Verdict on Adeela Attack - Labour Guilty

Whatever your views on the

Kerry Out campaign

, be they supportive or dubious, no one can argue that Labour aren't rattled by it. As part of a coordinated campaign day for Kerry McCarthy, some seriously dubious allegations have been plastered across the pages of the Mirror and the internet.

Firstly the Mirror was tipped off by Labour HQ's opposition research bods, Labour can't afford much but they sure as hell are bringing in the dark artists. Labour bloggers and twitter users have confirmed to TB that they were tipped off by Victoria Street and asked to heavily promote the story.

Cough

. The whole day will then end in a phonebanking session for Kerry run directly out of Labour's Victoria Street HQ.

The Mirror piece is an extremely lazy piece of journalism. It makes a series of swathing allegations backed up by absolutely no evidence. Blogger MPTP goes into some legal detail

here

:

You would think that any journalist, let alone one from a left-wing, Labour-partisan newspaper, would want to include in information about the circumstances in which these CCJs were incurred. It also seems strange not to approach the claimants for comment – and there is no indication in the story that the Mirror did. Why wouldn’t you ask the claimant why the debt is “outstanding”?


I suspect I know why.


The central register of country court judgements for England and Wales is maintained by the Registry Trust, a not for profit company set up in the early 1980s. Anyone can search the register, for a small fee, and the credit industry buys the data in bulk.


One of the interesting things about the register is what it doesn’t contain: to whom a CCJ debt is owed, or the circumstances in which it was incurred. A register entry for a CCJ consists of the amount, the court which made the judgement, the case number, and the date of the judgement.


So…the Mirror’s story contains no more information than could be found in a Registry Trust search against Adeela Shafi, and lacks the information which is not present in the CCJ register? The conclusion I draw is that the only basis for the Mirror story is a search of the CCJ register.


If that is correct, then the terms in which the story is written may yet prove problematic for the Mirror. It is specifically said that


…£324,272 is outstanding – despite her being ordered to repay it nearly three years ago in July 2007 – five months before she became a prospective Tory MP.


This goes well beyond the contents of a Registry Trust search result. The Register does hold a status for each CCJ, either “satisfied” or “unsatisfied”, but unsatisfied is not the same as unpaid.


Unsatisfied indicates that Registry Trust has never been notified of payment, whereas satisfied means that the debt was paid more than a month after the judgement. If a debt is paid within one month of judgement (or the judgement is set aside), the CCJ is removed from the register altogether, and there would be no trace of it in any subsequent search.


So here’s the problem – at this point there’s no evidence that Adeela Shafi owes a penny, but there’s a very clear implication from the Mirror that she owes £324,272. I’ve set out above why I think all the Mirror has is a CCJ register search – which can’t support that implication. You can defame by implication, of course, and an implication that someone has failed to pay a substantial amount despite a judgement is plainly defamatory.


Has the Mirror exposed itself to a defamation suit here? It will turn on whether there is some truth in the implication, and so far there has been no comment from either Shafi or the Conservative Party. 

On a related note, why didn’t the Mirror bother to access the court records? From these they could have obtained the names of the claimants in these cases, and details of the circumstances. That would have nicely padded out the story – frankly, have turned it into something worth printing.

A damning indictment on a shoddy piece of attack from Labour. If it was a real story it would have appeared somewhere else, anywhere else even.

Now the KerryOut campaign has been an interesting experiment in techniques of online fund-raising and raising awareness nationally of interesting local fights. It will liven up again as soon as the election is called and the streets will be pounded. The fact that Labour have resorted to trying such a blatant hatchet job on Kerry's opponent shows just how low they are willing to stoop.

P.S. It's really obvious when you try to coordinate attacks quite so unsubtly. Why not just come out and say it? Why is an MP hiding behind kids online half her age to do her dirty work? Labour HQ, on behalf of Kerry McCarthy and her team are directly behind these unsourced and unproven slurs on her opponents character. And she doesn't even have the guts to put her name to it. Another reason for the #KerryOut list eh?