Vote Leave campaign

In the wake of the EU referendum, the Vote Leave campaign has wiped its homepage.

Visitors to the site are now greeted by the above image. The only active links are to the campaign's Privacy Policy and contact details.


While this may simply be the campaign closing down in the wake of its victory, this removes all clear record of speeches, editorials, statistics, and information the Leave campaign used on the run up to the referendum on membership of the European Union on June 23.

Guardian reporter Alice Ross pointed out the wipe on Twitter this morning. However, content currently appears to still be hosted on the site, but with no direct access. Ross points out that users knowing a URL - such as Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, and Gisela Stuart's June 16 letter referencing Turkey's potential accession into the European Union - can still find the material.

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In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. OK, here's what's happened. They've wiped the *homepage* - speeches etc are still there, but not accessible from https://t.co/l9S2imUuyF — Alice Ross (@aliceross_) June 27, 2016

Anthony Dhanendran, digital product lead for BBC Top Gear, also pointed out that the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has cached versions of the Vote Leave site, seemingly preserving all claims made to voters on the run-up to the vote.


Previously, visitors to the voteleavetakecontrol.org homepage would find links to claims made during the campaign, as seen in the archived screen below.

Vote Leave campaign

The removal of all links to content is potentially problematic as the Vote Leave campaign has come under fire for misleading voters. Throughout the referendum campaign, it maintained claims such as £350m is sent to the EU each week, and suggested it could instead be spent on the NHS. However, this figure was debunked as inaccurate by the Office of National Statistics.

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Senior Leave politicians such as Iain Duncan Smith have, in the days since the referendum, denied the money was promised to the NHS, despite other figures in the campaign saying "the Government should use some of the billions saved from leaving the EU to give at least a £100 million per week cash transfusion to the NHS".

The £350m per week claim - or £50m per day in some promotional material - was used on Vote Leave campaign materials up to the day of the referendum itself.

While the homepage has been scrubbed of links to the content, Vote Leave's YouTube channel still - at the time of writing - has the full library of videos used during the campaign.


The link to the Vote Leave website is still currently linked to on the campaign's Twitter page, as seen below.

Vote Leave campaign

WIRED has contacted Vote Leave for comment and will update this story accordingly.