Fraud is a criminal offence, enacted by Labour in 2006. This Act of parliament came at the tail end of a lengthy Law Commission inquiry into the various theft offences where deception was a component, and, like all criminal offences, it has a high burden of proof, requiring that the offence is shown beyond reasonable doubt.
There are various guises of fraud currently. The most common is ‘fraud by false representation’, where the defendant makes a false representation dishonestly, knowing that the representation was or might be untrue or misleading with an intent to make a gain for himself or another, to cause loss to another or to expose another to risk of loss.
Grant Shapps has not committed any fraud. He has however been alleged to have used a technique to amass a large number of followers very quickly. This is akin to ‘shilling’ in marketing, where for example an author on Amazon might request sympathetic book reviews from his friends to give the impression of enhanced endorsement. You can see how such a technique would be useful for a politician, perhaps seeking to enhance his prestige in the pecking order, for example in bidding for a position in the Cabinet.
I would say that ‘Lord Credo’ is another social media phenomenon, except that Grant Shapps is a MP in real life, strictly speaking. Lord Credo amassed likewise a huge number of followers. It could be argued that Lord Credo tried to represent himself as a political comms expert, but Lord Credo would argue that this was clearly a parody account with a picture of Malcolm Tucker. So what’s the harm in it? Put another way, did it actually satisfy a ‘fraud offence’? There have been rumblings that people were taken in by this, but Lord Credo needs to have had pecuniary advantage from these weird activities, beyond reasonable doubt, for any fraud by false representation to be satisfied. In the absence of evidence about this, no fraud offence can succeed.
Bankers fiddling the LIBOR rate may be better candidates for satisfying an offence of fraud. It could be argued that they have made a false representation entirely deceptively about the LIBOR rate, exposing the public to a loss, or exposing them to a gain. Proving all elements of this offence is of course notoriously difficult. Whether or not Labour ‘underregulated’ or not, the Coalition had not been in a hurry to shore up the financial services legislation before this erupted, and the Serious Fraud Office have had problems in making a speedy charge.
Finally, disabled citizens clearly much easier targets for this ruthless Government who care little for facts. The rate of actual ‘benefit fraud’ is actually exceptionally low. The people who have the wrong level of benefit is an entirely different figure to that perception, perpetuated by the Government, that a significant number is fraudulently claiming ‘benefit’. Disabled citizens, like me, need their benefit for mobility and living; many of us cannot use public transport because public transport (for example) in London is completely inaccessible, and the money is needed to meet basic living requirements. It is not ‘benefit’ in the sense we are financially profiting – we just need the money to survive, and it does not constitute any employment support. The media have obviously run with this fraud story, and do not seem bothered about pursuing the potentially real criminal charges of a minority of bankers. We are a nation obsessed by alleged fraud, but unfortunately we have all the wrong priorities.
