Electoral spending: two wrongs do not make a right

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Speaker for allowing an Urgent Question on today's statement from the Electoral Commission. Whatever his faults may be (and I do find Mr Bercow's orotund pronouncements and patronising of certain members rather wearing), he has been assiduous in allowing ordinary members to call the government to account.

There was too short a time in the Commons Q&A session to examine all the implications of the EC's verdict that the official Remain campaign had overspent to the extent of committing a criminal offence. For me, it removes any remaining support for David Cameron's thoughtless (or Machiavellian) commitment to cede what should have been a government decision to the masses. I could have added "uneducated" (thanks to the dereliction of the BBC) and "deceived" (leading figures in several Leave campaigns have admitted to lies in their propaganda, on top of the efforts of the red-top newspapers) in front of "masses". Now we also know that money was spent illegally in order to achieve a narrow majority in favour of leaving the EU.

None of the leading Conservatives on the Vote Leave board or the Vote Leave campaign committee, some of them cabinet ministers, were prepared to face the music this morning. Instead, it was left to Chloë Smith (the Conservatives' fall guy of choice) to defend the indefensible. There was fulsome praise for the Electoral Commission, satisfaction that the UK was a robust democracy in empowering the EC and confirmation that the EC had applied the rules rigorously - but the government would just proceed as if nothing had happened.

Labour speakers largely avoided the Brexit elephant in the room, thanks to the divisions within their own ranks which they did not wish to expose. Instead, they objected to the feeble penalties and called for a beefing-up of the law - both desirable, but surely beside the point. There was also the lazy call for a public inquiry, which would be a needless and expensive distraction.

In the true spirit of yah-boo politics, the response of the few Conservatives prepared to stand up for the government's position was that Remain overspent too. Guido Fawkes and Priti Patel lead this particular campaign. However, it seems to me that, even if these charges stick, far from cancelling out the Leave offences, they only add to the disrepute of the whole referendum exercise.

As I emphasised before, Leave voters had genuine concerns which should be listened to and dealt with. (Incidentally, the EU itself has recently addressed one loophole in the employment of migrant workers.) But the government should now come clean and admit that the narrow majority in the 2016 referendum was not a reliable basis for their decision to invoke Article 50.