Brexit: Leave ‘very likely’ won EU referendum due to illegal overspending, says Oxford professor’s evidence to High Court

There's been little attention paid to the fact Vote Leave broke UK spending law. If that had happened in an election to Parliament, the vote would have been annulled and the election held again. I have to admit, despite the breach, I thought it unlikely the extra spending could actually have swung the election. But the Independent reports that Prof Philip Howard of Oxford (above) says otherwise.

[T]he Remain campaign was forced to stop its digital advertising on the last day of the June 2016 campaign because it had reached its spending limit. In contrast, Vote Leave carried on, despite busting its limit two days before the vote – and was later found by the Electoral Commission to have broken the law.

The illegal adverts were seen by millions, of whom 20--30% made up their mind in the last week, and half of those on the last day. In that context, the estimate that 800K people were swayed, more than the 635K needed to change the outcome, seems entirely plausible.

A new EU law could end the web as we know it (redux)

In June, the EU avoided voting for Articles 11 and 13, which have the potential to end the web as we know it. Now they're back; the vote is 12 September. Up to date info is at Creative Commons, links to help you write, call or tweet are at SaveYourInternet.eu. Below is what I wrote to my MEPs. If you are an EU citizen, you should write too; WriteToThem makes it easy.

Dear Nosheena Mobarik, Alyn Smith, Ian Hudghton, Catherine Stihler, David Martin, and David Coburn,

I write to you greatly disturbed by the new proposals for copyright. These would require any service provider to maintain large, expensive, and ineffective filters. While YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook will have no problems funding these, they will prevent the next innovative service from getting off the ground. Experience with such filters show that they ban all sort of material which should be in the public domain or which is fair use.

I am also concerned by the resurrection of the "link tax". Previous experience with adding a link tax in Germany and Spain showed that the newspapers that requested it soon stopped using it. It is particularly worrying that the legal formulation chosen will invalidate Creative Commons licenses. Many academic journals (including the one which I edit) depend crucially on Creative Commons, and passing a law that invalidates it is against the public interest.

An excellent one-page summary of the issues, with further links, can be found here:

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/11/evidence-free-zone.html

The web has been a huge boon to innovation, creativity, cooperation, and scientific progress. Please don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Yours sincerely,



Philip Wadler
Professor of Theoretical Computer Science
University of Edinburgh

Where we find ourselves

Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian sums up the state of affairs.

It’s gripping, of course. Game of Thrones meets House of Cards, played out at the tempo of a binge-viewed box-set. ...
This week’s antics of Gove and Johnson are a useful reminder. For the way one has treated the other is the way both have treated the country. ...
[Johnson] didn’t believe a word of his own rhetoric, we know that now. His face last Friday morning, ashen with the terror of victory, proved it. That hot mess of a column he served up on Monday confirmed it again: he was trying to back out of the very decision he’d persuaded the country to make.  ...
When doctrine is kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by reality, it turns into zealotry
So we have the appalling sight of Gove on Friday, proclaiming himself a proud believer in the UK even though it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that a leave vote would propel Scotland towards saying yes in a second independence referendum. The more honest leavers admit – as Melanie Phillips did when the two of us appeared on Newsnight this week – that they believe the break-up of the union is a price worth paying for the prize of sovereignty. ...
They did it with lies, whether the false promise that we could both halt immigration and enjoy full access to the single market or that deceitful £350m figure, still defended by Gove, which tricked millions into believing a leave vote would bring a cash windfall to the NHS. They did it with no plan, as clueless about post-Brexit Britain as Bush and Blair were about post-invasion Iraq.
Senior civil servants say Brexit will consume their energies for years to come, as they seek to disentangle 40 years of agreements. It will be the central focus of our politics and our government, a massive collective effort demanding ingenuity and creativity. Just think of what could have been achieved if all those resources had been directed elsewhere. Into addressing, for instance, the desperate, decades-long needs – for jobs, for housing, for a future – of those towns that have been left behind by the last 30 years of change, those towns whose people voted leave the way a passenger on a doomed train pulls the emergency cord.