The Electoral Commission is again investigating Vote Leave after whistle-blower Shahmir Sanni who worked for BeLeave came forward to say that when the sum of £625,000 was given to them by Vote Leave, it came with clear instructions as to how the money was to be used. If this is true, then it would be a criminal offence. Mr Sanni also asserted that most of the cash was spent on a firm linked to Cambridge Analytica.
Chris Wylie, former Director of Research at Cambridge Analytica, told MPs this week that the company’s actions during Brexit campaign were “a breach of the law”. Cambridge Analytica and its parent company provided analysis for Vote Leave ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum. The research, Wylie went on to say, likely breached UK’s campaign financing laws and may have helped to swap the outcome.
I think there is a case to answer by Vote Leave, BeLeave and Cambridge Analytica but I am not sure that it would have changed the 52:48 percent result. A plausible argument is that Leavers misled voters by stating that there was no economic downside to Brexit, no risk to the UK single-market benefits and off course the £350 million a week promised to fund the NHS. All these points were and could have been further countered by Remainers as they had the time and funds available to do so. However, we do have strict laws regarding elections and the question is were they exploited by Vote Leave.
Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesperson Ed Davey has written to Yvette Cooper, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, calling on her to investigate the alleged illegal activity of Vote Leave.
Davey urges Cooper to: “immediately launch an enquiry” into the “serious accusations” against the Vote Leave campaign, including “deliberate overspending, illegal coordination and a significant cover-up of their relationship with the smaller campaign group BeLeave.”
Davey explains that allegations against Cambridge Analytica, and the legal opinions of Helen Mountfield QC and Clare Montgomery, only strengthen the case for an urgent investigation.
He addresses Cooper, explaining that “if true, these allegations call into question the very foundations of our democracy, and I have no doubt you will agree with me that full disclosure must be given to Parliament and the British public on this extremely serious matter.”
* Tahir Maher is a former Chair of South Central Liberal Democrats and lives in Wokingham.
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7 Comments
Listening to the Leave voters on the Today programme this morning it is clear that few if any would have voted differently even if it was clear the economy would collapse after Brexit. One after the other said that if their local factory closed because of Brexit they would be sad but would not have voted differently. Their only concern was that Britain should be a “free sovereign state making its own laws”. This is the result of 60 years of a ruling class and artistic elite who do not care about the wishes of ordinary people and think they know what is good for them. The EU, comprehensive schools etc and all the pet projects of the elite are hated and the only way to express that hatred is by voting leave. The idea that no one votes to be poor is wrong. People have admitted that they would and this is a nation which endured 6 years of war and national bankruptcy to defend its independence so why would they worry about merely losing their jobs, the Government will have to pay.
This is one of a series of interviews with a similar outcome and I have heard it myself if I expressed a contrary view. Those parties who oppose the implementation of the referendum result will pay a heavy price, just as the Liberal Democrats are doing now, because even the Remainers are fed up with the endless politicking and want the matter settled as soon as possible.
As one Leaver said, if Parliament or the Government overruled the Referendum vote no one would trust the Government again and many would stop voting.
nvelope2003 – you think that what Leave voters say now about why they voted is in some way related to what they were thinking back in 2016. I think most of us are aware that the word ‘rationalisation’ was invented for a reason.
The Leave vote, as is widely accepted, was a misguided dig at the politicians held responsible for general dissatisfaction after years of austerity. I’ve spoken to hundreds of leave voters while campaigning for the Lib Dems, and virtually none of them has a coherent logic behind their decision to blame the EU for their woes – and I have asked. The idea that the party which opposes Brexit will “pay a heavy price” is absurd. We are the political party which wants to do the right thing for our country.
The strong likelihood that the June 2016 vote was rigged is not going to get the result declared void, but it does give weight to the argument for a further referendum on the deal. If Leavers claim June 2016 was democracy in action, the only possible reason for not wanting more ‘democracy’ is that they think they might lose. Chris Grayling on Channel Four News was typical of the Leave campaigners when, faced with the revelations about Cambridge Analytica, he declared that all the dodgy use of Facebook data actually had no impact on the voters! Of course you can’t prove that it did, and Leave voters are hardly likely to put their hands up and say they were conned by a smarmy character like Alexander Nix, so I’m afraid Leave supports like nvelope2003 are being very naieve (not for the first time).
I did not say I supported Leave. I am merely setting out what leavers appear to believe. The Liberal Democrats have already paid a heavy price, except in Local Government by elections where the EU debate is irrelevant. There is a case for a referendum on the terms but I think the result will be the same unless it was held after the effects of leaving showed it to be a mistake.
@Andy Daer “he declared that all the dodgy use of Facebook data actually had no impact on the voters”
Given that Lib Dems frequently dismiss Brexiters as being elderly, ignorant, and harping back to days of yore, then I’d be amazed if any amount of shenanigans with that newfangled interweb thing had an impact on them. 😉
nvelope2003 – sorry to have wrongly branded you.
Peter Watson – the Brexit debate has been going on for a while, but we are still stuck with generalisations being construed as absolutes when people want to rebut them. Older people were more likely than young people to have voted Leave. This does not mean that every old person voted Leave! (Or that every young person voted Remain). I suspect that CA were much less successful than their bragging suggests, but it is very unlikely that they had no effect at all. Therefore, if they affected a proportion of the millions of people who were targeted it is still possible that they altered the outcome – the vote was quite close, if you recall.
I think the wider point about psychological profiling is that we all do it on the doorstep while canvassing, to the extent that you can alter your manner and your message on the hoof, while trying to ‘read’ the person in front of you. The idea of a computer doing this to millions of people may not be morally any worse than what we do, but it still seems like cheating, because of the scale, and the secrecy. For some reason people are not offended by a human being trying to understand them from information they can glean on the doorstep, but don’t like a clever psychologist using their Facebook ‘likes’ to understand their character. Personally, my main worry is that whereas canvassing people on the doorstep is ‘honest’ in the sense that if you need ten people to canvass 1,000 voters, you would need a hundred people to canvass 10,000 voters, it seems wrong that a team of 50 people in a computer-based operation can reach 20 million people – and with more sophistication in the targeting of the message. It’s not just ‘unfair’, it means rich people (Robert Mercer, Arron banks) can buy the result they want. That isn’t democracy.
Andy Daer: I think many years of anti EU propaganda from the Sun, Mail, Express, Star and Telegraph is the most likely cause of the EU result. Nothing like as many people read The Guardian, Times and Mirror and not many young people read a paper at all as they get any news online and like most young people they do whatever is fashionable amongst their friends.
I have heard employers who asked their employees to vote Remain as their business depended on staying in the EU but they still voted Leave. Maybe they were just fed up with a life of work and looked forward to life in a socialist Britain where work was optional with the Universal Basic Income or a job in the nationalised industries like the ones the Cubans are trying to get rid of.
nvelope2003; Creating character profiles by counting clicks on things like Facebook, and then sending targeted messages, tuned to the mind of each recipient, seems more underhand than putting lurid headlines in tabloid newspapers, but I agree with you, The Sun and The Daily Mail are no doubt the real reason for bulk of the Leave vote.
We can all see that it if the EU does a thousand fairly boring things every day to make our lives better, and one thing per month that could be criticised, Daily Mail readers will only hear the bad news. This doesn’t even require Paul Dacre to be anti-EU, but simply that he knows a story about the straightness of bananas will sell newspapers. This is a fact of life, and requires readers to realise that lurid stories are entertainment, not education. When we read of a taxi driver who raped women we know this does not prove that all taxi drivers are rapists, but in the case of the Daily Mail’s anti-EU stories they fell on fertile ground; many of their readers want to believe all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.
This means the tabloid press is guilty of manipulating public opinion, but at least it was partly above-board and in the open. Getting into your mind, by studying your character from secretly acquired data, is a more scary prospect, if that is what the future holds. However, an even bigger issue for me is that we are having to face some worrying ideas about the nature of democracy. What actually is “the will of the people”? Does such a thing even exist at all? It seems it can be created by a tabloid editor, or manipulated at the whim of characters like Arron Banks. And even if we knew the real will of the people, would we want it to have sovereignty over Parliament? I’ve watched MPs during many, many hours of debate and select committee discussions, and I trust them a lot more than the bloke in the pub who pontificates about whatever comes into his mind that day.