Our election laws are totally out of date.  Legislation designed for a pre-digital age is allowing unscrupulous politicians to use misleading advertising and falsehood to dominate the online world.

Out in a league of their own are the Conservative Party. Once the party of ‘it’s not cricket’ and ‘good old British fair play’, they are now using the internet and social media in a disgraceful way.

Following on from their doctored footage of Keir Starmer apparently ‘speechless’ about Labour’s Brexit strategy and their relabelling of their Twitter-feed as Fact Check UK, they have now used BBC footage to give a misleading impression of support for the Conservative line.  It took a Copyright action by the BBC to force Facebook to take the advert down but only after it had been viewed over a million times.  This is nothing less than an assault on our democratic process and they are getting away with it.

Trump’s assault on democracy in the US is now coming under scrutiny and will lead to impeachment charges; but the misuse of online media channels here seems to go unchallenged. As one scam is blocked, another is tried - apparently with impunity. Lest anyone should think this is political bias, the other two parties have had their own scrapes with the truth during this campaign.

We need to change our laws to protect the democratic process which depends on people being given information about political programmes which have integrity.  Not only is falsehood undermining trust in the process, but fake news will become a weapon of choice for politicians who wish to use the power of their own disreputable ends, whatever their political hue.

It is not only in the political arena that the law is playing catch up.  Online business is changing the commercial world; particularly in the retail sector. Amazon and other online retailers pay no business rates unlike their competitors. These global businesses seem to have the capacity to make their vast profits disappear into distant black holes.  These global online giants are getting away with paying little in tax which is grossly unfair.  Tax laws designed for a pre-digital age are hopeless in trying to find a solution. At last our political parties are talking about new methods of taxation to ensure that these megaliths pay their fair share to societies from which they extract their profits. Perhaps new turnover taxes on what is earned in a jurisdiction will do the trick but this remains to be seen.

So we have some catching up to do to make our laws suitable to regulate our digitally enabled world to ensure we make it work well, but technology is changing the way we undertake our political and business affairs at breakneck speed and the rate of change will only accelerate. We are only in the first stages of our digital revolution. Microchips continue to increase in power and the prospect of quantum computing is mindboggling. In the meantime our civil system of governance and rulemaking grinds far too slow.

This is a challenge for lawyers and law makers. GDPR has begun to provide a framework for protecting our data, yet rules to control global businesses and the use of the internet are in their infancy.  Whatever new government we get next week, high on their agendas needs to be the provision of a regulatory network that can be fit for this new age.  The signs are that we still have a very long way to go before we get ahead of the digital curve. Trying to go it alone in this new global environment may not be such a clever an idea after all.