UKIP Uncovered

UKIP Uncovered
What motivates the leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party?

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Another Clark Kangaroo Court

We have received a copy of a recent e-mail regarding a disciplinary hearing to have been undertaken yesterday against Damian Hockney. This e-mail, from Hockney to Clark and copied to all UKIP's NEC members, has received widespread circulation on other internet fora so we believe it beneficial to post here as illustration of the outrageous practises now the norm within UKIP (as we have been stating for many months).

Quote
Dear Derek

Your e-mail and the letter I received from you this morning is the first indication I have had of your intention to stage a discipline hearing on 24th January 2004 (apart of course from Greg Lance Watkins' e-mail of last Saturday which told me the hearing date and led me to write to you). If your letter of 4th December enclosing a copy of the complaint did not reach me until 15th December as you claim (when in any event I was out of the country), I clearly could not have seen the papers for the Croucher case before we all attended the December NEC on 8th December - I have inadvertently described this meeting as being on the 4th December in my
earlier e-mail to you.

You claimed at this 8th December meeting that the Discipline Panel had all seen the papers and had time to make a judgment that I should be suspended from the NEC. Indeed, even with my foreknowledge of the case from Mark Croucher himself, and through receiving copies of some of the papers on the Monday morning just before the December NEC, I could not have had time to have read through and examine the case and prepared any form of rebuttal.

The case itself claims to be about 7.16 of the Party Constitution related to "public opposition to measures duly approved" and is simply a welter of incomplete e-mail correspondence, together with circumstantial evidence and untrue statements. The complainant encloses, as evidence of public dissemination, documents clearly identified as being sent by me only to party members and officials.

The office move was not duly approved, as was evidenced by the need for another vote in December. Without the NEC minutes before them, how could the Discipline Panel make a decision as to what was or was not duly approved? On the matter of the Party Treasurer, for example, my lawyers were instructed in September to overturn what you no doubt would describe as "duly approved" NEC policy, and branch chairmen became involved in resolving the law-breaking which that would have led to. Anyone who would seriously contemplate disallowing an NEC member through the discipline process from speaking to branch chairmen and candidates about leadership law-breaking, on a pretext that his comments represented "public opposition", would stand accused of a very serious form of corrupt practice.

You have provided no evidence in the documentation supplied of "public opposition", so there is no case until and unless you supply it.

You persuaded four unnamed members of the Discipline Panel to agree a suspension because it suited you, not because of any case. They clearly did not have time to analyse the matter or consider more than your hurried request to suspend me. If they did, they clearly had the paperwork well in advance of the date on which you mailed it to me.

If you are to be honest, all these cases are based on the fact that what I have said, the questions I am asking - initially privately just to the NEC, latterly including branch chairmen and candidates as well - have caused problems of accountability for the MEPs and the party leadership and have exposed some seriously questionable practices by them, some of which we know to be illegal.

I have specified before the breaking of the law over the Data Protection Act and the attempt to discipline me for stopping the MEPs from continuing to break the law.

It seems extraordinary that on your own admission you received a complaint and papers dated by Mark Croucher on 3rd December, turned them round to me on 4th December and by 8th December achieved agreement with the Discipline Panel on suspension, having (as you claimed at the 8th December NEC) achieved verbal legal advice that you could do this and supplied it to them to allow you to take this extraordinary and unprecedented step. It was an intervention by NEC member Nikki Sinclaire to demand actual written legal advice to confirm the claimed verbal advice which stopped you from achieving this suspension.

Can I please ask what steps you have taken under the Discipline rules to resolve the issue/dispute between the date you received the complaint (presumably 4th December 2003) and the date you sent it on to me (4th December 2003 according to you)? The Chairman and Panel simply could not have carried out their constitutional obligations.

For the fourth time of asking, can I please also have the name and address of the lawyer who you claim gave you verbal advice that allowed you to persuade the discipline committee to recommend suspension, and an outline of that advice? Your previous repeated failure to provide your claimed legal advice can lead to only one real conclusion.

And once again can you also please let me have the names of the Discipline Panel members who you persuaded to agree an illegal suspension?

I have asked all these questions before and have no record of any reply.

Additionally I cannot accept your own personal involvement in any discipline case involving myself, as you simply have to look back at the correspondence between us to appreciate my view that you are biased and acting on the orders of the employers of the complainant. I have made this clear to you before in your attempts to stage other discipline hearings. On previous attempts to bring discipline proceedings, all of which have either collapsed or been withdrawn, you have attempted to speed through a process against the rules, or attempted to bring cases when I was specifically out of the country. The very act of you agreeing cases, arranging them to be heard and attempting to speed them through the process is seriously questionable when these cases subsequently fell before any hearing. You have failed at almost all times to respond to my letters. Indeed you tried to arrange this hearing for 5th January 2004 when you knew me to be out of the country.

Indeed I understand you yourself took advice in October which indicated you should not handle my cases, which is why Craig Mackinlay and Gregg Beaman were appointed to chair all the cases that the leadership or their employees wanted to bring in the run-up to the European Elections. Now that they realise that these NEC members will probably not deliver what they want, I understand that you have been pressed to re-involve yourself, having been persuaded that I will not carry out my threat of legal action.

You must understand Derek that I always regard legal action as very much the last resort, but that I cannot carry on with your repeated attacks upon my reputation and standing in the party, misinforming the Discipline Panel, with the MEPs employees attacking me with impunity over the internet while you allow publicly aired discipline cases based upon fraudulent assumptions and flimsy evidence to do the rounds in the party.

The MEPs have a track record of bringing intimidating and frivolous complaints against me, initially because I challenged their attempts to remove "Leave the EU" from all our party policy documents. You may remember that their first attempt to discipline me was when they attempted to alter the new enquiry form to remove "Leave the EU" from it and I successfully opposed this serious censorship of the leaflet. You have not supervised these cases properly or fittingly. You have made clear that your role is to "do their bidding" and that is what you are doing. Their frivolous and intimidatory complaints have been withdrawn in circumstances which were very
embarrassing for the party. And public statements on the internet attacking myself by another MEP employee/consultant David Samuel Camps remain unpunished and unremarked.

It is clear that the haste over this was due to the plan to suspend me from the NEC and stop me from standing as a candidate for the NEC elections, which is clearly corrupt and is well understood by members of the NEC. You failed to achieve this due to the need to get the written advice to back up the claimed verbal advice, but this is followed by a clear statement in the
9th January Torbay NEC minutes that "Damian Hockney would not be allowed to take up his place on the NEC if the Disciplinary Hearing finds against him", thus indicating clearly the intention. Having been thwarted in December, this was a clear statement that the intended aim could still be achieved.

I have asked again and again for answers to these questions below, which I have copied to the NEC. The only reply I have received is from Mike Nattrass in capital letters telling me to stop asking questions. Your only reply has been to say that you have not heard from me, which is surreal.

I sent you an e-mail asking these questions, and you sent me one back saying that you haven't heard from me.

I do not have a copy of any letter or e-mail from you claiming a 24th January 2004 date - I was on my way back to England on the weekend you mention you sent it. Can you please confirm whether you sent this letter to me by post and whether you sent it recorded delivery - you sent the initial notification by recorded delivery as well as other letters to me on discipline matters by recorded delivery. This one giving a hearing date was clearly important so I need to see proof of postage.

I cannot in any event make a Saturday meeting which you have now informed me of following my e-mail to you about Greg Lance-Watkins remarks giving dates of my discipline hearings.

I am prepared to attend a fair discipline hearing, of which I have been given proper notification, but this does not qualify as a fair hearing. I have also made clear to you that my lawyer needs to be at the hearing.

I need you to confirm that you will not be involved in any future hearing, that those you persuaded to break the rules of the party or act unconstitutionally by recommending my suspension are not involved in the hearing, and that you immediately cease the process of using party/MEP employees to hear such cases. It seems extraordinary that you can secretly use party employees to hear cases brought by MEPs through their employees, having failed already with several frivolous cases of their own. It is quite simply corrupt.

Should you carry on with your intention of staging this clearly fraudulent discipline hearing, then I give you my assurance that I shall take legal action against you personally and against those whose actions have been clearly intended to damage my reputation and my chances of election to the NEC, and to the Greater London Assembly where I am the lead candidate and need only 5.1 per cent of the vote to be elected.

I understand that this matter was commented upon at length outside of the NEC in Torbay and I have received e-mails from two people present who state that it was made clear I must be stopped at all costs from being elected in London on 10th June 2004. Indeed, the leadership contact Greg Lance-Watkins has made this quite clear himself in two recent e-mails.

In any event, if you go ahead with this hearing and fail to confirm to me that you have placed the members of the Discipline Panel on notice of the seriousness of this, my lawyers will be writing to them. In October you failed to inform them when I made clear to you that the alleged party indemnity to discipline panel members is invalid, but on that occasion the proposed proceedings eventually fell by the wayside anyway.

I understand from a number of sources and indeed from Greg Lance-Watkins that you have been told by the leadership not to worry about me taking legal action as it is 'all talk'. I give you my assurance that I will take action and I would strongly advise you not to continue along this path.

I need you to confirm to me that this hearing will not take place on Saturday and that appropriate arrangements will be made with regard to this matter.

Damian Hockney

Unquote

Newer readers of this blog may be unaware that its author Martin Cole was treated in a similar fashion over his appeal against disqualification as an MEP candidate. Being advised by Party Employee Malcolm Wood, simply that it had been disallowed and requests for information as to the names of the supposed six members of the panel refused. See our posting of 27th May 2003. (See also the links on our side bar for much more on the outrageous practises of Derek Clark's disciplinary committee).

We will post further on this hearing as soon as more information is received.

posted by Martin |8:50 AM