contribution by Stephen Newton

You may easily have missed it, but in July the trustees of the Atlantic Bridge, a charity founded by defence secretary Liam Fox to promote closer ties between senior Conservatives and their US allies, agreed with the Charity Commission that they would cease all their current activities immediately.

This was a serious blow to those who would import US style neo-Conservatism to Britain and not just because the charity will no longer be able to pay for Fox and co to travel the US.

Yet while the effective closure of the Atlantic Bridge was a significant success in itself, questions remained over the fate of the charity’s assets.

The Atlantic Bridge worked in close partnership with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is best known for its work lobbying on behalf of the tobacco industry, fighting Obama’s healthcare reforms and promoting climate change scepticism.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act confirmed that while the trustees had agreed that none of their expenditure was charitable, the commission had chosen not to recover any misspent money. The commission has so far refused to explain its decision.

Later this week the commission and the trustees of the Atlantic Bridge are expected to respond to a proposed judicial review of the Charity Commission’s actions.

The aim of this action is force the commission to recover money it has found to have been misspent and to investigate other, even more serious acquisitions, that it has so far ignored.

I believe there are parallels with the ongoing newspaper phone hacking scandal in that both are examples of authorities refusing to investigate.

So it is perhaps not such a great coincidence that for this judicial review I am represented by Mark Lewis, a solicitor who also represents many victims of that scandal.

Fox has declared trips to trips to the USA, but William Hague has refused to declare an Atlantic Bridge sponsored ‘celebration’ of one of his books in New York.

I hope the Charity Commission, with the cooperation of the trustees, will be able to suggest a solution that will lead to the recovery the misapplied assets of the Atlantic Bridge, and see this money spent on work that really does promote the special relationship between the US and Britain.

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