The Observer claims they have been told that:
Eldon and Rock Services staff contacted companies for material for apparent use in the Brexit campaign, and discussed sharing data. ... “If Eldon employees were being paid to work on the campaign during the regulated period, it should have been a declared expense. We asked him directly if he’d used his insurance employees to work on the campaigns and he said they didn’t.”...One email chain that appears to have come originally from a Rock Services employee to staff at the stock photo agency Getty Images, dated 10 March 2016, shows the insurance company’s staff member requesting the right to use a series of photographs of refugees walking through eastern Europe. The Rock Services employee explains the image is to be used for an “advertisement talking about the issue of immigration and the refugee crisis”...Another former Eldon worker alleged that they were frequently asked to help Leave.EU’s pro-Brexit campaign..t there were always these urgent requests coming in. You were told to stop what you were doing and do something for Leave.EU,” they said...Brittany Kaiser, who worked for Cambridge Analytica [excellent implications of dodgy practice here] , the defunct data firm at the heart of the Facebook scandal, told the same committee that she saw “with my own eyes” employees of Eldon Insurance staffing a call centre working for Leave.EU... ....one senior Eldon employee appeared to have promoted themselves in their – since deleted – online profile as working for both Eldon and Leave.EU at the same time.
There is even a fashionable example of bullying by rich and powerful men [employers as they are known] : ' One ex-Eldon Insurance employee told the Observer: “I made it absolutely clear that I didn’t want to work on the political stuff. I wasn’t comfortable with it. I didn’t want to be complicit in it. There were quite a lot of spats about it. People were frozen out if they refused to work on it.” The legendary C Cadwallader also has a story:
Threats, bullying, vindictiveness: how Arron Banks repels charges against him
Banks launched vitriolic social media attacks on 12 MPs including Anna Soubry for being “traitors” and “enemies of the people”. And a week after I revealed that the Russian embassy had written to the Observer calling me a “bad journalist” who had “shown my true colours”, he posted a spoof video of me, beaten up and threatened with a gun, as the Russian national anthem played....he reported us both to two different police forces. Since then, he and his sidekick, Andy Wigmore, posted more or less daily attacks....
Naturally, there is a matter of high principle at stake: 'It’s our institutions – our press, our parliament – under attack. How we
treat Banks, how we report on him, how we deal with the multiple probes
into him and the other referendum campaigns is how the future will
judge us.' Ah yes -- the future generations,all hanging on the words of a journalist.
There may be something in all this. Brexiteer organisations have obviously worked with some pretty dubious characters in both business and Parliament. No doubt, so have Remainers, who include in their number upright bloodstained citizens such as Blair and Campbell. Blair has TWO articles (here in the news section, and here in the comment section) in today's Observer in the cause of the PV.
The whole UK ruling class/elite is commonly perceived as rotten and corrupt. The Observer only comes to the same tired old partisan points at the end:
Remain-supporting MPs from all the main parties said the latest revelations raised serious questions over how the referendum had been won – and strengthened the case for another public vote. The Tory MP Phillip Lee, said: “The more we hear about the risks of Brexit and the way it was sold to the public by people who had little or no interest in the truth, or following rules, [from a Tory MP!] the stronger the case becomes for suspending or revoking article 50 until all of these irregularities are cleared up.”...The former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna said: “These latest claims, if proven, call into doubt the entire validity of the referendum result.”
Brexit voters were gullible and easily fooled by advertisements and junk emails. Irregularities in the funding process invalidates the whole referendum with no further evidence required. The subsequent General Election, where people voted for parties that all said we should leave, is not to be counted. Any People's Vote would be free of any such dubious practices. Campaigners for the PV are motivated only by a commitment to upholding the truth and 'rules' -- and so on ad naus.
PS P Lee felt strongly enough about Remaining to have quit a Government post rather than vote for the Withdrawal Bill. What fuels his remainerdom? It must surely be something really cogent and strongly argued. According to the Daily Mail,[!] Lee said:
'It's about the virtual signalling of essentially being closed off to the world, because for most young people the world is just “Amazon”, it's just “there”, and it seems retrograde to being seen to be putting up barriers. It's like Trump's wall.
'So, single market access or not, I don't think it's what young people are talking about. I think what this is about is closing off, turning away from Europe, and also having controls on migration.'
And later on Twitter, according to the same source:
'the evidence and rational consideration indicate [Brexit] would be damaging.'
He added: 'It’s time for evidence, not dogma, to show the way. We must act for our country’s best interests, not ideology & populism [!], or history will judge us harshly. Our country deserves no less.'
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