Now’s not the time, Tom…
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s first appearance at the Despatch Box has more than lived up to what people were hoping for. Tom Brake found out the hard way that trying to outwit the Moggster is no easy task…
FBPErs were wetting themselves with excitement recently over a fresh no-hope anti-Brexit lawsuit brought by Remainiac MPs Tom Brake, Ben Bradshaw and Caroline Lucas. The Met Police’s lawyers have now responded to the legal threat, it doesn’t make pretty reading at all for the Remainers. Not that it’s stopping lawsuit-happy lawyers having a field day creaming cash from gullible Remainers on cases that have no chance of success…
First off they point out that the MPs themselves have no relevance to the case themselves – as required by law to actually bring the case. They then note that the Remainers’ expensive lawyers, Bindmans, have “not cited a single authority” where the courts have intervened in a police investigation in the way they want – by forcing them to bring a prosecutorial decision or hand over their entire investigation to the CPS within fourteen days. Politicians attempting to use the courts to compel the police in this way is truly extraordinary, this is real kangaroo court stuff…
However the people who’ll be squirming most reading it are the hapless Electoral Commission. The police lawyers list a truly remarkable catalogue of fundamental errors made by the UK’s electoral regulator:
“The proposed claim appears to be premised on the assumption that… when the EC referred those matters to the MPS it supplied all potential relevant documents… That assumption is incorrect…
“When the EC referred the matters to the MPS, the EC did not provide the documentation from its own investigation as your Letter of Claim asserts. Instead the EC required the MPS to make a request for disclosure pursuant to the Data Protection Act 2018 (a process that the MPS does not consider was necessary)…
“That documentation was not indexed or organised in what the MPS considered to be a systematic or logical fashion. The EC did not provide (and has not provided) the MPS with a comprehensive schedule of all used and unused material held by the EC from its investigation of the kind that the police would compile in a criminal investigation.
“The EC’s approach to the gathering and disclosure of evidence does not appear to the MPS to have complied with the letter or the spirit of the Criminal Procedure and Investigation Act 1996 and associated guidance…
“The MPS formed the view that EC has not disclosed all the documents in its possession or control that are potentially relevant to its investigation. The MPS has sought further disclosure from the EC on a number of occasions… The MPS remains of the view that the EC has not disclosed all of the documents in its possession or control that are potentially relevant to MPS’ investigation.
“Your letter of claim has only served to reinforce this view.”
This is a staggering indictment of the levels of pure unbridled incompetence at the heart of the quango that is trusted to be judge, jury and executioner of the UK’s electoral system. No-one in their right mind would hand such a bunch of rank amateurs yet more discretionary power over the UK’s democracy, the Tories are sensibly pushing back against it. Yet more evidence that the Electoral Commission is simply unfit for purpose…
UPDATE: The Electoral Commission have hit back strongly against the Police, accusing them of “unfounded, misleading and incorrect” assertions. Read their response in full here…
Read the original letter in full below:
Tom Brake has become the latest Lib Dem to dabble in climate hypocrisy, after Guido revealed Jo Swinson’s fracking cash. Last month Tom Brake flew to Russia at the expense of big oil company Total IPG Russia, just weeks before calling on the Prime Minister to tell Trump that there must be “no back-tracking on climate change & no cosying up to Putin”. His big oil funded all-expenses-paid trip came at the expense of a company who are drilling the Arctic for over four billion barrels of oil equivalent and have ties to the Kremlin.
This is just the latest bout of hypocrisy to hit the Lib Dems’ “climate emergency” campaign after they approved a massive new coal mine earlier this year. When it comes to climate it’s one rule for the Lib Dems and another rule for everyone else…
UPDATE: Tom Brake gets in touch to say
“… This is my entry (an error was made in reporting to me who had paid for different elements of the trip which has been corrected in this entry). Flights etc were paid for by Pluteos AG. The only thing that was paid for by Total was a lunch at the French Embassy which cost less per head than the reporting threshold.”
Pluteos is one of those consultancies run by ex-spooks that do discreet business for clients with geo-political concerns, clients like oil corporations. So no transparency there…
Lib Dem @thomasbrake “I make no apology for the fact that I do want to stop Brexit” pic.twitter.com/UKzvNzr4us
— BrexitCentral (@BrexitCentral) June 20, 2018
56% of his constituents in Carshalton voted to Leave…
LibDem co-conspirators in Sutton tell Guido the party mass produced a glossy leaflet designed for mail drops before the local election spending period. Having stockpiled the expensive leaflets, the LibDems only started to deliver them once the controlled spending period had started. Doh!
To make matters worse, official council email addresses appeared on the leaflets, rather than political ones. They have had to suspend their council email accounts and thousands of the flyers face being pulped…
The brains behind the campaign? It’s being run out of Tom Brake’s office. This morning Brake tweeted “check out Sutton LibDems. I just joined” – before deleting it. A hat-trick of campaign cock ups enhances Brake’s reputation for competence once again…
