Britain’s reputation for having a fair and above-board democracy has taken several knocks in the past few years. There were cases of serious fraud after postal voting was extended, big doubts about the accuracy of the electoral register and worries about the regulation of campaign expenditure. The most recent knock has been the loans-for-peerages affair.

Even in aggregate, these are blemishes rather than fundamental flaws: our elections cannot be stolen or bought and remain clean by international standards. The main problems with our representative democracy lie elsewhere, in the disengagement of a more demanding public with Parliament.

Nonethless, the recent problems are real and the concerns justified. So who is to blame and what should happen? Yesterday’s thorough report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life was highly critical of the Electoral Commission for spreading itself too thinly and for being too passive in its regulatory role.

Many of the report’s criticisms are valid, but there is a lack of balance. The commission has helped to open up the previously secret area of party funding and expenditure and should not take all the blame. Several problems go back to ambiguities in the original 2000 law that created the commission and the new regulatory framework. The Government is primarily responsible for the mess over postal voting by pressing ahead in 2004 despite the public doubts of the commission.

Moreover, ministers mobilised their Commons majority last autumn to resist proposals for individual registration of all voters, as backed by both the commission and yesterday’s report, and not just reforming postal votes as in the new Electoral Administration Act. And political parties themselves arranged the big secret loans at the heart of the current police inquiry.

The commission can be faulted for not being vigorous enough in pursuing and highlighting abuses, though that partly reflects weaknesses in its original remit. But it is hard to see what it could have done when ministers insisted on pressing ahead with postal voting on demand.

Many of the committee’s proposals to put a greater emphasis on regulation and to strengthen powers are welcome and should make registration more robust and voting less prone to fraud. There are also proposals to improve the accountability and governance of the commission, with a relaxation of restrictions on hiring staff with direct experience of politics and parties. But it would be both wrong and unworkable to have party nominees on the commission since all would have to stand down when anything controversial affecting one of them was discussed.

Yesterday’s report is only one of a batch in this area. The Constitutional Affairs Committee reported last month on party funding, on which the senior civil servant Sir Hayden Phillips is still trying to broker a cross-party deal (with limited prospects of success). And the Commons Public Administration Committee is reviewing all the ethics and standards watchdogs. There has been muttering from some MPs that these watchdogs are getting above themselves, but they can still perform an invaluable role in monitoring the workings of our democracy, even when they annoy the parties.

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