have been grossly abused in the past.

Second, I believe it would keep a small check on standards of behaviour by political candidates. For example, constituency campaigns often issue leaflets which masquerade as being published by an opposing party — one example occured in Chris Huhne’s campaign in Eastleigh in 2005, and I am told there have been others, and not just by Lib Dem candidates. I suspect that politicians would be slightly less willing to get up to such tricks if they knew such publications would be on permanent record in the EC library, available for public inspection in perpetuity.

Third, such a libraru would be of huge historic and academic interest, building up a valuable achive of elections in this country, providing an election-by-election tapestry of the issues, candidates and techniques of each campaign. It would be valuable addition to the nation’s heritage.

The new system could be viewed as being in the spirit with the new Freedom of Information obligations on government bodies, only FOIA does not currently apply to political parties.

In a way, the obligation I propose on candidates and parties to submit their material would be similar to the copyright law, whereby any publisher of a new book is obliged to submit one copy of the book to each of the six copyright libraries in the British Isels. Indeed, for all I know, the copyright law may even extend to election literature, though I doubt whether many parties do actually submit their leaflets to the British Library and other copyright libraries.

At the moment there are several academic libraries which collect election literature — the LSA, Bristol University and Brunel University — and a lot of local history libraries collect such material from their localities. But these collections are inevitably patchy and incomplete, especially since parties are under no obligation to respond to such academic requests.

I don’t believe that storing such material need be very expensive for the EC; collecting and keeping it could probably be handled by one person. It would probably involve about 15,000 pieces of paper per election — on a very rough guess of four leaflets per candidate. Indeed, the EC might want to team up with a university for long-term storage.

I think it would be asking too much of the EC to collect literature from local government elections, but it might be possible to apply the same rules to parties and candidates in local government, and make local authorities the collecting bodies, through their local history libraries or local archives.

It’s just a thought, which would fit quite neatly with the EC’s other work. I would be happy to come and discuss it further if you so wish.