Region served | United Kingdom |
|---|---|
Key people | Darren Grimes Shahmir Sanni Tom Harwood |
| Affiliations | Vote Leave |
BeLeave was a campaign group which campaigned for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in the 2016 EU referendum. The group was set up to focus on younger voters. [1]
BeLeave was set up as a "youth-focused pro-Brexit campaign" by Darren Grimes, at the time a 22-year-old fashion student and part-time shop worker, who was officially designated as Campaign Director of the organisation. In addition to Grimes, the BeLeave board consisted of Shahmir Sanni ('Secretary & Research Director') and Tom Harwood ('Head of Media & BeLeave Spokesperson'). [2] Grimes was reported as working from Vote Leave's office and was invited to appear on several TV and radio programmes arguing for Britain to leave the EU. When Vote Leave was close to its £7m spending limit, Vote Leave emailed Grimes with offers of financial help, to which Grimes replied asking that the money be spent on Facebook ads to be placed by AggregateIQ. Vote Leave sent £675,000 in this way to AggregateIQ, without the money ever passing into the hands of Grimes or BeLeave. BeLeave had no significant income or expenditure apart from this. [3]
BeLeave was described as a "Vote Leave Outreach Group" on the official Vote Leave webpage. [4]
In March 2018 former BeLeave activist Shahmir Sanni claimed that BeLeave was used by Vote Leave to exceed legal spending limits. [1] It was claimed that Vote Leave, the official campaign in favour of leaving the European Union in the Referendum, illegally used BeLeave as a channel for a payment of £675,000 to AggregateIQ, a Canadian company which worked on pro-Brexit projects, requiring that BeLeave spent the money in this way. Vote Leave would have exceeded its campaign spending limit of £7m had it spent the money itself. [1]
On 17 July 2018, the Electoral Commission published the conclusions of its investigation into the campaign spending of Vote Leave and found that Vote Leave and Grimes had broken electoral law.
Vote Leave was fined £61,000. Grimes, representing BeLeave, was fined £20,000, the maximum permitted individual fine, for exceeding its spending limit as an unregistered campaigner by more than £660,000 and delivering an inaccurate and incomplete spending return. [5]
On 14 September 2018, the High Court of Justice found against the Electoral Commission, stating that its advice to Vote Leave and Darren Grimes had been incorrect, but confirming that the overspending had been illegal. [6]
Vote Leave, which claimed they would not have paid BeLeave without the advice, [7] initially appealed against their fine, but withdrew the appeal in March 2019. [8]
Darren Grimes, who also began an appeal against his fine, did not withdraw in March 2019. On the 19th of July 2019, in the Central London County Court, Grimes successfully appealed the £20,000 fine levied for breaking electoral law in the lead up to the Brexit referendum, and the fine from the Electoral Commission was quashed. Judge Marc Dight said, "even if Grimes had committed the offence, it would not have justified the fine of £20,000, the maximum possible under current law." The Electoral Commission said: “We are disappointed that the court has upheld Mr Grimes’s appeal. We will now review the full detail of the judgment before deciding on next steps." [9] In August 2019, the Electoral Commission decided not to appeal against the ruling. [10]
In the United Kingdom, the Electoral Commission is the national election commission, created in 2001 as a result of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. It is an independent agency that regulates party and election finance and sets standards for how elections should be run.
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Brexit was the withdrawal of the United Kingdom (UK) from the European Union (EU) at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020. The UK is the only sovereign country to have left the EU. The UK had been a member state of the EU or its predecessor the European Communities (EC), sometimes of both at the same time, since 1 January 1973. Following Brexit, EU law and the Court of Justice of the European Union no longer have primacy over British laws. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 retains relevant EU law as domestic law, which the UK can amend or repeal.
Arron Fraser Andrew Banks is a British businessman and political donor. He is the co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign. Banks was previously one of the largest donors to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and helped Nigel Farage's campaign for Britain to leave the EU.
The European Union Referendum Act 2015 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that made legal provision for a consultative referendum to be held in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar, on whether it should remain a member state of the European Union or leave the bloc altogether. The Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary on 28 May 2015. Two weeks later, the second reading of the Bill was supported by MPs from all parties except the SNP; the Bill subsequently passed on its third reading in the Commons on 7 September 2015. It was approved by the House of Lords on 14 December 2015, and given Royal Assent on 17 December 2015. The Act came partly into force on the same day and came into full legal force on 1 February 2016.
Vote Leave was a campaigning organisation that supported a "Leave" vote in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. On 13 April 2016 it was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official campaign in favour of leaving the European Union in the Referendum.
Leave.EU was a political campaign group that was first established to support the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union in the June 2016 referendum. Founded in July 2015 as The Know, the campaign was relaunched in September of that year with its name changed to "Leave.eu" to reflect altered wording in the referendum question.
Labour Leave is a Eurosceptic campaign group in the United Kingdom. The group is unofficially affiliated with the Labour Party, and campaigned for the United Kingdom to vote to withdraw from the European Union, in the June 2016 EU Referendum. The group was led by eurosceptic Labour MPs: Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins, and Roger Godsiff.
Campaigning in the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum began unofficially on 20 February 2016 when Prime Minister David Cameron formally announced under the terms of the European Union Referendum Act 2015 that a referendum would be held on the issue of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. The official campaign period for the 2016 referendum ran from 15 April 2016 until the day of the poll on 23 June 2016.
The 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum took place in the United Kingdom and Gibraltar on 23 June 2016. Membership of the European Union had been a topic of political debate in the United Kingdom since the country joined the European Communities in 1973. This referendum was conducted very differently from the European Communities membership referendum in 1975; a more localised and regionalised counting procedure was used, and the ballot was overseen by the Electoral Commission, a public body which did not exist at the time of the first vote. This article lists, by voting area for Great Britain and Gibraltar and by parliamentary constituency for Northern Ireland, all the results of the referendum, each ordered into national and regional sections.
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The United Kingdom General Election 2015 – Party Spending Investigation was a probe involving the UK Electoral Commission, numerous police forces, and the Crown Prosecution Service into spending by political parties and candidates, primarily during the 2015 general election campaign. This co-ordinated investigation has been described as 'an unprecedented and extraordinary situation'.
Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum is a debated subject and remains unproven, though multiple sources argue evidence exists demonstrating that the Russian government attempted to influence British public opinion in favour of leaving the European Union. Investigations into this subject have been undertaken by the UK Electoral Commission, the UK Parliament's Culture Select Committee and Intelligence and Security Committee, and the United States Senate. "The Russia Report" published by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament in July 2020 did not specifically address the Brexit campaign, but it concluded that Russian interference in UK politics is commonplace. It also found substantial evidence that there had been interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.
Christopher Wylie is a Canadian data consultant. He is noted as the whistleblower who released a cache of documents to The Guardian he obtained while he worked at Cambridge Analytica. This prompted the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which triggered multiple government investigations and raised wider concerns about privacy, the unchecked power of Big Tech, and Western democracy's vulnerability to disinformation. Wylie was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018. He appeared in the 2019 documentary The Great Hack. He is the head of insight and emerging technologies at H&M.
AggregateIQ (AIQ) previously known as SCL Canada is a Canadian political consultancy and technology company, based in Victoria, British Columbia.
R (Wilson) v Prime Minister [2019] EWCA Civ 304 is a UK constitutional law case, involving judicial review of the Brexit Referendum in 2016. The claimants, including Wilson, argued that illegality through Russian interference, criminal overspending by Vote Leave and criminal investigation into the largest donor, Arron Banks, before and during the referendum undermined the integrity of the result, and rendered the decision to leave void. The application was refused in the High Court. In December 2018, the claimants lodged an appeal to the Court of Appeal. This was rejected on 21 February.
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Darren Grimes is a British right-wing political commentator and activist. A Liberal Democrat activist before dropping out of university, he then worked for a number of Brexit campaigns. He set up the website Reasoned in May 2020.
BrexitCentral was a pro-Brexit news website founded by Matthew Eliott. It was active from 2016-2020.
