While it might have fewer implications for his premiership than Tiverton & Wakefield, Boris’s defeat in removing the Commonwealth Leader Baroness Scotland is no less awkward for him. Going into today it was reported Boris’s team was “optimistic about ousting” the former Blairite cabinet minister, however in the last hour her challenger – the Jamaican foreign minister – lost the contest to Scotland: 27 to 24…
Boris’s opposition to Scotland is nothing new, given the number of scandals she’s presided over. During her time the Commonwealth has racked up more than £600,000 in employment tribunal costs. The Commonwealth’s audit committee has also accused Scotland of “circumventing” competitive tendering rules by awarding a £250,000 commission to a company owned by a fellow Labour peer. In 2016 it was revealed £338,000 had been spent refurbishing her Mayfair apartment, and she’s also had to deny helping a friend from Grenada to secure a knighthood. Valid reasons to get rid, though a third election loss in half-a-day doesn’t look like the result from a slick No. 10 operation…
Guido has crunched the numbers and can reveal that since the EU was created in 1992, the size of the combined Commonwealth economy has ballooned by 258%, whereas the EU’s combined economies have grown by just 119%. Added to this, the average EU growth rate today sits at just 1.4%, less than half of that of the Commonwealth’s 3.3%. Happy Commonwealth Day!
The EU has only ever signed a paltry six FTAs with Commonwealth countries, meaning the UK has been held back from fully engaging with Commonwealth powerhouses like India, New Zealand, Nigeria, Australia, or Pakistan. Staying in the EU’s Customs Union would mean our terms of trade with naturally close Commonwealth friends will still be dictated by the EU…
The Commonwealth is facing a legal bill of over £1 million after its disgraced leader Baroness Scotland lost a second major employment tribunal case in under a year. That’s after already blowing vast sums of taxpayers’ money on bumper contracts for her friends and attempting to bill the taxpayer £450,000 to do up her grace-and-favour Mayfair home…
This time, Scotland’s Secretariat was found to have breached its contractual obligations on two counts towards its former Deputy Secretary General, Dr Josephine Ojiambo. Scotland initially failed in her obligation to consider the renewal of Ojiambo’s three-year contract, before attempting to stop Ojiambo from pursuing a grievance with a barrage of email ultimatums trying to force her into a contract extension of a mere 3.5 months – and only on the condition that she dropped “ALL” her other complaints. Unsurprisingly Ojiambo declined.
The tribunal awarded Ojiambo all legal costs along with compensation which is expected to run up to a quarter of a million pounds altogether, not including the Commonwealth’s own legal costs. The total damages and legal costs from the two cases could run to as much as £1.25 million – over 5% of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s annual expenditure. Taxpayers again picking up the tab for Baroness Scotland’s chronically unprofessional behaviour…
