EU Referendum: Electoral Law

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

I could not agree more. I am sure that others will contribute to this debate—they may principally or exclusively be from the Opposition Benches—express their concerns about these allegation and ask that the matter be fully investigated in the way it deserves.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I am sure that were he not at the Liaison Committee, the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who has done such a fantastic job on this and has just spent four hours listening to the testimony of Christopher Wylie, would be here making exactly the same points as the right hon. Gentleman.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that equally helpful intervention. I hope that during this debate Members who heard that evidence will be able to contribute and update the House on what was said there, although I suspect that a lot of that information will have been contained in the papers this weekend, which I am sure many Members have spent hours assessing over the weekend and since.

I want to focus briefly on the Electoral Commission. This is how its website describes its role in relation to referendums:

“Our focus is on voters and on putting their interests first. Our objectives for referendums are that:…they should be well-run and produce results that are accepted…there should be integrity and transparency of campaign funding and expenditure”.

It is safe to say that neither of those objectives was met with respect to the EU referendum campaign—I am not blaming the Electoral Commission but others involved in the campaign.

What action has the Electoral Commission taken to date? The allegations we read about this weekend were new allegations, but there were existing allegations working their way through the system. I thank WhatDoTheyKnow, openDemocracy and FairVote for their work on this issue. They obtained internal emails from the Electoral Commission that described Darren Grimes’ spending as “unusual”. I think we can all agree it was remarkable that someone whose organisation in the first 10 weeks of its existence apparently managed to raise £107 was given £625,000 to spend in a completely uncontrolled manner. It is remarkable that such confidence was placed in that organisation and the one or two people behind it.

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[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on securing this emergency debate. As Members will know, I have been raising this issue and concern in the House for almost 18 months now, and when I first did so I was treated as a bit of a crank. Subsequently, however, almost every single allegation that I have used parliamentary privilege to put on the record in this place has proven to be correct.

This debate needs to be taken extremely seriously. It is not about who won or lost the referendum; it is about the integrity and security of our democracy and electoral system. Any of the sceptics who have cast doubt on the nature and quality of the evidence of the whistleblower, Chris Wylie, should watch the four hours of testimony that I watched today before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee: it was absolutely shocking and astonishing, and it should go to the heart of anybody who cares about our democracy.

Mr Wylie laid out clear evidence of serious lawbreaking by the leave campaign: not only collusion between Vote Leave and BeLeave, which is the one that has got most publicity, but collusion between Vote Leave and some of the other leave organisations, including Veterans for Britain, and indeed the DUP. Each of those organisations used either Cambridge Analytica—we know all about that, having heard the revelations last week about how it illegally harvested the Facebook data of tens of millions of people—or Aggregate IQ, a supposedly separate company based in Canada. It is not separate at all; it is all part of the same organisation. We know that 40% of Vote Leave’s budget was spent on Aggregate IQ and the work that it did. We still do not know how AIQ got that data, where the data came from or whether it was legally obtained and used. These are serious questions, and I am very pleased that the Chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who is a Conservative, is clearly taking the allegations seriously. He will be putting them to the Prime Minister at the Liaison Committee later this afternoon.

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree, given the scale of the spending on digital campaigning now, that along with the investigation into what happened during the referendum there is an urgent need for a complete overhaul of the electoral rules to ensure that they are fit for the digital age?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Yes, I entirely agree. I shall go on to say something about that a little later.

Mr Wylie provided compelling and credible evidence not only of the collusion but of the effectiveness of the targeted advertising campaigns that these data companies conduct, based on the data that they have. In the case of the referendum, the campaigns were targeted on 7 million voters whom the companies had carefully profiled as people whose opinions they could shift. In his evidence to the Committee today, Mr Wylie produced a staggering statistic. He said that, in his experience, the methods used by Cambridge Analytica and AIQ in this case would have had the potential to shift between 7% and 10% of the people targeted. Let us not forget that he was and remains a leaver. He wants Brexit to happen, but he does not want it to happen based on a fraud on the British electorate. He said that

“it is completely reasonable to say that there could have been a different outcome in the referendum if there hadn’t been, in my view, cheating”.

There have been attempts to discredit Mr Wylie. There was even a disgraceful attempt from Downing Street to discredit one of his co-whistleblowers by, among other things, outing him as gay. I am amazed that the man who did that is still in his job, because that was totally unacceptable. Let me tell those people who are trying to discredit Mr Wylie that he is one of 200 people who have been allowed into this country because of their brilliance. He has been allowed a special visa because of the amount he knows about how all this stuff works. I do not have a clue how it all works, but he is one of the world’s leading experts, and he is a very serious whistleblower. Not all Conservative Members dismiss his evidence, but those who do do so at their peril. Let us just wait and see where all this ends. Mr Wylie also made a very worrying statement, and I think that this is the first time that a connection has been made between Cambridge Analytica and the Russian FSB—although I had heard about it privately—via the work that it did for the Russian oil company, Lukoil.

It must be clear to everyone in the House, whatever their view on Brexit, that the powers and resources of the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission are wholly inadequate. If the Government were serious about getting to the truth by letting the commissioners do their job, we would have less of this “what-aboutery” and more action and support for the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner, in terms of their powers and—critically and more immediately—their resources. Mr Wylie has been working for many hours with the Information Commissioner, and one of the worrying things he told the Committee was that he had had to explain to the officials in that office what all this was about. They do not have enough technical experts. They do not have people who actually understand how all this works and what has been going on. In my view, this guy should be employed by all the global regulators, because he seems to be one of the few people who knows how this electoral corruption works, not only in our country but elsewhere. There was loads of evidence, for example, about what has been going on in Nigeria and in parts the Caribbean. This is not just a problem for this country.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. The accusations that he is outlining go to the heart of the Government, and the people who led the leave campaign are now senior Cabinet members. Does he therefore agree that the Ministers in question should excuse themselves from this investigation and possibly from Brexit-specific Cabinet meetings in the future?

[Mr Bradshaw]

What matters at this stage is that the Electoral Commission, the Information Commissioner, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee and Robert Mueller’s investigation in the United States, which is examining things that are relevant to us here, are given the full support and resources from our Government and from all their agencies that they need to do their jobs properly. In contrast to the outbursts from the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs trying to rubbish this testimony, I note that most of the rest of the Cabinet said that the Electoral Commission should be allowed to finish its work properly.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my astonishment that it took the Information Commissioner so long to get a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s premises, given that Facebook got in there in a minute and a half?

[Mr Bradshaw]

This is in no way a criticism of the Information Commissioner or of the Electoral Commission —they are doing their best—but they do not have enough people, expertise, money or power. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We had the farcical scene of the Information Commissioner trying to get access to Cambridge Analytica’s office for almost a week, while Facebook had got in right at the start. That just symbolises the paucity of the powers that we have to deal with this digital world when our legislation and resources are based on an analogue age.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

Given today’s evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, when clear links were made between Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and GCHQ, there is now a question not only of the electoral system, but of national security.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I agree. Any legislator in this House who takes his or her job seriously needs to read the testimony of Christopher Wylie before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee today.

Finally—this is slightly away from the evidence given by Mr Wylie today—I have received other new information that also concerns me. Members will recall the dreadful murder of Daphne Galizia in Malta last year. At the time she was murdered, I am informed that Ms Galizia was investigating Pilatus Bank, which had its assets frozen last week owing to fears of money laundering. She was also investigating Cambridge Analytica and Henley & Partners, which sells citizenship in Malta, and there are other links with the Legatum Institute, concerns about which I raised in the House several months ago, and the mysterious Maltese professor, Professor Joseph Mifsud, who is named in an indictment by Robert Mueller’s inquiry. All those matters need to be examined incredibly carefully, and I want the Minister to give a full and categorical assurance that, given the significant British links, the Maltese authorities that are investigating such matters will receive the full support and co-operation they need from our law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies.

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[Sir Edward Davey]

My right hon. Friend anticipates a line of argument that I wish to come to in due course. He is absolutely right, though, that the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were closely involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and we need to know whether these allegations go to the very top table.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I should not be doing the Conservative Members’ job for them but, in the interests of fairness, the hon. Member who has probably done more than most on this—certainly more than me—and who knows more than most about this subject is the Chair of the Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins). He could not take part in the debate because he was hearing this vital evidence from Chris Wylie. I am sure that he will also be doing his job very adequately in front of the Prime Minister later this afternoon. We need to approach this issue as consensually as we can because it is about not party politics, but the integrity and security of our electoral system.

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[Sir Edward Davey]

In responding to the hon. Gentleman, I want to be clear that these are all allegations. We need proper authorities to investigate, but of course, if those investigations go to the door of any Member of this House, be they Minister or not, the full weight of the law should go against that individual. No Member of this House should be above the law in those investigations.

I want to be a little clearer than the debate has been so far about how the Electoral Commission, which is key to this, thinks about whether there has been cheating. The Electoral Commission’s guidelines about whether a campaign has colluded are quite clear. It sets out three criteria for whether campaigns are highly likely to be working together.

The first is whether the campaigns spend money on joint advertising campaigns, leaflets or events. The evidence brought forward by Fair Vote, which can be seen by anyone at www.fairvote.uk, suggests that Vote Leave and BeLeave co-ordinated with the same digital strategy vendor, Aggregate IQ, so there does seem to have been co-ordination between their advertising campaigns.

The second test the Electoral Commission has set out is whether campaigns have co-ordinated their spending with another campaigner. The evidence produced by FairVote is very clear: it shows that BeLeave appears to have been assigned specific responsibility for the youth audience by Vote Leave. That is co-ordination and collusion.

The third test on cheating set out by the Electoral Commission is whether a campaign can approve or has significant influence over the spending of another campaigner. Again, the dossier shows that BeLeave was based at Vote Leave HQ, as we have heard, and appears to have reported to Vote Leave directors and shared all its information with their staff.

In other words, the three tests put forward by the Electoral Commission on whether illegal collusion has occurred appear to have been met, according to the evidence in this dossier. I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to read and think about it before they tweet in the way that was done by the Foreign Secretary, who at the weekend dismissed these allegations as ludicrous.

The Foreign Secretary may well have tried to dismiss these allegations, because if they prove to be true, the investigations and inquiries that we all want to follow this debate and public discussion may well want to ask him questions. Ultimately, he was in charge of and a key player in the Vote Leave campaign, and people will want to know whether he knew about this collusion. Did he know that moneys were going from Vote Leave to BeLeave? Did he know that the staff of both campaigns were colluding and working together? Did he know that Aggregate IQ was being used by both campaigns in a very similar way? These are very serious allegations, and we need to have independent inquiries. The same questions could of course be applied to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I would like to ask the Prime Minister whether she has asked her Foreign Secretary and her Environment Secretary about what they knew. If she is in charge of her Government, she ought to be asking her Ministers what they knew, given the severity and gravity of the allegations now in the public domain. If she is not getting good enough answers from the Foreign Secretary and the Environment Secretary, she should be taking action. There is another issue with regard to the Prime Minister’s responsibilities, which is that she has key members of staff in No. 10 who were staffers in these campaigns and appear to be part of the alleged collusion. At the very least, she should be asking them questions and getting assurances from them, and if those assurances are not good enough, she should take the appropriate action.

I want to ask the Minister whether the Foreign Secretary was speaking for the Government when he pushed aside these allegations as nonsense. Is that what she will say at the Dispatch Box in a few minutes’ time? Does she, speaking on behalf of her Majesty’s Government, agree with the Foreign Secretary that these allegations are all complete nonsense—before they have been investigated? That would be a quite extraordinary position for Her Majesty’s Government to take, and particularly for the Foreign Secretary to take, given that he is supposed to speak for this country about the rule of law in other countries—and one wonders, doesn’t one?

[Mr Bradshaw]

Does not the right hon. Gentleman also think it is telling that the Foreign Secretary put out his statement as soon as the news broke on Friday evening? He cannot possibly have read the three huge files of documentation that have been presented to the Electoral Commission and the ICO, can he?

[Sir Edward Davey]

One does wonder about the people connected to the Vote Leave campaign who have tried to get in their rebuttals and answers rather rapidly. The head of the staff side of the Vote Leave campaign, Mr Dominic Cummings, put out a pre-rebuttal before the allegations were in the public domain. It sounds as though he knew quite a lot about what the allegations would be, but perhaps he knew the truth. I am afraid that his pre-rebuttal did not convince anybody. Now that we have the allegations, with detailed evidence of emails and photo grabs of things that have since been deleted, we know why Mr Cummings was desperate to get in his rebuttal. I cannot know whether the Foreign Secretary was in the same position, but one has to have one’s suspicions raised.

It is because the allegations are so grave, affecting the most momentous decision this country has taken since the second world war, that the Liberal Democrats, supported by all colleagues on the Opposition Benches, are absolutely right to ask these questions of the Government. Just because there is no Division after this debate does not make these questions and this debate something the Government can push aside. I say to the Minister that we will be coming back and back again to this until we have answers. When the Electoral Commission reports, the Information Commissioner reports and, hopefully, the police report, those reports need to be published and debated here in this House. We will not let this lie. Why? Because we want to defend British democracy. We want to defend parliamentary sovereignty. We want to defend the rule of law. I hope the Minister will say from the Dispatch Box that that is what she is going to do, too.

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[Tommy Sheppard]

Indeed, and we will have to await the outcome of the Electoral Commission’s investigation before we consider whether the legal framework and the support that is provided for the Electoral Commission are in fact adequate for this task.

We have this new evidence. The Electoral Commission, by the way, had already reopened the investigation before the whistleblowing information came out in the last seven days, but we are surely indebted to Shahmir Sanni for what he has done in the service of democracy in this country. I have watched his video recordings and it is clear that we do not share the same point of view. We did not share the same point of view on Brexit during the campaign, and we do not share it now, but I do not think that anyone who watches those interviews can fail to be moved by the decency, integrity and bravery of that young man in coming forward and putting himself at risk. We owe him a great debt.

The response of our Government to the whistleblowing allegations therefore worries me. Others have mentioned this, but the Prime Minister’s explanation yesterday that this was a personal statement by Stephen Parkinson just does not hold water. How can it be a personal statement when someone is at a desk in No. 10 Downing Street, at the heart of Government—when they are on the payroll, issuing a statement from No. 10 Downing Street? This must be the first occasion in history, certainly that I can remember, when the Government have decided to attack a whistleblower by outing them as gay, causing them the possibility of actual harm to themselves and their family, and it is a disgrace.

[Mr Bradshaw]

Is the hon. Gentleman also aware that according to reports, that statement was approved by the Prime Minister’s chief communications officer, Robbie Gibb? There is no way that that was not an official statement, as the Prime Minister claimed yesterday.

[Tommy Sheppard]

I agree, and on the email it says “official”, so there can be no question that the Prime Minister did not know what Stephen Parkinson was saying. I have written to the Government today to demand that this young man be apologised to for the actions that have been taken. That is the very least that we can expect. Most reasonable people in this country will be wondering why Stephen Parkinson has not already been sacked, quite frankly, and in many other companies and areas of life, that is exactly what would happen.

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[Chloe Smith]

I will not, because this is a time-limited debate.

To safeguard elections, it is vital to have an independent regulator. The Electoral Commission needs to be able to act independently, without Government interference. I am a little disappointed by the loose thinking of the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett), because I think his argument was that the Government ought to have been able to investigate such things, but then he said that that was not correct. He then said that the Electoral Commission can do that as a fall-back. Let me be absolutely clear that it is a good thing this country has that independent regulator, and we cannot have it both ways. The independent regulator should do its independent job. I have heard too many arguments in the Chamber this afternoon that suggest that this House ought to pre-empt the commission, but we should not do so and, as I said at the outset, I will not do so.

Allegations have been made about campaigners during the EU referendum, and the specific allegations about spending rules and the accuracy of campaigners’ spending returns fall squarely within the remit of the Electoral Commission. The commission has announced investigations into various campaigners in that referendum and has already investigated a number of complaints and found no wrongdoing. It will publish its findings in due course. As the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington, who requested this debate—I thank him for doing so—acknowledged yesterday, there may be sub judice issues here, so I repeat that it would not be appropriate for me or the Government to comment on any ongoing investigations.

[Mr Bradshaw]

Will the Minister address the concern raised not only by me, but by the whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who spent a great deal of time with the Information Commissioner this week, that it does not have the resources or the expertise that it needs to do these investigations properly?

[Chloe Smith]

I think the right hon. Gentleman is asking me whether the Information Commissioner has the necessary resources. Is that right?

[Mr Bradshaw]

And the expertise.

[Chloe Smith]

And the expertise. Okay, I understand the point. The right hon. Gentleman, who is a senior and experienced Member, will appreciate that I am here to answer about electoral law, such was the title of the debate, but it is important that such issues come together. He will have seen the Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), who is leading the Data Protection Bill Committee, listening to part of the debate. The right hon. Gentleman will know that the Government are seeking to give the Information Commissioner stronger powers, such as around warrantry, compulsion and sanctions, and that the Government are considering doing even more after the Cambridge Analytica allegations. I believe that that will have been made clear to the members of the Data Protection Bill Committee. As for whether the Information Commissioner has the expertise, I would hope that it does, but I shall ask my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge to contact the right hon. Gentleman to ensure that he receives a satisfactory answer.

Allegations that the electoral rules may have been breached are rightly a cause for concern, but that does not mean that the rules themselves were flawed. It is not right to reach any conclusions on such issues until the Electoral Commission’s investigations are complete. It would not be right to jump to conclusions or to attempt to amend the system before any allegations have been proven.

In conclusion, the Government will continue to work closely with the Electoral Commission, along with many other stakeholders in the electoral system, to protect the integrity, security and effectiveness of referendums and elections. Let me make it clear for the record that we will continue to implement the referendum’s result and to make a success of it.