Vote Leave Breaking the Law Won't Stop Us Leaving the EU

An edited version of this article was published on the National Student website on the 18th Jul 18

Leave may have broken the law. Specifically, electoral law. That’s not a good look for a campaign who were supposed to be all about the sovereignty of British democracy.

To get everyone caught up: the Electoral Commission has referred Vote Leave, the official Brexit campaign, to the police, for breaking their campaign spending limit to the tune of almost £500,000 over the £7m cap. They allegedly did this not through direct spending, but made a donation to another Leave group, BeLeave, which the Electoral Commission consider significant evidence of coordination, joint spending which goes over the spending cap. The Commission also levelled several fines against several people and organisations, including a £20,000 fine against Vote Leave for ‘failure to cooperate … because we found it so difficult to get Vote Leave to work with us in this investigation’ – that’s the Electoral Commission’s chief executive, Claire Bassett, speaking.

Of course a Vote Leave spokesman has railed against ‘so-called “whistleblowers” who have no knowledge of how Vote Leave operated and whose credibility has been seriously called into question’, and insinuated that ‘the supposedly impartial commission is motivated by a political agenda’. It would appear an attempt is being made to discredit the opponents of the will of the people. Ultimately, the best situation for brexiteers is one in which everyone is just slinging mud. What once were whistle-blowers are now just uninformed gossips, misconduct investigations are just unjustified smear campaigns.

The Electoral Commission isn’t politically motivated. Even if they were, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to think that the way to stop Brexit would be to fabricate spurious allegations. In their scramble to distract attention, it seems they are forgetting what they should definitely know by now: bad smells get found out in the end.

There have been many strongly-worded polemics of what these irregularities mean for the future of our democracy. My favourite is the simplest analogy, handed down from the courts: “In elections, as in sport, those who win by cheating have not properly won and are disqualified”. Otherwise, if you allow cheating in one instance, you set a dangerous precedent.

Unfortunately, there are other reasons beyond truth and decency why we won’t be successful in choosing this particular spot as our hill to die upon. It comes as much from the argumentative strategies of Remainers as from the premise of the referendum itself, and it happens to be the reason why Vote Leave breaking the law won’t stop us leaving the EU.

You see, the tactic so far has been trying to convince people that they’ve been duped, but, now what? As Liam Fox quite aptly put it, “people knew what they were voting for”, or at least want to think they did. As rotten as cheating the referendum campaign would be, to predicate a challenge to Brexit on it would be a denial of agency to a group of people already furious with a political establishment which robs them of agency. In their eyes, an extra 7% over the spending cap by a political organisation doesn’t change how they feel about British sovereignty. The will of the people, to them, doesn’t cost 500k.

It’s debatable whether Brexit should be considered ‘the will of the people’ at all. Would Brexit still have its 4% majority if Brexit voters had to agree on a particular form of Brexit? Shahmir Sanni, the BeLeave whistleblower, said the group ‘needed to target Green party members that didn’t like the EU’s environmental laws’ or Eurosceptics who were ‘socially liberal’, it seems doubtful that such Brexit voters will be satisfied by a hard Brexit. Should a majority of less than 4% of referendum voters change the fate of our country, especially when we have yet to unpick the pernicious politically-atomising effects of social media campaigning? Coincidentally, BeLeave spent the additional money on AgragateIQ, a Canadian data firm.

But if we’ve found it difficult so far persuading people to change their mind on Brexit by calling them idiots, we’re going to have a harder time telling them that their vote is invalid because they were bought, or because social media controls their minds.

Besides this, the ‘advisory’ status was a decision made in advance of the referendum. The government is not legally impelled to pursue Brexit, which is precisely why overturning or overruling or rerunning the Brexit referendum now won’t stop Brexit, even if it were won by cheating and under false pretences. They’re scared of what backlash would happen if they go back on this, from within the Conservative party, and voters out in the country who might replicate the horrifying (for Conservatives almost more than anyone else particularly) swing to UKIP in the 2015 election.

Just look at Number 10’s response, promptly reassuring us that the 2016 EU referendum ‘was the largest democratic exercise in our country’ in which ‘the public delivered a clear verdict, and that is what we are going to be implementing’. Technicalities, even vital ones, aren’t going to stop this train-wreck.