They’re already calling it BrexitGate. Arron Banks – who gave the UK’s largest ever political donation to the Leave campaign – and his associates are being investigated by the National Crime Agency over suspicions that the money he donated may not have been his own and may have come from sources outside the UK. He is also suspected of misleading Parliament about the source of his donation, itself a criminal offence.
The amounts of money involved in this are huge – at least £2.9 million and probably a lot more. Taken together with the earlier finding that the official Vote Leave campaign broke electoral law by significantly exceeding official spending limits by co-ordinating illegally with another group, and indeed the continuing mystery over the source of the £435,000 Brexit “Dark Money” donated to the DUP during the referendum campaign, point to subversion of the UK’s democratic process on a grand scale.
Can the 2016 referendum result still be considered sufficient mandate to take the UK out of the EU? Absolutely not!
So what do we do about it?
We all must write to our MPs and ask them what kind of message it will send if we proceed with Brexit on the basis of a referendum that turns out to have been illegally interfered with on a large scale. Put simply, will it not do huge damage to our democracy to send the message out that no matter how much a campaign cheats and breaks the rules in a political campaign the result will be allowed to stand, despite the closeness of the result and the damage it inflicts?
We need to ask our MPs how they will look their constituents in the eye when the whole truth about the manipulation – possibly by foreign powers seeking to weaken the UK and its allies – of the UK’s democratic process during the 2016 referendum campaign comes to light. Do they really think that repeating the mantra about “the will of the people” will be enough when their constituents ask why they allowed Brexit to happen despite knowing about the lawbreaking and the damage Brexit would inflict on their community?
The revelations concerning suspected serious violations of electoral law by both the main Leave campaigns mean that we need to know what the will of the people is NOW, before Brexit happens! We need a People’s Vote on any Brexit deal (or no deal) with the option to stay a member of the EU!
Send them emails, or better still write old-fashioned letters, or even arrange to speak with them at a constituency surgery. Don’t just do it once, but keep at them, and tell all your pro-EU friends, colleagues and family to contact them to.
We have contact information for our local MPs, as well as tips on writing emails and letters to your MP (i.e. keep it short and to the point) on our website. We also recommend writing to the MP in the constituency you work in (if different to your home MP) and to other key MPs such as the Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer (email: keir.starmer.mp@parliament.uk) and Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn (email: leader@labour.org.uk).
The People’s Vote campaign have launched Write this Wrong, a very useful online tool that allows you to find your MP and provides an email template for you to adapt and add to and send to them.
It really can’t be stressed enough that writing to our MPs is probably the single most useful action we all can take at this moment in the campaign to stop Brexit, so do it and keep doing it! If you get any interesting responses from them please send them to us at info@cambridgestays.org.uk
So write to your MP and tell them to end the Brexit chaos with a People’s Vote…and tell your friends, family and colleagues to write to theirs too!
