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Electioneering & misconduct in public office

01 August 2019 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7851 / Categories: Features , Public , Constitutional law , Brexit
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Nicholas Dobson reflects on how & why the recent private prosecution against Boris Johnson failed

  • The district judge erred in issuing a summons against Boris Johnson for misconduct in public office for campaigning statements made before the June 2016 EU Referendum.

Elections invariably invoke strong passions as well as a rather creative approach to electioneering. So when a defeated challenger once accused former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza of ballot-rigging he was told that ‘You won the elections, but I won the count’.

In the UK passions certainly ran high before the EU referendum on 23 June 2016. Boris Johnson’s controversial ‘Vote Leave’ bus advert: ‘We send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead’, attracted widespread and impassioned outrage, particularly among Remain advocates. On the other side, the government leaflet circulated at public expense to every UK household warned that: ‘If the UK voted to leave the EU, the resulting economic shock would put pressure on the value of the pound, which would risk higher prices

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NEWS
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Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charles Pigott of Mills & Reeve reports on Haynes v Thomson, the first judicial application of the Supreme Court’s For Women Scotland ruling in a discrimination claim, in this week's NLJ
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
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