The mafia-style attack on the Electoral Commission

Writing in the Observer this week about the use of dark money in right-wing thinktanks and the explosion of domestic and foreign propaganda on the web, I said there was an obvious need to protect British democracy. The Electoral Commission should be given police powers. Political parties should have the same duty as banks to check they are not laundering dirty money. Thinktanks and lobbyists should be required under pain of criminal punishment to declare who is funding them. As should social media companies running political adverts.

But come now, I concluded, ‘Do you expect a government led by Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson to open up a system that gave them power?’

True to form, and as predictably as rain on a summer’s bank holiday, Cummings and Johnson are now proposing to limit what few powers our feeble Electoral Commission possesses or abolish it. The Electoral Commission investigated Vote Leave after the Brexit Referendum.