Cameron’s £9m mail-shot to 27 million households with pro EU propaganda of the basest (and most moronic) sort is immoral and potentially illegal – and court action should make Cameron personally responsible for repaying to the people their £9m.
Government’s – and in particular David Cameron’s Governments – are masters in manipulation and lies using words like “we have no plans to…” rather than “we will not” because they want to seem to deny their intentions while allowing their “plans” to change! So it is no surprise that the Minister for Europe David Liddington said in Parliament (Hansard, 7 September 2015, col. 89)
‘Let me repeat that we have no intention of legislating to allow the Government to do things such as mail-shots, paid advertising or leafleting’
and that we now see the Government has intervened in the UK’s referendum on membership of the European Union, spending £9m on a mail-shot to 27 million households with pro European Union propaganda of the basest (and most moronic) sort.
This mail-shot is immoral and potentially illegal for as the Venice Commission – The European Commission for Democracy through Law, has laid down on referendums:
“In any event the use of public finds for (referendum) campaigning purposes must be prohibited in order to guarantee equality of opportunity and the freedom of voters to form an opinion. In addition the public authorities at every level must not engage in one sided campaigning but show neutrality.”
The members of the Venice Commission are “senior academics, particularly in the fields of constitutional or international law, supreme or constitutional court judges or members of national parliaments”
On this website we explained why a referendum is “of the people” – not for the Government. It is the people’s sovereignty (lent to the State between elections) which the Government has removed and ONLY the sovereigns (the voters) have the right to debate and decide whether they want it back. Government Ministers and MPs must take part in the debate and vote as the citizens they are – not as some overbearing, arrogant State apparatus that “knows better” than the people and must tell them how to vote.
There is an excellent case for legal action against this grotesque denial of democratic balance in a vote which will determine whether the UK becomes again a free, democratic, independent country with its own parliament, borders and self determination.
The Venice Commission (with 60 members States) is an advisory body of the Council of Europe, composed of independent experts in the field of constitutional law. It was created in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin wall, to help East European countries, newly freed from the Soviet Communist dictatorship to establish their own democratic nation states.
Of course that same Council of Europe then stood back and watched how NATO and the European Union destroyed any kind of democratic nationhood by absorbing those countries into the supranational, corporatist fascist Euro-State, now pushing ever further Eastwards and courting another war.
It is quite in keeping with his slavish adulation of the imperialist Euro-State that Cameron should exploit the brutal power of the State to destroy the democratic balance in a vote of the people he so obviously despises – and makes them pay for it out of their taxes.
