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.

More Fearmongering from the Murdoch Press: Times Names British Politicians Appearing on RT as ‘Helpers of Putin’

You can really feel the fear coming off the mainstream press in waves now, and with this story Murdoch appears to be the most frightened and desperate. This short clip from RT reports and comments on two pieces in the Times today, which named the British politicians, who had appeared on RT. Most of these were from the Labour party, but there were also a select number of Conservatives. One of the pieces was entitled ‘Helping Putin’, and claimed that the politicos going on the Russian-owned station were guilty of helping the Russian president interfere in British politics. Not only did the Times name the individual politicians, it also gave details of how many times they had appeared on RT, and the amounts they’d been paid. Among those outed are the Shadow Energy Secretary, Barry Gardiner, the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, the Welsh MP David Davies, the MP Nigel Evans, and the Shadow Lord Chancellor Richard Burgon.

The RT’s own Polly Boiko remarks that traditionally in Britain, speaking to the media was seen one of our democratic freedoms. She then walks into the studio of RT’s ‘Going Underground’ to talk to the programme’s host, Afshin Rattansi. Rattansi remarks that the story’s ‘pretty shoddy stuff’, and the Times has not come to RT for their comment on this story. He also says that they’ve had not just Labour politicians on the programme, but also Tories as well as those from other parties. They come on the programme as they know they will be listened to. As for ‘helping Putin’, this is an attempt to scare people off the broadcaster by connecting them to Jeremy Corbyn. Boiko asks him if he believes that this will make it difficult for RT to get politicians on to his show. Rattansi states that it was initially difficult, but it has now become much easier as they’ve become established and known for listening to their speakers.

The Russian embassy have also given their response to the accusation, asking if that means that the Russian politicos, who have appeared on the BBC, have been helping the British government.

This looks to me like the Murdoch press doing what it has so often done in the past: kick up a ‘Red Scare’ in order to stop people voting Labour. The Times is copying the attacks on RT America over the other side of the Pond by the Republicans and Corporatist Democrats, who are terrified because increasingly more severely normal Americans are preferring to get their news from alternative media outlets, like RT, rather than believe anything from the biased and compromised mainstream broadcasters. Like Fox News, which is solidly Republican to the core, and whose main host, Bill O’Reilly, and one of its chief executives, Roger Ailes, were both sacked as serial sexual harassers. Obama’s election victory in 2008 was credited to a campaign for him on social media, and it has been social media that’s played a very large part in the massive growth in popularity for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, in opposition to a barrage of lies and smears from the mainstream press and broadcasters.

And Murdoch in particular is threatened by this. Fox News audience is very largely in their late 60s. I think the average age is 68, which means that it is signally failing to attract and influence the younger folks, who are turning instead to Bernie Sanders over in America and Corbyn in Britain. As for the Times, the paper is actually losing money hand over fist, to the point where Private Eye remarked that it would have been closed down long ago if it were not the British ‘paper of record’. Murdoch keeps it propped up so that he has a place at the table influencing our politicians.

Lobster and other commenters have observed that over the past decades, Murdoch has used his power in the British press to make deals with various governments. His papers support them and give them popularity as an a kind of unofficial official press, while in return they give in to Murdoch’s own agenda. This means that they grant him important business concessions, such as purchasing rival satellite and cable networks and generally expanding his squalid little empire. At the same time, they also listen very carefully to his wider political agenda, which has always consisted of smashing workers’ rights, and deregulating and privatising the economy. And that includes the NHS.

Clearly, with this story, Murdoch’s starting to become afraid that time’s running out for this scam. People are turning away from the mainstream media, including and particularly the Murdoch press, which has always had a reputation for sensationalist trash and gross rightwing political bias. And if nobody reads his papers, or watches Sky News, not only is Murdoch’s empire failing in itself, but so is his power to influence British and American politics.

He’s panicking, and it’s clear he’s panicking.

Of course, this isn’t the first time he’s attempted to smear respectable politicos as traitors and agents of Moscow. He’s done that many times before. Way back in the 1990s or early part of this century, the Times under its editor, David Leppard, printed a completely bogus story that Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, had been a KGB agent codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’. This was a highly credible story, as shown by the way Private Eye sent it up on their front page. This showed Foot walking his dog, which was cocking its leg on a tree. The tree, in turn, was attempting to contact Foot in code. Not surprisingly, Foot sued for libel and won.

Then there was the Scum’s attempt to smear various Labour politicians as Commies in the 1987 general election. Among those targeted were Labour politicians, who had spoken to or written for the Marxist press. Shock! Horror! Except that the politicos they tried to smear in this way weren’t actually Communists, nor even necessarily Marxists. They were largely mainstream Labour politicians, who had just written for the Marxist press on a particular issue. They also smeared Red Ken as a Marxist, when those, who knew him, said he wasn’t, though he wasn’t averse to using them and sounding like them on occasion. They also claimed that Peter Tatchell was a member of the Trotskyite entryist group, Militant Tendency, when he was no such thing. As well as making other spurious claims based on his homosexuality.

This is all the kind of stuff the right-wing British press has been doing since the infamous ‘Zinoviev Letter’ of the 1920s. This was an attempt by one of the newspapers to scare people away from voting Labour by publishing a letter from the head of the Comintern, Zionviev, to the Labour party, which purported to show that they were going to collaborate with Russia and turn the country into a Communist dictatorship. Except that the letter was a fake, a forgery, probably cooked up by MI5.

I’ve reposted a number of stories from RT, simply because the broadcaster is doing an excellent job of covering stories that the mainstream British media, including the Beeb, aren’t. This doesn’t mean I support Putin. I don’t. He’s an extremely authoritarian thug, and I don’t doubt that the stories of his own massive corruption are true. But that doesn’t mean that the stories reported by RT are false, or that RT isn’t doing proper journalism when it reveals them. In fact, it seems to me that RT is very much doing this, and it is precisely this that has got Murdoch and the Republicans and Clintonite Democrats in America running scared.

The Russian word for newspaper is ‘Gazeta’. The Russian word for the type of journalism practised by the Murdoch empire is ‘govno’. Which is Russian for ‘Sh*t’.

The Fictional Roots of the Anti-Semitism Allegations

Okay, a few minutes ago I put up a piece from RT’s Going Underground show, in which the Jewish anti-Zionist writer and activist, Max Blumenthal, said that he was struck by the similarity of the controversy surrounding supposed anti-Semitic comments from Ken Livingstone, Naz Shah and others in the Labour Party, and the plot of the book A Very British Coup by the former Labour MP, Chris Mullens. The book concerns the plot to undermine a left-wing Labour Prime Minister, the former steelworker, Harry Perkins, by the establishment, the Fleet Street press, the intelligence services and the right wing of the Party. Perkins is very popular, so his opponents unseat him by manufacturing anti-Semitic quotes attributed to him.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if the current attacks on Corbyn and other Labour MPs weren’t based on the plot of Mullens’ book. I never read it, but friends of mine did watch the Channel 4 adaptation when it was screened in the 1980s. The book is very roughly based on fact. In the 1920s the British press and intelligence services attempted to stop Labour winning the election with the publication of the ‘Zinoviev letter’. This was a forged letter from Zinoviev, the Soviet foreign minister, to the leadership of the Labour party encouraging them to overthrow capitalism and turn Britain into a Soviet state. Labour subsequently lost the election, although there is some debate over whether this was due to the letter.

In the 1970s there were various forgeries and allegations that the-then Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, was also a Soviet spy. There is considerable evidence to suggest that these were also cooked up by MI5, but this has been consistently denied by establishment historians.

I find it credible that the allegations may have been manufactured following the plot of Mullen’s book, because affairs like it have happened before. Frederick Forsythe’s novel, The Dogs of War, is supposed to have formed the blueprint for one of the coups led by mercenaries against one of the African states. Forsythe has always denied it, though this is contradicted somewhat by the fact that many of the mercenaries nevertheless carried it in their back pockets. Forsythe also wrote another book, essentially rehashing in fictional form the ‘Zinoviev letter’. Written during the new Cold War of the 1980s, this is about the intelligence services’ attempt to prevent another dastardly coup by the evil Soviets. The Communists have infiltrated the Labour party, which is set to win the general election. When this occurs, the Communists will take over, and Britain will be another Soviet client state.

It’s pure bilge, of course, and shows the attitude of Frederick Forsythe towards the Labour party as a bunch of potential subversives. It also shows Thatcher’s as well, as she declared it to be her favourite novel. I also recall the Scum running a similar campaign against the Labour Party, again claiming that Labour had been infiltrated by Communists, who ready to take over if Labour were voted into office.

The British secret state and the media have a long history of using fiction to smear Labour, and this seems to be another instance of the forces of conservatism and neo-liberalism, quite apart from the Zionist lobby, to hold on to power by smearing the Labour left.