Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

This week the Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced plans to limit the amount that Parliamentary candidates can spend in the period before an election is called, to just .

This will please many Labour MPs in marginal, and not-so-marginal, seats who have been terrified recently about the effect of Ashcroft money. The billionaire Conservative deputy chairman Lord (Michael) Ashcroft relates in his recent autobiography how before the 2005 election, when he held no official position in the Conservative Party and was acting solely in a private capacity, he devised a strategy of channelling large sums of his own money to target seats - many millions of pounds in total.

The cash was doled out according to the seats' winnability, and according to whether he personally thought the local Conservative campaign was being run effectively. And he claims a strong correlation between the seats he funded and where Conservative MPs were elected in 2005.

Difficult to police

Now, since he became a deputy chairman, Ashcroft's pre-2005 strategy has become official Conservative Party policy. These days, however, it's no longer really accurate to call it "Ashcroft money", since the Conservatives are raising big sums from all sorts of other people, and Lord Ashcroft doesn't need to fund the party on anything like the scale he once did, if at all.

The trouble is that history shows that election spending limits like these are incredibly difficult to police, and if any party wants to exceed them, they will almost certainly get away with it - though Mr Straw is also promising to tighten up policing procedures.

Way back in 1997 I made a film for Newsnight about the Wirral South by-election, and claimed that Labour had spent several hundreds of thousands of pounds on that successful campaign, at a time when the spending limit for a by-election was only about Β£30,000. (Indeed Jack Straw himself appeared in the film, when I asked him whether the cost of his rail fare to Wirral would appear in Labour's spending accounts). I also said that the Liberal Democrats had abused the spending limits in other by-elections, and the Conservatives too, though probably on a lesser scale.

Nobody complained

Months after that film was broadcast I was told by a Labour campaign insider that I'd greatly underestimated how much the party had spent in Wirral South, and that the true figure was about Β£750,000. Another source who should have been in the know, told me that Labour spent about Β£500,000 on their unsuccessful Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election campaign in 1995. Now these were high-profile by-elections, conducted over just a few weeks, and anyone with any understanding of election campaigns would have seen that Labour was abusing the spending limits (and that the other major parties did so in other campaigns). But nobody complained; nobody investigated; and each time the parties concerned got away with it.

OK, they were breaking the law, but the police always say it's not their job to investigate unless someone makes a complaint, and then they're pretty reluctant. Nobody does complain, because its hard to prove, and the major parties won't ever cry 'foul' because they all know they've been just as guilty themselves in the past. As for the Electoral Commission, established since 2000, they've neither the resources nor inclination to investigate such matters.

So in all likelihood, whatever the new law says, political parties will get away with it if they want to spend more than Β£12,000 a year in the run-up to the next election.

Many party professionals are expert at massaging their accounts, and transferring expenditure from one activity to another. Who is to say how many leaflets were really distributed, how many posters erected, how many phone calls made, or whether full-time staff were concentrating on just one constituency or working for the party in general.

The new limits look more like a sop to keep Labour backbenchers happy, and upset the Conservatives - which they will - than an effective attempt to limit pre-election spending.