Women's Views on News |
- Conservative election spending questioned
- Occupy as protest: ruins whose reputation?
- Political bias, the BBC and sexism claims
| Conservative election spending questioned Posted: 13 May 2016 06:23 AM PDT
The Conservative Party has had to be taken to court by the election watchdog amid claims that it breached spending rules at recent by-elections and the General Election in 2015. The watchdog – the Electoral Commission – had to apply to the high court for a document and information disclosure order after party chiefs failed to provide the details requested, the Guardian reported recently. And to date nine police forces have also launched fraud investigations into claims that the Conservatives recorded the costs of activists being bussed into marginal seats as part of the national campaign rather than under individual candidates' limits. On 28 April the Electoral Commission, in its role as the regulator of political funding and spending, announced that as part of the investigation launched on 18 February 2016 into Conservative Party campaign spending returns, it had requested that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the police consider applying for an extension to the time limit available to pursue criminal prosecutions. The final decision to apply for an extension rested with the police and the CPS. Bob Posner, director of party and election finance and legal counsel at the Electoral Commission said: "The police and the CPS both have the power to apply to the Courts to extend the time limit on bringing criminal prosecutions for electoral offences to allow for full investigations to take place. "We have requested that they consider doing this." The rules around candidate spending and potential criminal offences are matters for the police to investigate under the Representation of the People Act (RPA) 1983. The Commission's request does not mean that it has any view on whether criminal charges should be brought, but that the CPS and the police should consider whether it would be appropriate to leave open to themselves the option of pursuing cases if they consider this is necessary at any stage. Transparency and accountability in relation to campaign spending by local candidates and political parties is essential in order to ensure public confidence in the electoral process. Parliament has determined that anyone found guilty of an offence under the RPA relating to candidate spending or the making of a false declaration in relation to candidate spending, could face imprisonment of up to one year, and or an unlimited fine. The effect of a conviction is also that for 3 years a person convicted of an illegal practice is unable to be elected to the House of Commons or to hold elective office. Given the significant penalties that parliament has made available for such offences, the Commission's view is that in the absence of any current investigation by the police, it would be sensible for the criminal justice agencies to retain the ability to take action should appropriate evidence come to light as part of the Commission's own investigation. The Electoral Commission is currently investigating whether the Conservative Party met their reporting obligations under the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA) 2000, at the General Election in May 2015 and in the by-elections held in Newark, Clacton and Rochester and Strood, which all took place during the regulated period for the General Election. The Commission does not currently anticipate that its own investigation will have concluded before the time limit for RPA offences to be considered by the police will have expired. The Commission monitors and takes all reasonable steps to secure compliance with the rules on campaign spending by local party candidates, but has no powers to investigate or sanction candidate spending offences under the RPA. It has recently called again for its powers in this area to be strengthened. The Commission does have powers in relation to national campaign spending although its sanctioning powers are limited to a civil penalty of up to £20,000, which it has previously recommended should be reviewed and increased. The government has not yet responded to this recommendation. On 12 May the Electoral Commission announced that as part of its investigation launched on 18 February 2016 into Conservative Party campaign spending returns, it has made an application to the High Court for a document and information disclosure order. The application, which names the Conservative and Unionist Party as the Respondent, is made under paragraphs 4 and 5 of Schedule 19B to the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act (PPERA) 2000. Using its powers under PPERA, and in line with its Enforcement Policy, the Electoral Commission may issue a statutory notice requiring any person, including a registered party, to provide it with specific documents and/or information as part of an investigation. This places the recipient under a legal obligation to provide the required material. However, if the recipient does not comply with this statutory notice, the Commission may apply to the High Court for a disclosure order which if granted would be the court compelling the Respondent to release the required documents and information to the Commission. The Commission issued the Conservative and Unionist Party with two statutory notices requiring the provision of material relevant to its investigation. However, the Party has only provided limited disclosure of material in response to the first notice (issued on 18 February 2016) and no material in response to the second notice (issued on 23 March 2016). That follows the Commission granting extensions of time to comply. "If parties under investigation do not comply with our requirements for the disclosure of relevant material in reasonable time and after sufficient opportunity to do so, the Commission can seek recourse through the courts," Bob Posner said. "We are today asking the court to require the Party to fully disclose the documents and information we regard as necessary to effectively progress our investigation into the Party's campaign spending returns." The Commission will now make no further comment on the investigation, in line with its Enforcement Policy.  |
| Occupy as protest: ruins whose reputation? Posted: 13 May 2016 03:12 AM PDT
Faculty members and Students Union officer holders at Sussex University are objecting to changes proposed by the university's administration regarding the right to protest. The proposed changes to the University student discipline regulations at Sussex University include as an example of major misconduct – which could result in expulsion: "conduct which causes a nuisance (whether or not causing damage) and is detrimental to the good order or reputation of the University; for example, the unauthorised occupation of a University building". Occupations are a tactic used by students to bring an issue to the top of the agenda, and are ineffective if they are authorised as they have impact in deliberately being disruptive, to bring light to an issue after attempts at change via official channels have not worked. Occupations have a long-standing tradition in the history of Sussex students' activism on campus. In Spring 2013, for example, an 8-week Bramber House occupation by the Sussex Against Privatisation Campaign mobilised thousands of people and platformed the international movement against privatisation of campus services. The recent February 2016 Don't Deport Luqman occupation of Bramber House also received international attention for its stand against current immigration policies which make international students feel unwelcome in our country and watched on our campuses. And also in February this year the student-led campaign 'Safer Sussex' occupied Sussex House reception with mattresses and placards, calling for the university to take action on sexual violence on campus. That occupation has led to financial and institutional commitment to tackle sexual violence on campus, and a positive, collaboration action between the Students Union (USSU), Safer Sussex and Clare Mackie, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor. Lyndsay Burtonshaw, commenting on the proposed changes, said that Faculty members and Students’ Union president Abe Baldry co-signed an open letter this week stating "is, in our view, unnecessary and purposefully refers to (and by extension, limits) the right and capacity of the student body to engage in protest. "We also argue that including such an inflammatory and unnecessary example, seemingly referring to events in the University’s recent past, could itself damage the reputation of the University and possibly incite such conduct in the student body once again." Burtonshaw, Rose Taylor, Bethan Hunt, Rianna Gargiulo, Sarah Gibbons, Frida Gustafsson, and Jasper Chinedum, student officers at Sussex University, support the signatories of this letter and have echoed the calls to remove the example of ‘the unauthorised occupation of buildings’ from the proposed changes to ‘Regulation 2’. The Human Rights Act, they point out, includes Article 10: Freedom of expression, which protects your right to hold your own opinions and to express them freely without interference. This includes the right to express your views aloud, for example through public protest and demonstrations: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. "This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers". And Article 11 of the Human Rights' Act is for Freedom of assembly and association: "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others." But, given that occupying is a last resort, used when the authorities have not listened or have failed to take the required action, it is surely more to the point that if people want their reputation to remain shining and intact, they listen and act earlier on in any discourse.  |
| Political bias, the BBC and sexism claims Posted: 13 May 2016 02:55 AM PDT
A recent petition set up on the 38 Degrees site complaining about the political bias of the BBC presenter on election night last week raised 35,000 signatures. It was however taken down recently on the grounds that there were sexist or misogynist comments on it. But people who asked to see these comments have not, to date, been shown them and when they were made public, possibly via a leak, they were once again hidden. This has raised even more questions about BBC impartiality than it has either answered or quashed. We have been watching for months now the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn being picked to pieces in the press while under the current Conservative government child poverty increases, homelessness increases, disabled people and the poorly paid are ill-treated, women are tricked out of their pensions, face massive ill-effects of ideologically driven budgets and cuts to public spending, and in the face of questionable arms sales and questionable financial transactions. But as far as the media is concerned, none of these issues mattered compared to whether one man in a crowd sings in a song. And honestly, enough is enough. Soon after Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party last September, the BBC was accused of an 'anti Corbyn bias' and challenged with a 61,000-strong petition demanding that they stop using the prefix 'left-wing' when reporting on events related to his leadership, former newspaper editor Nic Outterside wrote on his blog on the issue recently. Even before he won a stunning 59.5 per cent of the vote, ensuring the largest democratic mandate of any Labour leader in modern history, Outterside continued, Corbyn was subject to what a source from his leadership campaign described as a 'complete hatchet job'. Former BBC political editor Nick Robinson even wrote to his colleagues over concerns about the Corporation's bias against Corbyn, and Channel 4's Michael Crick issued a stunning rebuke to broadcasters referring to non-left MPs as 'moderates'. Despite these protestations the BBC's agenda – behaviour, reporting – did not change. In January this year, Outterside pointed out, ‘Mr Corbyn's so-called 'revenge reshuffle' led to the revelation that BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil and so-called 'moderate' Labour MP Stephen Doughty planned for Doughty to make a live resignation on their programme hours before it began. ‘Despite the fact that a live on-air resignation could be considered dramatic broadcasting, it beggars belief how it is the job of the BBC's political editor to be of service to an evidently resentful shadow cabinet member intent on weakening the Labour leadership, Outterside pointed out. ‘A few hours later the producer of the programme bizarrely admitted in a BBC blog that Neil, Kuenssberg and himself manipulated the news to negatively impact Mr Corbyn during Prime Minister's Questions that week’. And, Outterside continued in the blog, ‘the producer – Andrew Alexander – admitted that the BBC team were not just reporting the day's news but trying to influence it: "We knew his resignation just before PMQs would be a dramatic moment with big political impact. "We took a moment to watch the story ripple out across news outlets and social media. Within minutes we heard David Cameron refer to the resignation during his exchanges with Jeremy Corbyn." Matters moved up a gear this past week, Outterside continued, ‘when a 38 Degrees petition to sack Ms Kuenssberg, following her outlandishly politically biased reporting on the 5 May elections, was signed by more than 35,000 people in less than five days. ‘The fact that a very small number of people on social media used abusive and sexist language in calling for the BBC's first female political editor to go, seemed at first like flotsam on the political wind. ‘Then suddenly, on Tuesday, 38 Degrees executive director David Babbs announced that the petition had been taken down with the agreement of the person who had posted it. ‘He [Babbs] said: "I am really concerned that a petition hosted on the 38 Degrees website has been hijacked, and used as a focal point for sexist and hateful abuse made towards Laura Kuenssberg on Twitter. "That is totally unacceptable and, with the agreement of the petition starter, we've taken the petition down to prevent it being used in this way. There is no place in the 38 Degrees family for sexism or any form of discrimination or hate speech." People who both signed and endorsed the petition were taken aback by this, Outterside continued. They had, as one does, read many of the comments on the 38 Degrees site, and of the scores of comments read through, only one was sexist. That one was quite unpleasant, but totally unrepresentative. It seems astonishing that a tiny and unrepresentative number of people can get a petition scrapped which had been signed by many thousands of genuine people. The only people who claim to have seen this widespread sexism is 38 Degrees, who have not produced any public evidence of this. Laura Kuenssberg, Outterside said, ‘is the most openly biased journalist I have witnessed on the BBC over the past three decades’. We here at WVoN have been shocked by the stance she has taken too. The Canary reported that former UK ambassador Craig Murray had aired his suspicions that petition site 38 Degrees had removed its petition to fire BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg for bias 'under establishment pressure'. Murray found and posted the comments connected to the petition on his blog. He found only one abusive one, and remarked that ‘even if there are more nasty examples of abuse, that is not the fault of the 35,000 good people who signed the petition’. And, he added, ‘there is a disconnect between two establishment narratives, both unproven. One is that Kuenssberg has been a victim of terrible misogynist abuse since appointment. The other is that the abuse was caused by the petition’. The comments were then (once again) removed. And, as Murray then asked, what does it say that having consistently been fed lies about these comments by David Cameron, Jess Phillips, 38 Degrees and the entire media, once the evidence is linked online it gets pulled at 4am in the morning? Kay Green has now set up a petition asking 38 Degrees to moderate comments rather than down petitions. Given that the rest of us moderate comments, this would seem logical. In her petition letter to 38 Degrees' Adam McNicholas, Green says: ‘More than 35,000 people signed the 38 degrees petition calling for the sacking of Laura Kuenssberg, due to the public losing patience with right-wing bias in BBC reporting – but then, say 38 degrees, it was taken down, because some people were making aggressive, sexist comments. ‘But anyone who uses social media regularly knows that just about anything gets its share of daft posts by ‘trolls’. Many people believe there are armies of paid trolls who set out to lower the tone on any social media site or activity their employer wishes to discredit. ‘That’s why moderators exist. ‘It should not be necessary to explain this: most public-access media have people who keep an eye on things, delete rude, aggressive or otherwise unacceptable posts, issue warnings and ban from site anyone who keeps coming back with abuse. ’38 degrees, please moderate your own sites, and if abusive comments elsewhere worry you, report them to the moderators of those sites. ‘There is no need to react by downing a petition people have signed. ‘In the strange political climate at this time, many people are very unsettled by 38 degrees’ odd decision. ‘If it happens again, people will begin to wonder what the motivation is. ’38 degrees, please protect the valuable service you give by changing your policy. Delete abusive comments, call out or report comments elsewhere, but don’t throw out petitions which, by their numbers of signatories, are clearly important to people.’ Which, from what we know, sums it up. You can sign her petition here.  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Women's Views on News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |