Smoking Astroturf

After several hours of wailing about fraud, Reform UK is now saying that it may have won Gorton and Denton. Take as long as you need.

John Ault is a veteran Liberal Democrat activist and a sometime Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, and his previously unknown Democracy Volunteers organisation turns out to be funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I am no Green, but this was how it started against Jeremy Corbyn, not with the Far Right, but with centrist astroturfers such as Labour Together. This was already in The Guardian at 12:22.

We are seeing how the last outburst of that sort of thing has ended up, with Peter Mandelson on bail and having been ordered to surrender his passport, with even the European Commission also now investigating him, with Josh Simons waiting for the knock on the door, with an Interpol Red Notice having been issued for Tulip Siddiq, and with even the Clintons possibly facing their comeuppance at last.

Simons tried to frame people for offences against the Official Secrets Act and the National Security Act. Why are they waiting for some investigation by his own Cabinet Office? With his Harvard, Silicon Valley and Beltway connections, he is a flight risk. Call the Police.

As for Siddiq, did this Government mention international law? Negotiated by Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, and by Dominic Raab, Liz Truss, James Cleverly and David Cameron as Foreign Secretaries, will the Gibraltar deal be put to a referendum there? If so, then the previous Government's Chagos deal, for so it was, should also go to a referendum of the Chagossians. Or if not, since the British Overseas Territories were neither independent, nor constituent parts of the United Kingdom, then the same is true of the Crown Dependencies.

The Assisted Suicide Bill in England and Wales is effectively dead, David Lammy has always been opposed to it, and it is within his power to refuse Royal Assent to the comparable legislation in Jersey and in the Isle of Man. He should do so. As with the closure of all tax havens in the British Overseas Territories and in the Crown Dependencies, anywhere that did not like it would be free to become independent.