eurealist.co.uk

Last year the government held the first of a series of planned referendums on elected regional assemblies, in the area they considered the easiest target, the North East. They had hopped that getting a yes vote in one area would create a domino effect and eventually all the EU designated English regions would have their own mini parliaments dealing directly with Brussels and eventually bypassing Westminster. Thus they had planned the compleate break up of Britain as an effective political unit.

Unfortunately for them, but good for Britain, they had not counted on the opposition to these plans by a certain Neil Herron, who began to campaign vigorously against the NE elected assembly. Mr Herron facing the combined weight of the British government most of the media and Brussels backed local opposition, built up a widely supported non political affiliated movement against the EU plans. As the time grew near for the referendum a recently created Conservative backed No campaign was unaccountably selected by the governments Electorial Commision as the main opposition in the area sidelining the already existing No Campaign. And also putting a trump card into the yes campaign hands and allowing them to portray the no campaign as a conservative big business southern oriented organisation.

In the event the ground work done by Mr Herron and his team held firm and the government and the EU lost the referendum, by the biggest margin ever recorded. Completely demolishing any hope of an elected assembly, not only in the North East, but by forcing the government to shelve further planed referendums, in the rest of England. Any normally democrat would assume that this was the end of regionalisation in England, and would expect the government to accept its defeat. Not the case at all the government intent on the break of England have continued to keep the embryo regional parliaments in place, in the hope that they will eventually be able to force through their plans.

Again Mr Herron steps up to the plate as explained by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph today:

Prescott’s regional scheme is well and truly hoist on its own petard
An extraordinary impasse has arisen in the North-East, following the referendum last November in which voters threw out John Prescott’s plan for an elected regional assembly by an overwhelming margin of four-to-one. Last week the unelected North-East Assembly, made up of councillors and representatives of local bodies, announced that it was to set itself up as a limited company under a new name. The reason publicly given for this by the Assembly’s chairman, Alex Watson, was that they wished “to engage with the public better than we have done”.
What Mr Watson did not reveal was the real reason for this new policy. It is now more than a year since Neil Herron, the leader of the campaign against an elected North-East Assembly, uncovered the embarrassing fact that, since the unelected assembly was an unincorporated body, its members were personally responsible for all its financial obligations, including the contracts and pension rights of its employees. Between them they had thus unwittingly taken on liabilities amounting to millions of pounds.
Initially the assembly tried to deny this, but Mr Herron’s point was subsequently confirmed by lawyers, including those for North Tyneside council. Since this unfortunate fact came to light, the assembly has been seeking to set itself up as a limited company, in the hope of relieving its members of this burden of personal liability. But when they tried to set up the North-East Assembly as a company, they found that Mr Herron had got there first. He had already registered that name.
Worse was to come, because Mr Herron then pointed out that, under the 1985 Companies Act, for them to set up such a company would not absolve them of their existing obligations. And then Mr Herron produced his trump card. Since the councillors who were members had voted for their councils to provide the assembly with funds, they were in breach of the 1972 Local Government Act, because they had voted to give public money to a body in which they themselves had a financial interest.
So it appears that the councillors on the North-East Assembly have not only taken on a personal liability from which it is impossible for them to extricate themselves, but Mr Herron is now asking the police to investigate evidence that they also have been acting in clear breach of the law. Since it appears that similar breaches of the law have taken place in other English regions, he is also making available a set of searching questions (via neara@btconnect.com) for voters to put to their own councils.

When Mr Prescott sought to impose by stealth his scheme for elected regional governments, he could hardly have foreseen the tangled web in which it would end up being ensnared.