Anna Soubry: she was leader of Change UK at the end, while her partner was Treasurer.
Remember Change UK, the company-pretending-to-be-a-political-party that went through multiple name-changes in its short life?
Well, it seems the auditor handling the wind-up has discovered irregularities.
Will anything come of it – prosecutions? Doubtful.
Should prosecutions happen? Hard to tell.
Politicians seem to get away with so much these days, it’s impossible to tell whether they’re innocent of wrongdoing or not.
Staff at the Independent Group for Change, the disbanded party established by centrist MPs in 2019, “inappropriately destroyed” financial records, a report by its auditors has found.
According to the auditors, documents including bank statements and files recording details of donations to the party were destroyed by former members of staff. None of the documents, auditors said, could be “satisfactorily reconstructed”.
The report, contained in accounts filed at Companies House on Friday, said the loss of the documents had limited the scope of the auditor’s review of the party’s finances.
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Which UK political party has made the biggest fool of itself in the 2019 general election campaign so far?
Was it the Conservative Party? Labour? The Liberal Democrats? Plaid Cymru? The SNP? The Greens? The DUP? Sinn Fein, even?
And what was their error?
Already you have a huge number of cringeworthy gaffes from which to choose.
Please respond using the comment column and I’ll publish some results over the weekend.
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Put ’em up: Boris Johnson is heading for a confrontation with other MPs over his deliberately aggressive and unreasonable approach to Brexit.
MPs from all parties except the DUP have written to demand that Boris Johnson recalls Parliament from recess to debate Brexit.
A total of 110 MPs, including the leaders of the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Plaid Cymru and Change UK have signed the letter, and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is understood to be backing the recall.
But are they enough? 110 MPs – 111 with Mr Corbyn – is still only slightly more than one-sixth of Parliament.
After the way Jo Swinson was treated for trying to influence Labour’s “no confidence” proposal (with only 14 MPs when Labour has 247), BoJob could quite legitimately argue that this is an attempt by the tail to wag the dog, as it were; that a majority of Parliament is not calling for the summer recess to be terminated so there’s no reason for him to agree.
The aim of the recall would be “to allow MPs to hear statements from you and your ministers on progress towards a Brexit deal and to scrutinise your preparations for a ‘no deal’ on 31 October.”
The letter states: “Our country is on the brink of an economic crisis, as we career towards a ‘no deal Brexit’ which will have an immediate effect on food and medical supplies, damage our economy, jobs, the public finances, public services, universities and long-term economic security. A ‘no deal Brexit’ also threatens our crucial security cooperation to keep our country safe from criminals and terrorists.”
It points out: “At times of grave economic emergency and threats to our national security Parliament has been recalled to allow MPs to make representations on behalf of their constituents and to hold Ministers to account.”
And it concludes: “This UK Parliament was elected by the people of the UK in 2017. Your fragile majority is a reflection of the democratic choices of the people of this country then, and since, and the representatives of the people must be able to do their job in holding you and your government to account in these unprecedented times.”
The demand is particularly timely after the leak of information on ‘Operation Yellowhammer’, a report on which states the “most likely” effects of leaving the EU without a deal would be a three-month “meltdown” at the UK’s ports, and food and medicine shortages.
The leaked documents suggest that the UK will face shortages of fuel, food and medicine if it leaves the European Union without a transition deal, jamming ports and requiring a hard border in Ireland.
Mr Johnson himself is currently said to be preparing to tell EU leaders that he needs a new deal to replace Theresa May’s thrice-failed withdrawal agreement – or the UK will crash out of the bloc without a deal on October 31 and there is nothing Parliament can do to prevent it.
It is just about the stupidest thing he could do.
In effect, he’s saying: “You must do a deal that is better for the UK or I will make sure the UK seriously harms itself. The EU won’t suffer any consequences at all.”
European leaders should be expected to shrug and say, “So what?”
He would be well-advised to accept the demand to recall Parliament and join other MPs in working throughout the summer and autumn to rescue the UK from this disaster he, personally, did so much to create. Their holibobs aren’t anything like as important as the economic future of every single UK citizen for the next generation or more.
And if he doesn’t accept the logic of it?
Maybe this will push more MPs over to supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s plan for a “no confidence” vote that will stop Mr Johnson in his tracks.
POSTSCRIPT: Meanwhile our mainstream media are quiet. Have you seen anything about this letter on the national news?
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This is the second change of party affiliation for Chuka Umunna within six months, as the former Labour MP for Streatham continues his quest to find a political party that can accommodate his personal ambition.
The simple fact is: He won’t find one.
This latest flirtation with the Lib Dems is happening because he saw them doing well in the European Parliament elections and thought they must be enjoying a revival; they aren’t.
The brief bounce happened because the Lib Dems positioned themselves as the ‘Party of Remain’ in elections that weren’t about Brexit at all, but which were presented as such to fool the voters.
People don’t live in ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’ constituencies – they vote for the party whose policies reflect their own thinking, as Labour’s win in Peterborough demonstrates.
And Mr Umunna, once touted as a possible future head of the Labour Party, back in its New Labour days, will end his career as nothing more than a footnote.
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Just when the Liberal Democrats thought they were electable again, Chuka Umunna looks set to join them.
That’ll mess things up. According to the Mail – so an unreliable source – he wants to represent the Party of Remain in Streatham, his current constituency, which has a “safe” Labour seat but voted very strongly to remain in the EU in 2016.
In the spirit of giving news stories all the space they deserve… that is all.
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And then there was one: Anna Soubry, centre, is the new leader of Change UK, while former leader Heidi Allen (left) and Sarah Wollaston (right) have quit the party like rats leaving the proverbial sinking ship.
Six of Change UK’s MPs have quit the party after it failed to make an impression at the European Parliamentary elections.
It speaks volumes about the party that its principal defectors were its former leader, Heidi Allen, and spokesman Chuka Umunna.
Both have been talking up the prospect of an alliance with the Liberal Democrats – who, conversely, fared exceptionally well at the elections.
While they haven’t actually joined the Lib Dems yet, it seems a safe bet that they will.
Also out of CHUK are Gavin Shuker, Luciana Berger, Angela Smith and Sarah Wollaston.
You can smell the desperation, can’t you?
These people left their respective parties in the belief that their personal brands were more popular than those of the parties they were leaving.
They were wrong – even the three who left the Conservatives.
Now, it seems to This Writer, the six quitters – double-quitters, if you think about it – are looking for another way to keep themselves in Parliament.
With the Liberal Democrats apparently on the rise again thanks to their stance as the “Party of Remain”, it seems they look like good prospects.
I’d say “watch this space”, but in the case of Change UK it is only likely to grow more empty.
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Take heart, Britain! All is not as bad as the European election results make it seem!
Yes, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party won 28 of the UK’s 73 seats, indicating an alarming shift to the political hard-right. But that doesn’t mean a hard-right election win. The Brexit Party didn’t even get a majority in the UK.
Also, the simple fact is that anti-EU parties led by Nigel Farage don’t actually do anything in the European Parliament, other than fart around making speeches that annoy the serious politicians. They certainly don’t take part in any democratic votes because it is a pillar of their beliefs that the EU cannot be a democratic organisation.
People who voted for the Brexit Party won’t make a difference in the EU because the Brexit Party won’t turn up.
In fact, the only reason the Brexit Party even campaigned was so Mr Farage could deliver an ultimatum on Brexit negotiations: He wants a place at the table so he can push for a “no deal” Brexit.
No deal means no NHS (he’d sell it to the Americans), no human or workers’ rights, chlorinated chicken for dinner and a massive increase in the cost of groceries and other goods. He would pauperise everybody who voted for him.
Best thing to do would be to give him the place he wants at the table – and then ignore him in the national interest.
Yes, the Liberal Democrats enjoyed a surge of support as UK citizens who want to remain in the European Union protest-voted for them.
How they expect to push their promise that a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for remaining in the EU, when the European Parliament won’t be voting on that subject, is a mystery.
But those votes won’t be wasted. They’ll be used to promote right-wing Liberal Democrat policies – the same kind of policies they supported when in Coalition with the Conservatives, here in the UK, between 2010 and 2015.
Socialist remainers who voted Liberal Democrat should monitor the result very carefully – and probably with dismay.
But there was also a surge of support – across the EU – for Green parties and policies that address the growing climate change and environmental crises caused by a human race whose policies have been controlled by people like the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats for far too long.
The UK’s Green Party now has seven MEPs – an increase of four – who will help boost the total number of Greens in the European Parliament to a projected 71. This could give the Greens the balance of power in the European Parliament.
Any parliamentary group that wanted Green support would have to deliver on three key principles: climate action, civil liberties and social justice.
The party will exert maximum pressure on climate policy, but will also push for more social justice when it comes to who winds up footing the bill for the green transition.
And Labour will learn the lesson of its losses. The party as a whole will continue to express dismay at the polarisation of politics around a Leave/Remain conflict but will say there is no political solution coming from Westminster or Brussels so the question must go back to the people – directly.
That means either a general election or another referendum – the “people’s vote” that so many MPs, of many parties, have been demanding.
Labour has always said it will abide by the results of plebiscites on our membership of the European Union, and while a “people’s vote” referendum has been framed as a way of establishing support for remaining in the Union, the European election result (although not representative of the entire electorate as only a little more than one-third of the UK electorate took part) suggests otherwise.
It would be a way of silencing this divisive debate, once and for all.
So in the end, Labour’s policy may prove to be the winner.
This is very amusing from Skwawkbox, and is more proof of the ineptness of the Change UK team. The message is clear: don’t vote for people like this.
Twitter is taking action against CUK over its paid advertising on the platform. In just the past week, two out of its three paid ads have been removed by Twitter for violating its policies.
Twitter has not stated which of these were the issue with the CUK ads.
Twitter is not the only – or apparently even the major – target for CUK’s paid advertising. The outfit is spending a huge amount on Facebook – well over £50,000 just in the last week.
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