Public most likely to think Conservatives often break spending rules at elections

Theresa May- photo from EU2017.EE, used under the CC BY 2.0 license.

When asked by YouGov whether they think different parties “often break the spending rules at elections”, 44% said this was the case for the Conservatives. Only 24% agreed this is true of Labour, 23% of Ukip and just 19% said it is true of the Lib Dems.

That might of course be related to the Conservatives having been on the receiving end of a record-breaking fine for breaking election expense rules on repeated occasions, after having repeatedly obstructed the regulator’s investigation.

Despite Theresa May’s recent claims in the media that the Conservatives properly reported all local expenditure at the last election, that’s not what the regulator found and published detailed evidence of – which is why the Electoral Commission said of the recent CPS decision, “The evaluation set out by the Crown Prosecution Service in today’s announcement is consistent with that of the Commission, which concluded that the Conservative party’s spending return was incomplete and inaccurate, as it contained spending that should have been included in the candidates’ returns.”