BRITISH HIGH Court judges yesterday ordered that a former Labour immigration minister should lose his House of Commons seat because he made false statements about an opponent during this year’s general election when he alleged that a Liberal Democrat supported Muslim extremists. It is the first such ruling since an Irish MP lost his seat in 1911.
Oldham and Saddleworth MP Phil Woolas, fearful that he was about to lose in the May vote, had deliberately targeted white voters concerned about immigration: “If we don’t get the white folk angry he’s [Woolas] gone,” one campaign e-mail, revealed later, declared.
Mr Woolas beat Liberal Democrat candidate Elwyn Watkins by just 103 votes after claiming that Mr Watkins had wooed extremist-supporting Muslims, and that Mr Watkins had refused to condemn those who had threatened him after he had served as immigration minister under prime minister Gordon Brown from 2008.
Ordering a rerun in Oldham, and barring Mr Woolas from standing for election to the commons for three years, the two High Court judges ruled that Mr Woolas’s statements were untrue and that he “had no reasonable grounds for believing them to be true, and did not believe them to be true”.
Warning that the judgment would “chill political speech”, Mr Woolas’s solicitor, Gerald Shamash, said they will seek a judicial review.
However, Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow is to rule on Monday on whether Mr Woolas can sit in the commons while the challenge is heard.
Former Labour lord chancellor Lord Falconer warned of a flood of election challenges: “ means the courts are prepared to let people use them.”
The last MP to lose a seat, after a petition was taken to Dublin High Court under 1880s legislation, was the Irish Parliamentary Party’s Richard Hazleton. He won a bitter battle in North Louth in December 1910 against Tim Healy – who was later to be the first British-appointed governor general of the Free State.
Depriving Hazleton of his North Louth seat, the judges found that his agents had been “guilty of corrupt practices” for paying people to vote, for making false allegations against Mr Healy and for intimidating voters.
However, Hazleton did not lose his seat in the House of Commons because he also happened to be an MP for a Galway constituency, from which he resigned in 1914.
The petitions legislation used to remove him from Louth is no longer in force in the Republic, since such matters are now governed by electoral acts passed in 1992 and 1997.
Candidates can face sanction for making false statements to the Standards in Public Office Commission, though there is nothing mentioned about making false statements about other candidates.