The leader of a local group campaigning for residents to vote against staying in the European Union has hit out at the government’s plan to distribute pro-EU membership leaflets across the country.
The 16-page leaflets will be sent to 27 million UK homes from next week using over £9m of public money.
Helen Hims, who is leading the local ‘Sedgemoor Leave.EU’ group and was Burnham’s UKIP parliamentary candidate last year, has spoken out about the news.
She said: “This is a case of how to ‘rig a referendum’ – give one side £9.3 million more resources than the other!”
“In 1975, Harold Wilson and his government issued a taxpayer-funded leaflet to every household in the UK urging them to vote to stay in the ‘Common Market’.”
“The ‘Yes’ campaign spent ten times the resources of the ‘No’ campaign and won two thirds of the vote. It was a majority obtained by profligacy and fraud. Fast forward 41 years and despite early promises by ministers not to do so, exactly the same stunt is being played out again by the British establishment.”
“The government has just spent £9.3 million issuing a taxpayer-funded leaflet to every household in the UK urging them to stay in the European Union. The ‘Remain’ campaign is yet again allowed to spend many times more than the ‘Leave’ campaign in their desperate attempt to load the dice against Brexit.”
“The production and mass-distribution of this biased and inaccurate leaflet only serves to prove that the arguments for staying in this expansionist and failing EU federal bloc are so weak, that only by skewing the playing field and throwing the full weight of the establishment behind it, do they feel capable of success.”
Prime Minister David Cameron has defended the pro-EU membership leaflet amid criticism that £9m of public money is being spent on “one-sided propaganda”. He said the government was “not neutral” in the referendum and the cost was “money well spent”.
Pictured: South West MEP Dr Julia Reid, left, and Leave EU’s Helen Hims
