Friday, 1 November 2019

Brexit Day (No 3) +1 - The "throw a dead deal on the table" election



This morning we saw a report from a committee of Parliament - The detention of young people with learning disabilities and/or autism - reported alongside the harrowing stories of people who've suffered from inadequate services and inadequate law. Other committees might be beavering away to finish their own reports before the end of the parliamentary session, when they lose access to the facilities of Parliament, and the committees cease to exist.

What we didn't see was the Intelligence and Security Committee report which Dominic Grieve raised the alarm about yesterday. As he told the Commons, "in accordance with the Justice and Security Act 2013, we sent [it] to the Prime Minister on 17 October for him to confirm that there were no classified matters remaining. There ought not to be, because the report has already been carefully looked at by the Cabinet Office. That confirmation should have been received by today to enable publication before the House is dissolved". But that confirmation seems still to be unavailable.

Today, some of those infamous "anonymous sources" have told Alberto Nardelli of Buzzfeed that there's nothing to see here, and that we should all move along and stop making a fuss. The fact remains, however, that a committee of Parliament - not just the Commons - which is required to exist by its own Act of Parliament, has undertaken an investigation of Russian money and misinformation operations and their effects on British democracy, that the report is complete, and that we might not see it until after a general election. If ever.

(Incidentally, it's rather amusing, and also something to be fixed toot sweet, that the independent website of the independent Intelligence and Security Committee is not itself secure.)

We therefore have a man who's considered trustworthy enough (and in most contexts we'd consider him "establishment" enough) to be granted access to the operations of British spooks, who's really annoyed successive Conservative governments for the last couple of years but not been relieved of those responsibilities, who's labelled a "traitor" by sundry Brexity social media warriors, and who's led his equally trustworthy bunch of Conservative, Labour, SNP and crossbench MPs and peers in producing a report.

Which might be relevant to an election campaign.

And which Number Ten appears not to want to see published. Not a good look.

Where do we go from here?

Parliament is still staggering on, as noted above about committee reports, but not for long. Dissolution comes next Wednesday, 6 November, at which point all the legislation which is now in play will be lost.

We might hope that the Domestic Abuse Bill, which was messed about by Johnson's initial, unlawful prorogation, will come back in. This deceitfully initiated session (the sovereign will no doubt absolutely love coming back just before Christmas to deliver another Queen's speech, which will sound suspiciously like the one she's just done) has had time for little more, but it would be very interesting indeed if the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill wasn't also reintroduced in its current form.

IFF it's a Conservative government doing it...

The next important date is 14 November, when nominations of candidates close, and now Farage has given it extra significance, as that's the day he promises to unleash his full slate of candidates on the world if Johnson doesn't play his game (see below).

After the election on 12 December, Parliament will reopen for "business" (swearing in and not much else) on Monday 16th, before packing up again three days later. Will the Lords even bother turning up?

Then they start again on 6 January, with Brexit No 4 looming at the end of the month. There's going to have to be a Queen's speech at some point, and whoever ends up running a government will have to prove they have a majority.

It makes you wonder how they ever get anything done.

An unstoppable force stumbles into the light

Donald Trump happened to discover the landline number of a British radio station yesterday, and happened to call just as his old mucker Nigel Farage happened to be on the air. They exchanged a few astonished pleasantries - "What are the chances of that then?" they laughed over each other at one point... [not really]

The stunt worked, in that it dominated front pages and broadcast media first thing this morning. Speaking to one of his fellow employees on LBC ahead of his party's launch event this morning, "Farage refused to give clues as to whether his party would be fighting a national campaign, or a narrowly-focused, constituency-specific one. He said: 'Some newspapers are suggesting that we will fight vast numbers of seats, others think we will fight as few as 20 seats. I run a very tight ship, we don’t leak. I will reveal all later on today.'".

And so he did. I was trying to discover the actual location of Brexit Party Ltd's election campaign launch, and found this, from authoritative blog-of-record Guido Fawkes: "the Brexit Party are to hold a rally in Parliament Square on the day the UK is due to leave the EU [1 November; surely some mistake], either in celebration of independence or anger at parliamentarians once again pushing pointless delay". The best laid plans of mice and registered company number 11694875, eh?

The event's message was for Boris Johnson: Join a Leave Alliance with us and a few Labour-Leavey-types we'll tell you about later, dump your agreement with 27 other countries, and we'll take over some constituencies where you don't have a chance but we do, and we can clobber Labour, and we'll leave you alone in areas where you should win on your own, and you'll emerge with a stonking majority. Otherwise we'll stand against you everywhere and... (the logic started to fall apart here; I couldn't tell whether Farage was threatening Johnson with a Labour majority, the loss of Brexit, or both).

A frighteningly large number of Conservative party members (not all of them infiltrators) would probably have snapped that up, but MPs and the party machine seem to think that something called the Conservative party matters, so the answer so far has been No.

Commentators were working out what the actual likely effect might be. Professor Rob Ford of Manchester University offered a long Twitter thread beginning "People seem to be forgetting there are a lot less Labour Leave votes in Labour Leave seats now than in 2016 because a lot of them switched to Cons in 2017. So BXP candidates in Lab Leave seats will usually take more votes from Cons...".

The British Election Study came to a similar conclusion: "There are some caveats. It is possible that there may be some small subset of seats, where the Brexit party is more attractive to recent Labour voters, and the Conservatives have done a good job of reclaiming Brexit party voters since June. But even with these caveats, it is hard to see how the Brexit party will hurt Labour more than the Conservatives".

And, just to help, Matt Chorley at the Times Red Box dug out this analysis of British attitudes to Donald Trump.





We don't do bribery and corruption around here

Oh no, not at all. The impending social media election wars have led media companies to allocate digital analysts to "tell us what's going on". We've heard variously that the LibDems got started early and are consumer-testing various images of Jo Swinson, that Labour have just kicked off a solid campaign, and that the Conservatives might have posted an ad directed at the good people of Milton Keynes, informing them that Jeremy Corbyn was rude about them once.

But these people are still assuming that their objects of study will play by the rules. Quite apart from a £100m "Get Ready..." campaign, which was supposed to cement Brexit, a Conservative government and the idea of "getting it done" in electors' minds (government websites are now being changed wholesale, with "Get Ready For Brexit" becoming "Find Out More About Brexit'), we have the My Town campaign.


A week ago, the "town" I live on the edge of was the subject of this Facebook post. Many other towns have reported the same. And local information on the scheme is already out there - Marketing Stockport tells us "Cheadle to benefit from new Towns Fund". A local opposition councillor, however, points out that there "may be no money for Cheadle in Government towns fund". Nobody has received a penny yet of course, but it has been noticed that the lucky towns nominated so far seem to be Conservative areas or parts of marginal constituencies.

Yvette Cooper asks, "How on earth has Mark Sedwill allowed this to happen? Did permanent secretaries go along with this Tory abuse of government advertising?".

A happy ending

It has to happen sometimes.

After many months of suspicion that they were holding back progress on their investigations of electoral malpractice during the Brexit referendum, perhaps under political pressure, the Metropolitan Police have "submitted a file to the CPS for Early Investigative Advice in relation to the second investigation, which followed a referral by the Electoral Commission on 19 July 2018 and concerns Vote Leave and Be Leave".

It could still take a long time, and it could still come to nothing, but OpenDemocracy suggests that "the timing of the submitted file by the Met for what is termed 'Early Investigative Advice' from the CPS could not be worse for the prime minister" in the run-up to an election.

We can only stand and stare.


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