EU Referendum: Electoral Law

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Alexander]

I am afraid I will not. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to make a speech and contribute to the debate—contributions from the Conservative Benches have been so sadly lacking—he will have time to do so.

I have read the reports over the past few days and looked at some of the emails that were exchanged between some of the key players, and I am worried that what I see is a corrosive abuse of power. If we want the British people to have faith in us, we need to find a way to conduct our politics with decency. I fear that the opposite is currently the case. It has to stop.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Sir Edward Davey]

rose—

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[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is absolutely amazing that the Foreign Secretary is not in his place, given the gravity of the accusations, his personal centrality to them and the pivotal part he played. He has said that the allegations are “ludicrous” and farcical, that the vote was won legally and that there was fair play. Frankly, what we have already heard and know casts those basic assumptions into doubt. These issues need to be looked at very carefully.

We are talking about the electoral law on which our democracy is based. People watching this debate will be asking themselves whether the referendum was a cheat. Was it based on a lie? Were the economic dice loaded with illegal and dark money? Were the electorate cynically manipulated by Cambridge Analytica, which illegally harvested people’s Facebook data without their knowing it and manipulated their choices to take us on the journey we are now on, which is going to take us into economic Armageddon?

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

In yesterday’s Russia debate, I called on the Government to pull together a Russia commission so that we can have a root and branch examination of where Russia has interfered not only in our elections, but in our economic, legal and accounting systems. Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem we currently have is that the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner lack the powers and the numbers of staff required to carry out the sort of inquiry we need to the depth that we need?

[Geraint Davies]

I certainly agree with my hon. Friend’s last point. The Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner are going to have a great deal of difficulty evaluating Cambridge Analytica’s role and the dirty money involved. Russia is a much bigger question. There are questions around whether the targeted bombing of innocent civilians in Syria in the run-up to Brexit, in the knowledge that the Germans were allowing in a million refugees, was instrumental in the Brexit result and whether that was intentional; there are questions about whether President Trump was elected through the influence of the Russians; there are questions about whether the fascists in France got a third of the vote because of the Russians; there are questions about how the Russians influenced the German elections; and there are certainly questions about how they influenced Brexit.

I suggest that I limit my comments here to Cambridge Analytica, its abuse and manipulation of British voters and the dirty money behind it.

[Damian Collins]

rose—

[Geraint Davies]

I will give way, but just let me finish this point.

People seem to have this misconception that the Brexit result was not close, but I put it to you, Mr Speaker, that if we ushered 33 people into a room, and 17 voted one way and 16 the other, that is the most marginal vote that we could get. That vote could be swayed by Cambridge Analytica and by the other forms of manipulation. It is in sharp contrast to the natural and rightful instincts of British people that this is simply not fair play.

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) made an important point about the power of the Information Commissioner to investigate these matters. The hon. Gentleman raises serious issues in his remarks, but, often, the Electoral Commission, and the Information Commissioner in particular, do not have the power to go behind the curtain and take the data that they require to support their investigations. They are largely reliant on companies complying with information notices, and, as we have seen over the past few weeks, that can be a frustrating process.

[Geraint Davies]

That is an excellent point very well made. Obviously, it brings into question what further powers those commissioners or others should have to secure the information that they need to bring their legitimate concerns to a conclusion.

[Tom Brake]

On this issue of data, is the hon. Gentleman aware that one of the other allegations that is made is that, after the Electoral Commission’s first inquiry in which it found no case to answer, some of the people who are now at No. 10 allegedly went onto databases to unlink certain documents so that it appeared as though those documents were not available to everybody on the Vote Leave and the BeLeave campaigns. Is he concerned about that?

[Geraint Davies]

Well, I am profoundly concerned about that. Again, facts are emerging day by day, and they need to be forensically examined and it is very important that the resources are there to do that. That sort of information coming forward gives us greater reason to be enormously concerned about this. That is why I am so saddened to see that the Government Benches are empty, when the essence of our democracy, as we are about to step on the biggest journey—

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I do not want to cast any aspersions on the hon. Gentleman’s ability to see if he cannot see that these Benches are not empty. If he can see, he can see that they are full, and he should not say what he said.

[Mr Speaker]

The Benches are not empty. The hon. Gentleman has made his point, and I invite the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) to continue his speech.

[Geraint Davies]

Yes, as a point of information—

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Geraint Davies]

One moment. I am still dealing with the previous intervention.

For the record, the Government Benches are virtually empty. They may be 1% full—I do not know—but, frankly, it is pathetic. I am very grateful to have the opportunity to point out that the Government do not seem to care about the integrity of democracy and the law.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

When it comes to the question of fairness, does the hon. Gentleman think that it was entirely fair that, while the remain camps and the Vote Leave camps were allowed to spend £7 million each, the Government spent £9 million of taxpayers’ money to convince people to vote remain. Whether or not he thinks that that is fair, it obviously made no, or very little, difference and, therefore, all these arguments are grossly exaggerated. The British people have the good sense to make up their own minds.

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[Geraint Davies]

If the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that because one side spent more than the other side, it is all right for the other side to behave illegally, it is not a very persuasive argument. This behaviour—the clandestine manipulation of people’s views through Facebook and other things plus the dirty money—casts into question the very integrity of our democracy and the decision that was made. That influence may have been pivotal. If one were asked whether an Olympic athlete would have won a race had he not been doped up, one might come to the conclusion that perhaps he would, or perhaps he would not, but the point is that they would have been disqualified, and quite rightly so. The British people want fair play. They want the rule of law, and, fundamentally, that has been cast into doubt.

Even before this unhappy episode, people were already saying that the Foreign Secretary had stood in front of a bus claiming that we would spend £350 million a week on the NHS, had said that he favoured the single market and would vote for it but now says that he does not, and had said that we would take back control but of course we have not have had democratic control in this place because it has been given to Ministers. People are saying, “Hold on—that’s not what we voted for.” They are questioning whether there is legitimacy in what has been happening. They are saying to me, certainly in Swansea, that what they now want, in terms of fair play, is to have a vote on the deal having checked that it does satisfy what they were promised.

But now we are in a completely different ballpark. We are saying that those people were not only misled but cynically manipulated through Facebook, with millions of voters involved in dirty money. The British people are saying, “Hold on—let’s have another look at this.” They are already saying to me, as to everybody, “This whole Brexit process is taking too long, it’s costing too much, we didn’t know the facts, it’s terribly complicated, the EU is running rings round us, and the UK is incapable of negotiating properly. There is a problem here and there needs to be a solution.” That solution, they are saying to me, is that they want a public vote on the deal. Now we have this situation with Cambridge Analytica, which is completely in breach of fair play. Anybody who thought, “Actually it would be unfair to have a vote on the deal because we’ve had a vote”, now realises that what fair play demands is to move forward and have a final vote on the deal.

People like the Brexit Secretary have said, “Democracy isn’t democracy unless it has the right to change its mind.” I agree. People like Nigel Farage have said, “It would be unfinished business if the vote was 52:48—we need a two-thirds majority.” People like the Member for—I have forgotten his constituency. The Member for Somerset—you know, Moggy—said that we should have a second—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman should not refer to a colleague in that way. I think the person he has in mind is the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg).

[Geraint Davies]

That is correct.

[Mr Speaker]

Yes. That is the proper way to refer to him.

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[Geraint Davies]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I am glad that you prompted me because I could not remember the “North East” bit so I inadvertently said “Moggy”. I am sorry about that. The hon. Gentleman is on the record as saying that perhaps there should be a second referendum when the negotiation is completed.

As we go through this unhappy episode and find that we have had electoral breaches, that there is an inherent breach in our democracy, that there are questions over the legitimacy of the referendum, and that there is a need for fair play, people are now asking whether Facebook and Google should have these sorts of powers. Should they not be publicly regulated, as they are becoming very much instrumental in our democracy and we need to overturn that so that the public and our democracy can be protected?

People who were 13 during the referendum will be 18 by the time it is now planned to leave. Surely their futures are paramount. Sadly, many of the people who voted will not be with us then any longer. Now that we are seeing the legitimacy of these votes cast into doubt, surely there is a compelling case, in terms of fair play, that the public should have a vote on the deal. We should move forward, refresh and renew our democracy, and do the right thing for Britain.

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[Sir Edward Davey]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. The fundamental issue here is: did people in the leave campaign cheat? Did they break the law? That is what we need to focus on. The hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) made an analogy with athletes and sport. If athletes dope, we expect that to be investigated and then punished, whether or not that cheating affected the result of a race or any competition. It is the cheating and the breach of the law that needs to be followed through, whether or not it relates to the outcome of the referendum.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if Ministers—I am thinking specifically of the Foreign Secretary and the Environment Secretary—are implicated in any illegal activities and are the dopers in the analogy he is using, they should not be above the law, and that when the police are doing the investigation, they should not be intimidated or deterred from putting forward a legal case against Ministers, irrespective of their position in this place?

[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?

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[Chloe Smith]

I regret to say that the hon. Gentleman seems to be under a misunderstanding about the debate that you have granted, Mr Speaker. It is about electoral law, and as the Minister responsible for electoral law, I shall answer on that point.

The Electoral Commission is independent of the Government. It is accountable to Parliament via the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission. One important point that has come up today is the suggestion that the Electoral Commission is under-resourced. I encourage hon. Members to look at the commission’s operating costs for this year, which show an underspend against its anticipated budget. Indeed, in January this year, it returned funds. Now, I leave it to others to draw conclusions from that about whether the Electoral Commission is resourced correctly, but I say again that the commission is accountable to Parliament and that such questions could rightly be in looked into by Parliament and your committee, Mr Speaker.

[Geraint Davies]

Will the Minister give way?

[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.

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[Mr Speaker]

The short answer is that the right hon. Gentleman is right; the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission preoccupies itself with the estimate, and scrutiny thereof. That is a narrow albeit important remit. We are concerned with resources. There have been occasions when a particular issue appertaining to the Electoral Commission has arisen that has caused the Committee to meet to hear from its officers. However, so far as investigations are concerned—to be fair, the Minister did not suggest otherwise—those are not matters in which my Committee would in any way become involved. There is a model for this in relation to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority—the model of a Committee scrutinising an estimate—and Members should have that in the forefront of their minds. We do not get involved in investigations. In so far as the right hon. Gentleman’s point of order and my response to it has made that even clearer, I welcome that.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This debate has questioned whether the Brexit vote may have occurred illegally—or illegal activity may have affected the outcome—and therefore it questions the legitimacy of the vote itself and subsequent activity in this Chamber. In your view, what should be the next steps, in the event that it is found categorically that illegal activity may have reasonably been found to have distorted the outcome of that democratic referendum?

[Mr Speaker]

I am bound to say to the hon. Gentleman, who is quite an experienced Member of the House, that that is a triumph of optimism over reality. For him to seek to beguile me into participating in an exchange on that matter is not reasonable, and the puckish grin on his face suggests that he is keenly aware of that fact. The question he puts to me is a hypothetical one and I have always thought that the late Lord Whitelaw spoke very good sense when he said, “On the whole, I prefer to cross bridges only when I come to them.”

Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [Lords]

Bill to be considered tomorrow.