Ashcroft, Unite and Byers pale into insignificance beside the way New Labour has schemed to ensure a built-in core of loyal voter support.

MPs working the expenses gravy train disgust and anger almost everyone. More of that ilk still at the cesspool of cash-for-influence seems no surprise – but does confirm what most voters think: the existing legislative system is a perfect reflection of a seriously eroded moral culture in the UK.

Far fewer people get worked up about money influencing elections, but as a form of corruption it is much worse for the health of our democracy – and much worse than most people realise. Recently the media (with heavy prodding from the two main political Parties) have thrown the spotlight on a very rich man and a very powerful trade union as contemporary examples of money-buys-votes electioneering. But a third form of the practice dwarfs these two by some distance.

The big moral issue of Ashcroft’s millions is that, in a constituency-based electoral system where the majority candidate’s ‘spare’ votes cannot be counted nationally, a very wealthy supporter of the Establishment can massively influence the behaviour of a small but crucial group of electors. The population of Britain is around sixty million; but the number of carefully targeted floating voters in one constituency may well be no more than a few thousand.

The cynicism of focusing persuasion funds in the UK’s marginal constituencies is mind-blowing. It is nothing short of the identification of a voting system’s intrinsic faults, followed by the use of one rich man’s money to steal an election by exploiting them.

The average marginal can be won or lost at most on the basis of 5000 votes. Concentrating an election marketing campaign on sixty marginals means that the votes of five people in a thousand can be used to change a national dead-heat into a working majority.

‘Working’ such a system in this appalling manner would be bad enough if the Party involved had equivocal views about that system. But that simply isn’t the case with the Conservative Party: David Cameron has expressed his supposedly firm belief that First Past the Post is the best way to produce strong government in a democracy.

Setting aside an obvious debate about the definitions of ‘strong’ and ‘democracy’ there, even the most trusting of observers would be left doubting the Conservative Leader’s objectivity. In a fully proportional representation system, the Ashcroft Plan just wouldn’t work. An opportunity to use the influence of the powerful monied elite to influence an election would be removed – and the Tory Party would have a much steeper hill to climb than the one it faces today.

But the very 1 in 4 incline of that hill brings me to the Government Party. In the Spring of 2009, let it be remembered, the sanctimonious tendency in New Labour’s ranks considered a bill to cap the allowable election spend per constituency. Although an excellent idea objectively, it was nothing less than an attempt by the Left to stop Ashcroft’s money from dwarfing the enormous amounts it too receives from an unrepresentative interest group: the TUC – or as it is more commonly known these days, Unite.

Unite’s influence is every bit as pernicious a form of privilege as the donations of a shadowy nondom: as well as goading BA workers towards a strike confrontation, it has ensured a Parliamentary seat for its prince Jack Dromey and many others – and been subsidising his partner Harriet Harman for over three decades. She is now Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and – whatever one may think of her gender theories – a very powerful person indeed. Charlie Whelan (as we saw last week) has Unite at his beck and call in the marginals.

However, the systemic scam being worked by New Labour goes beyond the Unions to a quite staggering level of potential control over how the British people vote. It outdoes any of the growing evidence that the Left in Britain recycles government funds for trade unions into Labour Party war-chests.

In effect, since it came to power in 1997, the Government has been growing its own electors.

The process of germinating Labour voters uses our tax monies directly to employ people in the public sector – across several industries and countless quangos, and in millions of bureaucratic positions. This – along with the nurturing of a dependency culture among the jobless – renders Labour little more than a pusher threatening to withdraw the drug unless the addicts do as they are bidden. If you want to know why Mandelson goes on endlessly about what he calls “deep and furious cuts by the Conservative Party”, you need look no further than the syndrome I have just described: his game is simply to terrify the workforce he and his ilk employ.

The numbers employed in the public sector have risen steadily every year since 1997. In 2005 (again according to the ONS) the number topped 1 in 5 for the first time. During 2009 alone, an amazing 290,000 more people started working for the Government in one capacity or another. Further, the trend has been away from economically productive public sector to administrative. Thus although 13,000 commercial public sector workers lost their jobs in the fourth quarter of last year, fully 20,000 staff joined the NHS.

In 2010 – according to figures compiled by The Guardian – the Government employed 40% of all women in work. In Wales (the Welsh Assembly admits) 30% of all Principality citizens work in the public sector. In Scotland, it’s nearer 50%.

Frightening numbers like these explain at a stroke why the recent Politicshome attitude study showed a stark divide between the 25% keen to start cutting the UK deficit right away, and the 40% who wanted to put it off for as long as possible: the split reflects the entirely opposed interests of many of those who work in the private and public sectors respectively. A Government keen on a bloated public sector is going to get the lion’s share of the votes available among that workforce.

Is that extrapolation simplistic? Not at all: Ipsos Mori data tables show the trend going back many years. In late 2006, 41% of public sector workers supported Labour to 29% for the Conservatives. In September 2007, 45% versus 23%. In late 2008, 44% versus 32%. In fact, only when the enormity of Britain’s mess was laid bare did the Government’s share of the sector begin to degrade from May 2009 onwards: but the lead is still 35% to 28%. No wonder Lord Mandelson is laying on the Tory cuts scare-tactics with a trowel.

But it doesn’t end there. Successive governments have preferred to talk about ‘the unemployed’, but referring airily to an unemployment rate of 7.8% (around 2.5 million) is completely misleading. The figures emanating from our prolific friends in the Office of National Statistics show that the actively employed rate is around 73%. Sorry to be obvious here, but that leaves 27% of employable adults not working – not just because they’ve lost their job, but because they have never worked or are incapacitated. Of these, around two thirds are on benefits.

Remember, these are not senior citizens getting by in retirement. That’s a further 18% – of whom over half are completely dependent on the State for a living. A person dependent on the State is going to feel that their bread will be better buttered by a Labour Government.

The national aggregate of those economically dependent on the current Government builds like this: 18% on benefits + 10% on State pensions + 20% working for the Government = 48%….almost a built-in majority with a vested interest in voting Labour.

The level of direct and indirect bribery in our electoral system is tribal in the worst sense. The Opposition in one corner exploits a 300 year-old system to bend the result one way; and New Labour in the other uses a combination of mass patronage and muscle to fix the result in the opposite direction. One might perhaps argue that they thus cancel each other out, but this is like hoping the Capone mob will wipe out the O’Banyon gang: innocent bystanders still get caught in the crossfire.

The bottom line is that the system ensures the dominance of these two enormous political organisations, because it dilutes the votes of those who want neither of them. This is no small consideration: the minority Parties represent over a quarter of all voters at any given time, and this time anything up to a further 45% may well abstain through desperation, disgust or apathy. This is rejection on a colossal scale – but access to huge sums of money guarantees both the Tory and Labour Parties immunity from the consequences of it.

Many commentators rightly feel that the way we choose, elect and bankroll our politicians must be scrapped from top to bottom. Specifically, both the dangerously direct employment of the electorate – and easy access to the cash of those who want to be above the law – should be reduced to a minimum. One generation after another has been cheated of its fundamental right to elect legislators they expect to be independent representatives of benign aspiration. A system failing them this badly – in the context of an economic maelstrom worse than most people alive have experienced or even contemplated – will not survive.