Who remembers Arron Banks ?
www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/3451.html
Looks like Banks is likely to lose, and to pay a hefty costs bill but it's
not over till it's over.
The judge has ruled on the "meanings" of the offending words but a future
hearing will decide if she has a valid defence.
In my judgment, the Ted Talk and the First Tweet meant:
On more than one occasion Mr. Banks told untruths about a secret
relationship he had with the Russian Government in relation to acceptance
of foreign funding of electoral campaigns in breach of the law on such
funding.
The Convention Speech meant:
Mr. Banks had been offered money by the Russians and that there
were substantial grounds to investigate whether he would be willing to
accept such funds in violation of prohibitions on foreign electoral
funding.
The Second Tweet meant:
There is a proper basis to investigate whether Mr. Banks' contact
with Russia involved any criminal conduct just as the Italian government
is investigating Lega's contact with the Russians.
unquote
There are some interesting Brexit arguments quoted in the judgment.
quote
So, on the day after the Brexit vote, in June 2016, when Britain woke up
to the shock of discovering that we're leaving the European Union, my
editor at the "Observer" newspaper in the UK asked me to go back to South
Wales, where I grew up, and to write a report. And so I went to a town
called Ebbw Vale. And I went there because it had one of the highest
"Leave" votes in the country. Sixty-two percent of the people here voted
to leave the European Union. And I wanted to know why.
This is a new 33-million-pound college of further education that was
mostly funded by the European Union. And this is the new sports center
that's at the middle of 350-million-pound regeneration project that's
being funded by the European Union. And this is the new 77-million-pound
road-improvement scheme, and there's a new train line, a new railway
station, and they're all being funded by the European Union. And it's not
as if any of this is a secret, because there's big signs like this
everywhere.
And it came to a head when I met this young man in front of the sports
center. And he told me that he had voted to leave, because the European
Union had done nothing for him. He was fed up with it. And all around
town, people told me the same thing. They said that they wanted to take
back control, which was one of the slogans in the campaign. And they told
me that they were most fed up with the immigrants and with the refugees.
They'd had enough. Which was odd. Because walking around, I didn't meet
any immigrants or refugees. I met one Polish woman who told me she was
practically the only foreigner in town. And when I checked the figures, I
discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of
immigration in the country. And so I was just a bit baffled, because I
couldn't really understand where people were getting their information
from.
But then after the article came out, this woman got in touch with me. And
she was from Ebbw Vale, and she told me about all this stuff that she'd
seen on Facebook. I was like, "What stuff?" And she said it was all this
quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.