National Coverage as stakes get higher

Sunday Telegraph
Christopher Booker's Notebook
(Filed: 26/09/2004)

Prescott gets assembly writ
Still largely ignored by the media, the soap opera of the referendum campaign on John Prescott's plans to set up an elected regional assembly for the North East continues.

On Friday, lawyers for Neil Herron's "North East No" campaign served a High Court writ on Mr Prescott, to force him to correct a leaflet sent to to North East voters that claims that elections to the new assembly will only be by proportional representation. His own Regional Assemblies Bill makes clear that two-thirds of assembly members will be elected on a "first past the post" system.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has already admitted another inaccuracy in the leaflet, understating the cost of reorganising local government in Co Durham. It proposes to remedy this by sending out a corrected leaflet, but only to 200,000 voters in Durham; not to the region's other 1.7 million voters, who are thus being invited to vote on what is admitted to be false information.

The Electoral Commission has also been served an injunction. It failed to check the ODPM's misleading leaflet, and was last week defending its decision to give £100,000 of taxpayers' money to a rival "No" campaign, Nesno (North East Says No), run by the Tories - a party so weak in the North East that it no longer has a anyone on Newcastle council. Since one of Nesno's objections to any assembly is that it will not be given enough powers, it has been dubbed the "Yesno campaign".

The "Yes" campaign was last week boasting of a poll, commissioned by itself, showing a 2:1 majority in favour of an elected assembly; whereas an internet poll run by The Sunderland Echo was showing 94 per cent against.

Confronted by such confusion, it seems the "Don't know campaign'' is leading by quite a margin.