Oh yes another United Kingdom General Election result was  manipulated in 2015 by the rich & powerful AGAIN, but WHO is going to put a stop to it and when, you might ponder?

A previous post [‘United Kingdom General Elections – WHO is ‘really’ controlling them?] identified the problem we face in Britain where the rules governing our elections are far too much out of date for the twenty-first century, don’t you think?

We now suffer unsustainably from undue influence again being exercised over voters that was first stopped by Liberal PM Gladstone by the ‘now superseded’ acts of parliament in the ‘Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act 1883′ & the Parliamentary Elections Corrupt Practices Act 1885. He had tried to invoke strict rules and financial controls governing elections in Britain to prevent corruption and undue influence over voters that involved intimidation, bribery, coercion, conflicts of interests or other illegal practices.

A major plank in his curtailment was to establish stringent limits on the money to be spent on political campaigns. But that ambition has all been blown out of the water nowadays hasn’t it? Individual parliamentary candidates’ election expenses are always rigorously examined and controlled, but that is the tip of the iceberg these days, when it comes to the total money being spent on getting them elected, surely?

The main political parties can spend an absolute fortune with no questions asked as long as they don’t mention a specific candidate, eh? Oh yes parties have been given overall spending limits but they only apply in a few short weeks regulatory period though. When you have a fixed term parliament you don’t bother to wait to spend your war chest in the last few weeks of the five years do you? So how much did the Tories actually pump-in from their wealthy big donators – twenty million plus pounds? And cash strapped Labour – perhaps only half that? Does that sound to you a fair financial curtailment contest in these days? Gladstone would be aghast, surely?

Then we have the unaccountable, baron controlled printed press, exercising power without responsibility, with every main player, except the Mirror Group, owned by foreigners or non-UK residents. Of about say forty British newspapers (some small), with a total circulation of about twenty million people, some forty percent supported the Tories, but that coverage astoundingly giving them nearly seventy percent of the whole Country’s readership – four times more readers than supported sad old Labour. The papers banging the big drum for the Conservatives included the daily (and their corresponding Sunday versions where published) Sun, Mail, Metro, Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, and Yorkshire Post. Some of these so called ‘newspapers’ slanted their news and then blatantly instructed their readers to vote Tory. It doesn’t even stop there though, does it? No, all the big boys also have their finger in the growing and massively influential internet pie as well – so they peddle their voting instructions to further countless millions more potential voters there, don’t they?

We even have the glaring evidence of massive vote manipulation when the biggest circulation UK newspaper the Sun, instructed its Scottish readers to vote for the SNP while at exactly the same time frightening the life out of voters in England by warning that the SNP were coming to Parliament to wipe it out, so they had to be repelled by voting Tory and not Labour here. Oh yes, in Scotland the main papers told voters to go for the SNP who subsequently swept the board – a coincidence, do you think?

Does all that sound to you like no undue influence over voters by the rich & powerful, eh?

[The UK TV lot are required by law to give balanced reporting and are not allowed to tell the population who to vote for – why doesn’t that equally apply to the press, you might ask? But they seem to get away with being a law unto themselves]