More details are emerging. The Leave campaign was not only a pack of lies and fearmongering, but the organisation(s) were opaque, are beyond the purview of the Electoral Commission, are legally dubious and have credible ties to the current US administration. That's not a free and fair democratic process.
On the surface, the two main campaigns, Leave.EU and Vote Leave, hated one other. Their leading lights, Farage and Boris Johnson, were sworn enemies for the duration of the referendum. The two campaigns bitterly refused even to share a platform. But the Observer has seen a confidential document that provides clear evidence of a link between the two campaigns. More precisely, evidence of a close working relationship between the two data analytics firms employed by the campaigns – AggregateIQ, which Vote Leave hired, and Cambridge Analytica, retained by Leave.EU.
British electoral law is founded on the principle of a level playing field and controlling campaign spending is the key plank of that. The law states that different campaigns must not work together unless they declare their expenditure jointly. This controls spending limits so that no side can effectively “buy” an election.
Legally, these two companies – AggregateIQ in Canada and Cambridge Analytica, an American company based in London, have nothing to connect them publicly. But this intellectual property licence shown to the Observer tells a different story. This created a binding “exclusive” “worldwide” agreement “in perpetuity” for all of AggregateIQ’s intellectual property to be used by SCL Elections (a British firm that created Cambridge Analytica with Mercer). The companies may have had different owners but they were legally bound together.
Millar said: “It is appalling that Vote Leave, whose lead campaign status was authorised by the state (and whose campaign was partly funded by the state), does not feel an obligation to give … public answers to the questions you raise.” Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica have responded by telling the Observer that they did no work with each other. Arron Banks, the head of Leave.EU, said it had talked to Cambridge Analytica about working with it “if we won the official designation – but we didn’t”. This directly contradicts his own memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit. Under the entry for 22 October 2015, Banks writes: “We’ve hired Cambridge Analytica, an American company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics’ to influence people.”
All this has taken so long to come to light because the spending returns for the different campaigns were published only in February. Martin Moore, director of the Study of Communication, Media and Power at King’s College London described how he began to investigate the returns back then.
“I went through the invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”
The Observer has learned that the Information Commissioner’s Office is actively investigating BeLeave, Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain and the DUP for potential offences, including illegal sharing of data, but it is believed to have the same problem: the evidence is offshore.
Kinnock said: “It’s clear the Electoral Commission, the body which is meant to uphold it, is completely toothless … Even if it finds a problem, it can only impose a fine which is just the cost of doing business.... And there is no way of properly holding anyone to account... There are so many issues. Thousands of pounds of work apparently unaccounted for. Evidence of coordination between multiple campaigns. Multiple breaches of data protection. And this question of foreign influence, of a foreign billionaire buying influence in a British election, goes right to the heart of our entire democratic process.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/14/robert-mercer-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-referendum-brexit-campaigns
It's pretty clear that there is a grave risk that the referendum should be declared invalid due to illegal campaigning. This should have been enough to delay triggering Article 50 until it was certain that the referendum had genuinely reflected the freely expressed will of the British people.
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