EU Referendum: Electoral Law

Debate between Ed Davey and Ben Bradshaw

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.