THE High Court ruling that Michael Gove’s Cabinet Office broke the law when it handed public money to friends of Dominic Cummings “will certainly not be the last”, the SNP have warned.
Kirsten Oswald MP, the SNP’s depute leader at Westminster, said the High Court judgment showed that the Tory government in London is “driven by its own interests”, In doing so she echoed lawyer Jolyon Maugham, whose Good Law Project brought the case against the UK Government.
Following his campaign’s High Court victory, Maugham said it was clear that this “is not government for the public good – it is government for the good of friends of the Conservative Party”.
READ MORE: UK Government broke the law by handing Covid contract to Dominic Cummings's chums
Justice O’Farrell made a ruling in favour of the Good Law Project and said there had been a “failure to consider any other research agency” than Public First, which is owned by good friends of Cummings, the former chief advisor to the Prime Minister.
She said that the handing of half a million pounds of taxpayer money to Cummings’s friends’ firm “gave rise to apparent bias and was unlawful”.
The ruling follows a separate one from the High Court in February which found that Health Secretary Matt Hancock (below) had broken the law by failing to reveal details of contracts his department had signed during the Covid pandemic.
Yet another Tory minister, Priti Patel, was found by a High Court judge to have presided over illegal activity when her Home Office housed asylum seekers in accommodation which a judge ruled made a Covid outbreak “virtually inevitable”.
READ MORE: Priti Patel told to resign for policy that led to 'inevitable' Covid outbreak
Commenting on the High Court’s latest ruling on Gove’s Cabinet Office, the SNP’s Oswald said the UK Government “cannot attempt to brush this under the already stuffed carpet”.
She called for Boris Johnson to come before Parliament to “set the record straight” over the Government’s law-breaking.
Oswald (below) said: "The Tory government's handling of multi-billion-pound Covid contracts has been riddled with a catalogue of cronyism.
"The High Court ruling that the Tory government acted unlawfully when awarding lucrative contracts to friends and contacts is utterly damning.
"This corrupt Tory government is stumbling from one cronyism row to the next, with this ruling just the latest in a long list of examples.
“These latest developments of cronyism will certainly not be the last, but they make clear that this Tory government is driven by its own interests. Only with independence can we put Scotland’s recovery in Scotland’s hands – not Boris Johnson’s.”
READ MORE: Top lawyer in Tory cronyism case criticises BBC after 'curious' interview
A Cabinet Office spokesperson commenting on the ruling said: “The judgment makes clear that there was no suggestion of actual bias and that the decision to award the contract was not due to any personal or professional connections.”
Maugham said this statement was “misleading” as the court “made no finding, in fact, about whether there was actual bias”.
He added: “The public law test is apparent bias. So what we had to show, and we did show, was that a reasonable observer would think there was a likelihood that the contract went to Public First because of favouritism.”
A spokesperson for Public First said they were “deeply proud” of their work, echoed the Cabinet Office’s statement that the was no finding of “actual bias”, and said: “The judge made no criticism whatsoever of Public First anywhere in the judgment.”
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