The Franking Privilege Is Incumbency

A legislator has to be able to reach the people they represent. Postage is a trivial cost against that, and paying it publicly is entirely reasonable.

The provision authorising it says so, and confines the privilege to official business rather than to political communication.

The distinction is correct and it is not one that can be drawn cleanly, because almost everything a legislator writes to constituents is both.

A letter describing what the member achieved on a local issue is a report on official activity and an argument for re-election, in the same sentence.

The rules respond with proxies. Limits on how often a member's name may appear, on photographs, on distribution close to an election.

The proceedings contain periodic debates about tightening the rules, and the pattern in them is instructive: the reforms that pass restrict form, and the ones that fail would have restricted volume.

Those proxies do real work and they measure form rather than function, so a communication designed to persuade can comply with all of them.

Members are candid in those debates that constituent communication is part of how a seat is held, and equally candid that they regard it as legitimate.

The postal regulations carry the mechanics, and the mechanics assume a mailing: a physical item, counted, with a cost that can be attributed.

The mailing list is the asset nobody discusses. An office accumulates constituent contact details through casework over years, lawfully and for good reasons, and the list stays with the office.

Both things are true, which is why the argument never resolves and why the constraints accumulate at the edges instead.

Electronic communication broke that assumption, because the marginal cost of an email is nothing and the rules were built around a cost.

A framework that limits mass mailings by expense has very little to say about a message that costs nothing to send to everybody.

The pre-election blackout is the most effective constraint in the scheme, and it is the one most obviously aimed at the real problem.

It concedes the point. A rule that forbids the privilege near an election is a rule acknowledging that the privilege affects elections.

The enacted history shows the constraints accumulating in response to specific abuses, each one narrow and each one leaving the underlying advantage untouched.

The advantage is name recognition, which is the single largest asset an incumbent holds and the hardest one for a challenger to buy.

A challenger reaching the same households pays for the postage, the list and the printing, and does it with money raised under disclosure rules that do not apply to official mail.

That asymmetry is the whole subject, and it is rarely stated because both sides of the aisle benefit from it identically.

A challenger builds that from nothing while the incumbent inherits it, and no rule about content or frequency touches the difference.

There is a real defence, and it deserves to be made properly rather than dismissed.

Constituents genuinely need to know what their representative is doing, and a system in which only the well-funded can communicate would be worse than the present one.

The privilege is also small in cost terms, which makes it an awkward target when far larger advantages of office go unexamined.

The reform that fits the actual problem is disclosure rather than restriction: publish what each office sent, to how many households, and when.

A member whose official mail is genuinely official has nothing to lose from that record existing, and one whose mail is something else would have to defend it.

At present the volume is reported in aggregate, long afterwards, in a form nobody reads, which is the reliable signature of a disclosure regime that is not meant to be used.