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The Manchester Mill has revealed that Reform UK appear to have broken electoral law during the Gorton and Denton by-election by distributing campaign material without a legally compliant imprint.
That matters. The law is the law, and if a party breaks it, that should be taken seriously.
But if you stop the analysis there, you miss the much bigger and much more worrying point.
Because even if Reform had followed the rules, the current system would still have allowed them to run a campaign that was deeply misleading to voters.
Reform distributed a letter designed to look like it came from a “concerned local resident”. It was written in a conversational tone, styled to feel personal, and crucially did not make clear that it was a piece of party political advertising.
According to the Manchester Mill, the material failed to include the required imprint, meaning it didn’t properly state who was responsible for producing it. That’s why the police are now looking at it.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Reform could have easily stayed within the law and misled voters just as effectively.
Under current electoral law, campaign material does not have to state the name of the political party behind it clearly.
Instead, it only needs to include: the name of the candidate, and the name and address of the candidate’s agent. That’s it. No party logo required. No party name required. No plain-English explanation of who is trying to persuade you. Just a couple of names that no normal voter will recognise.
Most people in Gorton and Denton won’t know who the Reform candidate is. They certainly won’t know who their election agent is. And they shouldn’t be expected to.
So, Reform could very easily have run almost the same campaign, added a tiny line of legal text at the bottom, and stayed fully within the law while voters were still left none the wiser about who was really behind the message.
This tactic has been deployed before. The Conservative Party has previously produced election material that technically complied with imprint rules while doing everything possible to avoid clearly identifying itself as the source. One particularly egregious example is documented here, where responsibility was buried behind a Westminster address and a named individual rather than the party itself.
The purpose of imprint rules is supposed to be transparency. Voters should be able to tell who is speaking to them.
But the law has drifted into a compliance exercise designed for campaign professionals, not what voters require.
If the test of transparency is “could an average voter reasonably work out who is behind this message?”, then the current rules fail that test badly.
Reform UK may have broken the law in Gorton and Denton. That should be dealt with. But the far bigger issue is our electoral law allows political campaigns to be deliberately misleading while remaining perfectly legal. The government need to use the opportunity of the upcoming Elections Bill to make this common sense change.
Read our four recommendations for the upcoming Elections Bill here which includes rules to prevent misleading electoral ads like this one and including the political party’s name in the imprint.
Photograph from The Manchester Mill
