A group of pro-Brexit Tory MPs led by Jacob Rees-Mogg were spoon-fed questions intended to undermine their own government. The European Research Group encouraged its members to wrong-foot the prime minister and senior ministers on everything from control of migration to trade deals and EU laws, according to a cache of private documents obtained by openDemocracy.
The questions, usually accompanied by “superficial” research, were expected to be deployed against the Tory government. Details of the ERG’s inner workings were revealed after openDemocracy fought a successful legal battle with the spending watchdog, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
The European Research Group received hundreds of thousands of pounds in taxpayers’ money over the last four years. The ERG’s work, claimed as part of MPs’ pooled resources, is supposed to be research that is politically neutral, essentially not for party political purposes.
