Tories Fund ‘Fake News’ Think Tank to Smear Corbyn

Mike this morning also put up a very importance piece about how Tweezer’s party has also been seeking to undermine British democracy by providing 2.25 million pounds to a think tank, the Institute of Statecraft, to spread smears against Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party, and individual Labour politicos.

The Institute is based in an old mill in Fife, and runs a programme, the Integrity Initiative, to counter Russian propaganda. This is supposed to be done through a collection of friendly journos and ‘influencers’ throughout Europe, who will go online and attack Russian propaganda on the Net. Instead, it appears that the think tank has been using the money given it by the Foreign Office to smear Corbyn as an instrument of Moscow on Twitter. One Tweet included an extract from a newspaper article denouncing Corbyn as a ‘useful idiot’, a phrase Lenin used to describe sympathetic individuals in the West, who could be manipulated by the Bolsheviks. The Tweet then said

His open visceral anti-Westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.

Another Tweet ran

It’s time for the Corbyn left to confront its Putin problem.’ A further message refers to an ‘alleged British Corbyn supporter’ who ‘wants to vote for Putin.

Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, stated it was outrageous and said that one of the cardinal rules of British politics was that government funds should not be used for party purposes. She made the point that the smears weren’t outside the government’s control, as it said in its funding agreement with the company that the money would be used in party to expand the Integrity Initiative as well as Twitter and social media accounts. She concluded

So the Government must now answer the following questions: Why did the Foreign Office allow public money to be spent on attempting to discredit Her Majesty’s Opposition? Did they know this was happening? If not, why not? And if they did, how on earth can they justify it?

According to RT, the revelations follow the leak of classified documents to the Sunday Mail.

Chris Williamson commented

What the hell is going on? I tabled a parliamentary question recently and discovered the Foreign Office has given 2 million of public money to a shady organization that’s indulging in black propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party.

Another Labour MP, Jon Trickett, said

If it is true that there is a deep state, taxpayer funded operation against our party it is totally unacceptable and explanation and an enquiry must be conducted immediately.

RT reported that the Foreign Office has now launched an investigation stating that any involvement in domestic politics would be condemned. Alan Duncan, the minister of state for Europe and the Americas, said

I don’t know the facts, but if there is any kind of organization for which we are paying, which is involved in domestic politics in that way, I would totally condemn it.

Here’s RT’s report on the scandal.

Mike in his article about the think tank and its smears also quotes Duncan, who said that

The Institute for Statecraft is an independent, Scottish, charitable body whose work seeks to improve governance and enhance national security. They launched the Integrity Initiative in 2015 to defend democracy against disinformation.

In financial year 2017/18, the FCO funded the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative £296,500. This financial year, the FCO is funding a further £1,961,000. Both have been funded through grant agreements.

Mike comments that the statement that Institute for Statecraft was defending democracy was simply untrue, as they should not be posting disinformation on social media. And nobody else should be doing so either.

He also reminded us that less than a year ago, Gollum, I mean, Tweezer, had announced that she was launching a rapid reaction force based in the cabinet office to rebut fake news. Mike had said then that

This is not an attempt to ensure a ‘fact-based public debate’. It is a bid to hijack the news and turn it into Tory propaganda.

He adds in his article that he was right. It’s just that the government has outsourced its propaganda.

Mike’s article also gives the responses of a number of Labour supporters and MPs condemning the Institute’s smears. One of them, Aaron Bastani, states that if the Institute has a list of journos and influencers smearing the leader of the opposition, then it has to be made public immediately. And Dan Carden MP remarked on how, with the exception of the Scottish Daily Record and the Sunday Mail, this was being ignored by the mainstream media. He stated that these were strange times, but we still expected democracy to be defended.

Mike replies

Yes, we should expect democracy to be defended.

Just not by right-wingers like those running the BBC and most of the print news media – or by our democratically-elected government.

Yet this is the government that wants to push us all through Brexit, in the name of democracy.

It doesn’t stack up. We need an election to get the Tories out of office, and then a police investigation to find out who authorised the Foreign Office to fund this offence.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/12/10/to-blazes-with-brexit-its-being-handled-by-a-government-that-used-public-money-to-undermine-the-opposition/

I wondered if the reason the lamestream media have so far ignored the story is because so many of those newspapers and organisations might have been involved in it. Several journos have been named as the conduits for government propaganda in the press. One of these was Andrew Neil, when he was the editor of the Sunday Times.

Actually, the Tories and the British secret state have a long history of smearing the Labour party and its leaders as agents of the Russians. Back in the 1920s there was the notorious Zinoviev Letter, forged by MI5, which purported to come from the head of the Comintern in the Soviet Union, Zinoviev, instructing the Labour party to get ready to stage a revolution and turn the country into a Communist satellite state.

Then in the 1970s the CIA and MI5 smeared Harold Wilson as a Russian spy. This has been extensively discussed by the conspiracy/parapolitics magazine, Lobster. One of those, who believed this tripe was Maggie Thatcher.

Robin Ramsay, in his recent additions to the ‘News from the Bridge’ section of Lobster, has also posted up a piece ‘IRD Reborn’, commenting on a report by Iain Cobain in the Groaniad that the British government has the army’s 77th Brigade conducting ‘information operations’. There’s also the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) in the Home Office. According to Cobaine, the department, founded in 2007

says privately that it aims to “effect attitudinal and behavioural change” through methods including the dissemination of messages on social media, leafleting homes and feeding stories to newspapers, was modelled on a secretive anti-communist body called the Information Research Department (IRD), set up in Britain in 1948.’

Apparently, RICU was set up by Gordon Brown, who read Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, and instead of taking the book and its revelations as a condemnation, actually thought it would be a good idea.

Ramsay comments

I think it may be safe to say that Brown knew nothing about the IRD’s activities, especially their role in the British state’s disinformation operations – a.k.a. the ‘Lisburn lie machine’ – in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This pioneered the business of putting out so much disinformation – fake news – that no-one knows what to believe.

The rest of that section discusses whether or not anyone really believes the kind of fake news spouted by people like Alex Jones and InfoWars. Ramsay concludes that it’s probably very few.

The current issue of Lobster, 76, is at: https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue76.php
To see the piece, download the ‘View from the Bridge’ by clicking on it, and then scroll down the piece until you get to the right section. There’s also an awful lot of other very important pieces in that section, including government data-gathering on private citizens and implantable bio chips to keep track of us.

Outcry over Firms Microchipping Workers

I found this very ominous story in today’s I, for the 12th November 2018. It seems some firms are inserting microchips into their employees, and employers’ groups and trade unions have rightly come together to condemn it. The article reads

Both the employers and trade unions representative bodies have expressed alarm at reports that UK firms are considering implanting staff with microchips for security. UK firm BioTeq says it has already fitted 150 implants while Swedish firm Biohax has claimed it is in discussions with several UK firms. (p.2).

This is deeply sinister stuff, straight out of the X-Files. Never mind the bonkers conspiracy theories about aliens inserting implants into our bodies to control us, ordinary human capitalism is beginning to do that. From the article it seems that the chips are simply there to make sure employees are who they say they are, but this is nevertheless a real totalitarian move. As it stands, employees in some companies are very closely monitored. Private Eye printed a story a few months ago about how the weirdo Barclay Twins, who own the Torygraph, wished to have motion sensors attached to their hacks desks to make sure they weren’t moving around too much. They had to abandoned this intrusive and hare-brained scheme because it was resented so much by the hacks. Nevertheless, if this goes ahead uncontested, I can see more firms adopting the practice, right up to the government. After all, what better way to cut down on crime, identity theft and illegal immigration than have everyone implanted with a microchip containing all their biographical and biometric details. Blair’s government was, after all, considering passing legislation to establish compulsory electronic identity cards carrying biometric information. And I’ve no doubt other, deeply authoritarian regimes around the world would be all too enthusiastic about adopting the policy.

It also reminds me of the one part of the millennialist beliefs held by Fundamentalist Christians about the End Times and the one world global superstate they’re afraid of. In this myth, which has been around since the 1970s, once the global Satanic dictatorship is established with the Antichrist as its head, it will order barcodes to be marked on everyone’s hands and forehead. Those who don’t have the barcodes will be unable to buy or sell. It’s how they believed the prophecy in the Book of Revelation in the Bible that the Antichrist would have everyone marked with the number 666 on their hands and foreheads would come true in the modern world.

I really don’t believe in the religious right’s millennialist fears. One interpretation of the Book of Revelation is that it’s a coded description of the persecution the early church was experiencing under the Roman Emperor Nero. Both the Romans and Jews used various number codes, in which letters of the alphabet had certain numerical values. These could be used in ordinary secular ways, as well as in number mysticism, in which people tried to discern a deeper meaning in religious or mystical texts through adding up the numerical value of particular words. 666 corresponds to ‘Neron’, a form of Nero. He’s also believed to have been the person described in the Book of Revelation as ‘the great beast’, because as a young prince, before he got into power, he and his cronies thought it was jolly japes for him to go round Rome dressed as a beast and attack people. I think this is probably the right way to interpret that part of the Bible, rather than seeing it as a literal prediction of an imminent end of the world.

But even so, when faced with reports that the firms are trying to implant their workers with microchips, and Blair and authoritarian politicians after him would like to make it compulsory for us all to carry biometric electronic identity cards, I do wonder if the Fundamentalists have a point.

Chunky Mark on the Horror of Theresa May’s Cabinet

Theresa May was declared the winner of the Tory leadership contest. Yesterday, she moved into No. 10, and now today she has announced her cabinet. This includes such luminaries as Boris Johnson (foreign secretary), Jacob Rees-Mogg (Secretary of State for India) and Liam Fox. In this video, Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver gives his considered view of this cabinet of horrors. As you’d expect, it’s a rant, and Mark compares May and the rest of her cabinet ministers to some of the classic monsters of horror cinema. May herself is the Queen from Aliens, and he likens all of them to the Omen, Norman Bates, Pinhead from Hellraiser, and Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s It. He says at one point that they’re so horrific, he expected poltergeists to fly out of No. 10. This is Margaret Thatcher’s revenge from beyond the grave, he tells his viewers. And none of them have been elected. The leadership of the country was simply transferred from one Tory to another, without our consent or involvement.

But he has a point. These people are monsters. May stood in the street yesterday, and announced that she was going to work to continue the Tory party’s work of creating a more equal Britain, and not one that was for ‘the privileged few’. This is surely a lie, as flagrant as any the Tories have ever uttered. Chunky Mark points out that she praised David Cameron’s social programme, which has seen even more people forced down into misery and poverty. And May is, of course, the authoritarian, who wants to spy on everyone with her ‘snoopers’ charter’. Chunky Mark goes a bit far when he says that she wants to implant chips in our heads. But as Lobster has shown in a number of articles on mind control, the technology is there, and has been refined ever since one of the scientists involved in developing the technology stopped a raging bull with it in an experiment for MKULTRA back in the 1960s. The paranoiacs might be nuts, but sometimes they’re right.

Mark also discusses the shouting that was also heard on camera when May made her speech. You never saw them, and nobody from the BBC decided that the public should listen to them, or hear what they had to say. They were protestors from DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts, protesting against the cuts to Disability Living Allowance and the PIP. But the Beeb didn’t want you to know that.

He also covers May’s stance against Scots independence. The British Conservative Party also includes the Scots Unionists, indeed, until the 1970s, the Conservative Party was known as the Unionist Party north of the Border. And May has made it abundantly clear that the Conservative and Unionist Party will never let the Scots have their independence.

The Chunky One is also rightly incensed about the vile racism in all of this crew. One of May’s new ministers declared that our society was being wrecked by North African and Syrian immigrants. Chunky Mark points out that they’re refugees, who’ve been forced to flee their countries because of the wars we’ve started there, and our own looting of them. Then there’s Boris Johnson with his infamous rant about ‘watermelon picaninnies’ and how Obama hates Britain, because he’s half-Kenyan, and we tortured his people. It’s a very dark joke when this man becomes our foreign minister. And then there’s the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Secretary of State for India.

It’s a rant, but an accurate one. This is indeed a cabinet of horrors, in which people, who are clearly deeply unsuited to any kind of responsible cabinet role, have been given the posts to which they are the most unsuited. Kenneth Clark said in his unguarded conversation with Malcolm Rifkind that if Boris got in, he’d have us fighting three wars at the same time. Well, he’s not Prime Minister, but he has been made foreign secretary, so perhaps he’ll have his chance yet. Completely absent from all of them is any concern for the poor, or for anything except corporate profit. Cameron’s was an administration of aristos and corporate elites for the rich. That has not changed one iota, no matter how much May spouts about ‘equality’ and not working for the ‘privileged few’.