Nissan's legal action against Vote Leave is being exaggerated and misrepresented by the Remain campaign

The Remainiacs - the media included - are reporting that Nissan is suing Vote Leave for claiming that they support Brexit in referendum leaflets. This isn't true.

Vote Leave hasn't claimed that Nissan is supporting Brexit, merely that Nissan has said it will continue to invest in the UK regardless of the result of the referendum. Nissan's stated position is that they support neither campaign, would prefer us to stay in but will not be reducing their investment in the UK when we vote to leave the EU. They have said that they will have to consider future investments on a case by case basis.

Here is the part of the leaflet they have a problem with:

It doesn't say or imply that Nissan supports Brexit, merely that they are one of the many companies who have said that they will stay. Which they have.

We are a global business with a strong presence in Europe. We have a rich heritage in the UK with 30 years of manufacturing and engineering presence, and remain committed to building and engineering cars in the country.

[...]

While we remain committed to our existing investment decisions, we will not speculate on the outcome nor what would happen in either scenario.

Furthermore, Nissan is not suing Vote Leave in the commonly understood meaning of the term, they are seeking a High Court injunction to prevent Vote Leave from using their name and logo without their permission and from (in their opinion) misrepresenting Nissan's position. Whether Vote Leave has a right to use Nissan's name and logo to illustrate the fact that Nissan won't be leaving the UK if we vote to leave the EU is for a judge to decide but such use of names and logos in political leaflets during an election are generally considered fair use so it's hard to see why this wouldn't be. There are specific exclusions in UK copyright and trademark law for reporting news and who could argue that this leaflet isn't reporting the news that Nissan (amongst others) has said that they will stay in the UK when we leave the EU?

Nissan say that they have asked Vote Leave to stop using their name and logo but they have continued to do so. This is similar to NHS England who told Vote Leave to stop using the NHS logo on their leaflets. Vote Leave stopped printing leaflets with the NHS logo but the leaflets that have already been distributed are out of Vote Leave's hands. I know for a fact that they are still being delivered by people who don't work for Vote Leave months after printing of that version of the leaflet was stopped. No doubt that is the case with this leaflet that was printed some time ago.

If Nissan has asked Vote Leave to stop using their name and logo then of course Vote Leave should respect their wishes unless they believe that doing so is fair use. If companies were allowed to prevent their names and logos being used when reporting news that would allow them to suppress any bad news coverage which is clearly not in the public interest.

The case is a frivolous one in any case as they aren't seeking a hearing until Monday when the referendum will be over and the company behind Vote Leave will have already started winding itself up. The timing of the announcement - four months after Nissan say they asked Vote Leave to stop using their name and logo and three days before the referendum date - is suspicious to say the least and is most likely a Remain campaign stunt to try and discredit the Leave the campaign.

Pledge to Vote Leave

Vote Leave forgot to do English and Northern Irish versions of their Vote Leave pledge card when they were doing the Scottish and Welsh versions so we've fixed that for them.

Here are all five versions:

Vote Leave banner the size of a small house attached to Cavendish House in Dudley

This picture of Cavendish House in Dudley has been posted on Facebook by the Spotted : Dudley page. The block of flats is a local eyesore that's supposed to have been scheduled for demolition for a couple of years now. Looks great today!

Wetherspoons boss donates £200k to Vote Leave

The boss of the Wetherspoons pub chain has donated £200k to Vote Leave.

Tim Martin founded the JD Wetherspoon chain in 1979 which has gone on to become one of the world's largest and most successful pub chains. He is concerned about the effect of EU red tape on small businesses.

Whilst Vote Leave have been successful in raising a considerable amount of money from ordinary members of the public and a few big name donors, the mad cows at the BSE campaign are flush with money with establishment figures like Lord Sainsbury and Lord Rose donating millions to top up the millions the British government are spending on their behalf. The BSE campaign have already raised more in donations than their spending limit so any new money they get is just being spent on staff to churn out propaganda as staffing costs aren't included in spending limits.

The leave campaign is massively out-funded by the BSE campaign which has the backing of government with vast sums of taxpayers' money being thrown into promoting their message. What they Project Fear doesn't have, though, is people on the street putting leaflets through letterboxes and talking to members of the public. This is where the leave campaign's strength lies but it takes a lot of people to make as much of an impact as the £14m the BSE campaign has in the bank so if you haven't already done so, get in touch with your local UKIP branch, Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Grassroots Out, Better Off Out or any other campaign working to get us out of the EU and see what you can do to help.

Bernard Jenkin MP is right to suggest an alternative to the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty

The editor of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, is claiming that a letter from Bernard Jenkin MP reveals that Vote Leave wants to keep us in the EU for at least a decade but the letter doesn't actually mention Vote Leave and Kassam appears not to have read the letter properly.

Whilst there are undoubtedly some in Vote Leave who want to use a Leave vote as a negotiation tool to get reformed membership, the campaign itself is officially in favour of a Leave vote meaning we leave the EU. As Vote Leave's Chief Executive, Matthew Elliott, told us earlier in the year:

I'm not quite sure what else to say, other than the fact that if we are to win this referendum, we have to convince voters who have previously taken a "reformist" stance to come out for Leave - sadly Leave is not yet at over 50% in the polls! I am campaigning for a Leave vote, and there is no way I will campaign for or recommend a Remain vote. 

What Bernard Jenkin MP has said in his letter to a constituent is that he (not Vote Leave) thinks that there are other options available to the UK in the event of a Leave vote than immediately invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty as David Cameron has said he will do. His preference is to instead negotiate a new treaty with the EU that would do away with the need to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

In his eagerness to "prove" that Vote Leave is a trojan horse for the establishment Kassam has ignored the fact that Jenkin hasn't even mentioned Vote Leave and failed to consider whether what he says is a viable option.

Under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty the only legal way to leave the EU is by giving notice to quit under Article 50 of the treaty. If the other member states agree to let us leave (no, this is not a joke) then a two year process is triggered in which we negotiate the terms of our exit and our future relationship with the EU. At the end of the two years we are out.

The is no other provision in the Lisbon Treaty for leaving the EU but under international treaty law a new treaty can supercede the Lisbon Treaty just like a piece of domestic legislation can implicitly or explicitly supercede another piece of domestic legislation. Bernard Jenkin's suggestion that we could conclude another treaty with the EU that would result in our exit from the EU and not require giving notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is absolutely valid and in fact the deal that we would negotiate with the EU if we leave by way of the Lisbon Treaty would quite likely result in a new treaty or at the very least a new annexe to the Lisbon Treaty. If it did result in a new treaty then that treaty would of course contain the repudiation of the Lisbon Treaty.

Where Kassam gets the decade in the EU thing from is Jenkin's clumsy wording about negotiating the new treaty where he says that we would have to negotiate with all 27 remaining EU members. 

It would be for the UK and the EU to agree the basis of a new relationship in the aftermath of a vote to leave. This would involve negotiation with all the other 27 member states at government-to-government level. This could take the form of a new treaty, which would mean the UK would not need to resort to Article 50. We will have many options open to us after a vote to Leave, unlike if we vote Remain and I am grateful to you for offering me your thoughts on the matter.

Conducting 27 separate negotiations would indeed take many years but there wouldn't be 27 trade deals with 27 EU members. One of the fundamental arguments for leaving put forward by Leave campaigners is that as EU members we can't negotiate our own trade deals because they have to be done collectively by the EU. Reading the whole paragraph, Jenkin is clearly referring to lobbying of the individual EU governments as Cameron did to get his "deal" to ensure that the agreement reached with the EU goes the right way.

If it was practical I would like to leave tomorrow but the whole machinery of the state needs to move from its current model where large chunks of government are outsourced to the EU to one where they actually do their own thinking. The biggest challenge will be DEFRA which has been little more than an outpost of the EU in the UK, the British government having handed control of fisheries and agriculture to the EU many years ago. In the case of DEFRA they will effectively be building a brand new government department. Government moves at a sedentary pace, it is unlikely that they could even decide what the department should do let alone resource it and get it working effectively. If there was an opportunity to delay the insourcing of at least some aspects of government beyond the two years allowed by the Lisbon Treaty then as long as fully leaving the EU is the end game and it doesn't delay that objective unduly, it isn't something that should be dismissed.

David Cameron has predicted pretty much everything short of an alien invasion (from outer space, not the middle east) when we leave the EU and when we do vote to leave he will want the record to show that he was right. Government departments have been instructed to make no plans for leaving and he has said that he will give notice under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty as soon as we vote to leave so government departments and the civil service will be starting from scratch with a fixed two year deadline to bring everything that has been outsourced to the EU back in-house and negotiate a new relationship with the EU. It's been set up to fail to secure Cameron's legacy but what Jenkin suggests is a way to make it work.

With an agreement that we cap our relationship with the EU as it is now, sign up to no new treaties and hand over no new powers we can chip away at what competencies the EU has (with a corresponding reduction in the membership fee of course) whilst negotiating a new treaty in parallel which will take us out but maintain a relationship with the EU on terms that work for us. As long as there is an agreed deadline for getting out completely - perhaps 5 years - and it's not used as a stalling technique there's no reason why we should choose to limit ourselves to two years to leave and equally no reason why we should have to use the Lisbon Treaty to leave if our best interests are served by leaving in a different way.

Vote Leave is clearly the establishment campaign - it's the one the politicians and other establishment figures flocked to - but is it a trojan horse? I don't think so. Our preference was for Grassroots Out to be designated the official Leave campaign but the Electoral Commission chose Vote Leave. Their decision was made transparently and whilst the decision wasn't the one we wanted there is no point trying to undermine the campaign that has all the money and resources and the mandate from the Electoral Commission to lead leave campaigners. Kassam's misleading analysis of Bernard Jenkin's letter and incorrect attribution of that misleading analysis of the MP's comments to Vote Leave are not helpful. Now is the time to work together, not play silly games.

Vote Leave designated official leave campaign

The Electoral Commission has designated Vote Leave the official leave campaign for the EU Referendum.

The decision wasn't a surprise as one Tory MP congratulated Vote Leave on their designation last night, two days ahead of tomorrow's deadline which may have forced the Electoral Commission into making the announcement today.

UKIP's NEC has voted unanimously to get behind Vote Leave whilst Aaron Banks says he intends to seek a judicial review on behalf of Leave.EU which could potentially delay the referendum until October. Grassroots Out says that it will continue to campaign within the reduced spending limit.

The Electoral Commission decided that the politician's choice was the campaign that would best represent leave campaigners rather than Grassroots Out. Vote Leave is a much slicker campaign with the most professional politicians behind it but Grassroots Out is the blue collar campaign that wanted to pull everyone together. Regardless of the dubiousness of the Electoral Commission's reasoning, we now all need to get behind the designated leave campaign and win this referendum. Refusing to support Vote Leave, wasting time and money on legal proceedings or any other distractions are not going to help the campaign, we have just 70 days to secure our independence.

Department of Health threaten Vote Leave over use of NHS logo

Vote Leave have been threatened with legal action for using the NHS logo on leaflets about the NHS.

The leaflets argue that when we leave the EU, the money we save can be used on services like the NHS. The Department of Health doesn't think that a leaflet about the NHS should use the NHS logo but doesn't seem to explain why. It's not like the NHS is a profit-making organisation or one that needs to protect a reputation to ensure it doesn't lose customers. Using the NHS logo in a leaflet about the NHS is clearly fair use and the Department of Health's legal threats are just part of the British government's campaign to try and undermine the leave campaign.

We're backing GO

The EU referendum is a once in a lifetime opportunity to free ourselves from the undemocratic, unproductive, corrupt EU and to ensure that we have the best possible chance of getting the right result for the country we need the myriad leave campaigns to work together.

We are therefore backing the Grassroots Out leave campaign in its bid to be given official designation by the Electoral Commission and urging all leave campaigners to join GO and work together to secure the result we all want.

It is increasingly apparent that Vote Leave is the group of choice for politicians whilst Leave.EU is presenting a more tabloid campaign designed to appeal to the man on the street. There's nothing wrong with tailoring those campaigns to a particular audience but they need to work together rather than pulling in opposite directions or playing games of one upmanship.

So we are calling on Vote Leave and Leave.EU to put their differences aside and work together constructively under the GO umbrella alongside the the likes of Business for Britain, Better Off Out and the Freedom Association who have already joined forces under the GO banner.

BSE remainers try to poach economists from Vote Leave campaign

The mad cows at BSE have emailed members of the Economists for Britain group, which is backing the Vote Leave campaign, to ask them if they are "comfortable being associated" with the campaign when Economists for Britain has previously said that it wants fundamental changes to our membership of the EU.

From: Will Cousins
Sent: 06 January 2016
To:
Subject: Economists for Britain

Dear Professor xxxxxx

My name is Will Cousins, and I work in the press office of Britain Stronger In Europe, the main cross-party organisation campaigning to keep Britain in the EU in the forthcoming referendum. I emailed you shortly before Christmas.

You are listed as a supporter of Economists for Britain, part of the Vote Leave campaign which wants Britain to come out of the EU.

I wondered if you were comfortable being associated with that campaign? Economists for Britain describes itself as giving “a voice to Britain’s economists who want to see fundamental changes made to the terms of our EU membership.” If it is your view that the EU requires fundamental change but that the answer is not for Britain to leave, do please get in touch.

Yours sincerely,

Will Cousins

Press Officer, Britain Stronger in Europe

Clearly Economists for Britain are clever enough not to be duped by Cameron's false promises and know that fundamental changes to our member of the EU are never going to happen. It's not as if there aren't some big clues such as every EU leader telling Cameron the answer is no or there being no legal basis for the return of powers from the EU thanks to the ratchet clauses in the Lisbon Treaty.

Any economist that thinks that remaining shackled to the world's fastest-shrinking economic bloc and one of the most over-regulated protectionist political unions needs to reconsider their career choice.

UK contributions to the EU top £503bn since 1976

Research by the Vote Leave campaign has found that the UK has paid £503,000,000,000 in membership fees to the EU since 1976.

The UK's rapidly increasing EU budget contributions would have paid England's NHS cancer budget 56 times and is one and a half times the £340bn that the United Nations has spent worldwide in the 70 years of its existence.