Vote Leave Campaign: Electoral Law

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I want to pay tribute to my long-standing friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), for a sterling introduction to the debate on the petition. I am sure my colleagues will be pleased to know that my contribution will be brief: he said a lot of what I would have said. I also want to thank my 555 constituents in east Bristol who put their names to the petition.

I was one of the 122 MPs, 57 of them Labour, who voted against triggering article 50 in February last year. Every day that goes by vindicates in my mind that I was right to do so. The Government had no plan for Brexit then and have no realistic Brexit plan now. Triggering article 50 began the countdown to the biggest changes our country has faced in peacetime. It was an incredibly serious decision that should not have been taken lightly. Once the Prime Minister’s letter reached President Tusk’s desk in Brussels, it strictly limited the time for negotiations to two years.

The clock is ticking down, and it feels as though it is ticking down ever faster. Even with a coherent Brexit plan in place, it would be a challenging deadline to meet, but the Government were totally and utterly unprepared. They simply had not done their homework, which was painfully obvious when Ministers came before Select Committees such as the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sit.

We conducted an inquiry into chemicals regulation post-Brexit. When the Minister came in front of us, it became clear that the Government were only just starting to ask the chemicals industry what Brexit would mean for it. This was after article 50 had been triggered. The conversations that needed to be had with industry, with important sectors and with the much derided experts had barely started, so triggering article 50 was reckless in the extreme. The Prime Minister was not doing it because Brussels insisted we move to a trigger, or in an attempt to unite our divided country after the difficult referendum campaign. She was doing it in a futile attempt to keep her warring Cabinet together. We can all see now how well that has been going.

There is little serious doubt that article 50 is revocable, although I know that was not envisaged when it was drafted. The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, reiterated last year that no Brexit is still an option for the UK Government, and the author of article 50, Lord Kerr, has said that the UK can still opt to stay in the EU. He said:

“At any stage we can change our minds if we want to, and if we did we know that our partners would actually be very pleased indeed.”

[Tom Brake]

Does the hon. Lady agree that if the Government want to be transparent and open, they should clearly state whether in their view article 50 is or is not revocable? As far as I am aware, the position they have adopted so far is, “The question is not being posed, so we are not going to answer it.” However, they should, and they should put it on the record.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I absolutely agree. We are discussing all the options available to us at the moment—from no deal to the option that some of us advocate: that we ought to think better and do all we can to try to stay in the EU. Clearly, looking at the legalities around article 50 is in everyone’s interest so that we know which options are still on the table and which are not.

Today’s debate is not really about the rights and wrongs of triggering article 50, although that is something that the petitioners put forward as part of their call. It is about Vote Leave’s illegal activities during the referendum. Although Vote Leave has been held to account, a fine of £60,000 is pitiful and no deterrent at all when we consider that so much was at stake during the referendum campaign and when the people involved are so wealthy and can easily access the funds needed to pay the fine.

I support the Electoral Commission’s call for greater fines to be levied on those who break the law in such a way and the call for a judge-led inquiry into the conduct of the referendum that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) called for. My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) has led the way in investigating the Russian connections of Arron Banks’s Leave.EU campaign. I was glad to be a signatory to a letter he organised to the Metropolitan police and the National Crime Agency urging them to investigate the links between Vote Leave and Leave.EU.

It has been reported that Arron Banks met Russian officials multiple times—on one occasion it was reported that he had met them 11 times before the Brexit vote. There are reports now of an investigation by the National Crime Agency. We are seeing the destruction of our democracy by foreign funding, by fake news and by very wealthy individuals prepared to play fast and loose with our electoral law and get away with it with impunity.

I do not believe that such law breaking alone is reason to rescind article 50, if the intention in calling for article 50 to be revoked is to rerun the 2016 referendum campaign. Nor are the arguments put forward about a lack of information, or indeed the deluge of misleading information when voters made their choice in 2016, a valid reason to call for a rematch. Democracy is never perfect. We can never really second-guess why people voted the way they did. I would prefer not to turn the clock back and talk about rerunning the 2016 referendum, but I very much support the need to properly scrutinise any deal that the Government put forward, possibly with a people’s vote if the Government do not put forward a deal acceptable to Parliament.

Some of us spent the campaign warning that the Brexit process was much more complicated than some would have it. We have gone from being told that Brexit would be

“the easiest deal in human history”,

to the Prime Minister saying,

“it wouldn’t be the end of the world”

if we left with no deal. The promises have evaporated. As I said, I would rather not turn the clock back and look to scrap article 50, but we certainly need to hold to account the people responsible for illegal actions during the referendum campaign. They should not be allowed to get away with it with impunity, but the important thing now is to look at the deal—if it is possible to scrutinise it, given what an absolute mess it is at the moment. It is important to focus on the here and now and make sure that we either get the absolute best deal—a soft Brexit for this country—or we think again, extend or rescind article 50 and go back to the drawing board.