Peter Watt has resigned because, as the BBC reports:
David Abrahams gave more than £400,000 through associates, claiming he wanted to avoid publicity. Mr Watt told a meeting of officers of Labour’s National Executive Committee that he had known about the arrangement. But he added that he had not known it might be illegal.
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7 Comments
If he didn’t know it might have been illegal, he was incompetent.
Another prison dodger like Peter Abrahams!
I’m not generally much of a fan of people at the top having to resign simply because their organisation has done something wrong, but on this occasion I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy for this guy.
I knew very well that it is a breach of PPERA to give money to a political party not under your own name, and if someone as closely involved in regulating donations as the General Secretary isn’t, then I don’t have a lot of sympathy for him.
Have you given back the Michael Brown donation yet?
Come on David, you’re better than that.
I’m not an expert on the whole Brown saga, but hasn’t the EC said that there is no proof it broke the rules, and that the party made all the investigations it could reasonably have been expected to do, to demonstrate that. It may still turn out, after several further investigations by the EC, that Brown did not reveal everything to the party that he should have done.
But this is surely rather different from from a quite rudimentary and unambiguous breach of the rules which the average local party treasurer would have been able to spot a mile off, which is what this is.
So, Jeremy, you are happy to run off funds donated from a convicted fraudster? You feel under no moral obligation to hand the funds back?? No? Thought not.
Thank you “passingtory” for answering the question you posed me before you had given me a chance to answer it for myself. I’m sure this gave you an answer that was more satisfactory for you!
Personally I don’t think the party should be accepting people from like Michael Brown. But there is a limit to how far any party can reasonably be expected to go in researching the backgrounds of its potential donors. This party did checks on Brown which if I understand correctly the EC has confirmed it thinks were appropriate checks to perform. At that point even the police, with all the resources at their disposal, which are, er, specifically intended to catch criminals, had not said there was anything untoward about him.
Clearly it has subsequently transpired that there was more than met the eye to him. But I think there is a limit to what can be expected of people who acted in good faith – and indeed beyond that, made active efforts to ensure that what they were doing was reasonable.
Thank you both to you and David Boothroyd for your efforts to hijack yet another thread on Lib Dem Voice to talk about the now several years old story about Michael Brown, but in fact this is completely different from this week’s news of a General Secretary of a party committing a schoolboy error on what sort of donations are permissible under PPERA – which is what this thread is actually about.