Typical bloggerYasmin is just a teensy wee bit elitist
She is also versatile and capable of spouting desperately unsound shite on a wide variety of topics
So, I must admit to being just a tad surprised that Yasmin is the first corporate commentator to square up to the rather large elephant in the living room that is the current Labour Party sleaze crisis
Yasmin has just written an article about the impact of lobbying on British political life. She focuses on the Labour Friends of Israel but, reasonably enough, widens the discussion to include all the groups of shady fuckers who are seeking to exercise behind the scenes influence on the way our country is managed
People like this guy
There is little dispute that American politics is infested and influenced by what are known as Political Action Committees and the signs are there to indicate that British politics is no different. However, the corporate press rarely talks about lobbying in the UK. Partly due to an arrogant sense that 'it couldn’t happen here' but also because the people who run our lobby groups are interchangeable with and interconnected with the people who run the media as well as the political parties
What is really puzzling me is why a member of that caste has just written and been allowed to publish an article talking about its malign influence
I’m f*cked if I can figure out what angle is being played
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To be honest, a few million grubby pounds bunged to all the major political parties doesn’t make that much difference here or there to the way the country is run.
The really interesting subjects are the more intangible ways in which popular consent is manufactured and managed.
Which is why I am one of those people who are fascinated by organisations like Common Purpose.
Organisations which, by their own admission, focus on identifying future leaders (the younger the better) and grooming them for membership of a leadership caste, whilst at the same time promoting a scary brand of soul-less, corporate ‘McDiversity’ which frankly gives me the willies
Hmmm, McDiversity good. Global corporate branding ever better...
These organisations are also characterised by their fondness for masking whatever it is they are really up to through the use of a particular brand of BollocksSpeak™ which baffles the uninitiated with an unrelenting torrent of ‘glittering generalities’.
This network of consultancies, think tanks and lobby groups are interrelated in such a way that not even the majority of the people associated with them can be entirely sure if they are part of, and subservient to, some larger hierarchy or not.
Once you’re switched onto these outfits and the kind of people they promote you can spot them virtually instantly
I fucking hate them
The top echelons of the major political parties are full of the fuckers
And if, as it seems, that membership of this particular loosely-knit group is a prerequisite for preferment then the claim that they seek to identify society’s future leaders starts to sound very much like a self-fulfilling prophecy
The latest addition to my list of fruity little clubs which seem to be part of this network came about as a result of reading the Wikipedia entry for the Leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament, Wendy Alexander
Wendy's in a spot of bother at the moment
One particular paragraph in her Wikipedia entry caught my eye…
Alexander's brother Douglas, the Secretary of State for International Development is a Labour Member of Parliament for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Both were chosen to take part in the British-American Project for the Successor Generation (now known as the British-American Project) which was described by the journalist John Pilger writing in 'The New Statesman' back in 2003 as "a masonry of chosen politicians and journalists conceived by the far-right oil baron J. Howard Pew and launched by Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch".
So, off I clicked to the Wikipedia entry for the The British American Project and…
The British American Project for the Successor Generation was founded in 1985 by Nick Butler to perpetuate the close relationship between the United States and Britain. It has a membership of around 600 leaders and opinion formers from both countries. It holds an annual conference to which journalists are not invited and rarely appears in the media, although many members are themselves journalists.
...and then onto BAPS’ scary homepage, especially the FAQ section with its disturbingly Common Purpose sounding jargon and super-fruity ‘future leader’ selection process (well worth reading)
..and then onto an article on BAPS from the Grauniad a couple of years ago, including a taster of BAPS’ membership.
It is truly heart-warming to find so many people with apparently so many different political beliefs able to come together with a common, er, objective
No surprises to see Julia Hobsbawm’s name there (well worth a few minutes Googling and worth pairing up with ‘Gordon Brown’, ‘McCann’, ‘Editorial Intelligence’, ‘Common Purpose’ for starters)
And not much of a fucking surprise to see Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on the list either…
.
26 comments:
These matters are far too important to be left to chance. The political class that advocates 'risk' for the lumpen (ie precarious) is rather averse to it in their own 'business'.
Fit in or fuck off is the mantra of these dreary cultists.
'Grooming' is also always the term I think of with these projects for youngsters, as it is a paedophilic euphemism for the corruption of children.
Meanwhile the colour television casts dark expressions on Russian election irregularities. They should maybe remember how a large amount of the last vote in jockistan (500 miles up the road, just past 'the north') was 'disappeared' with the efforts of Douglas Alexander and Neil Kinnock's computer firm.
What's with all this sudden interest in honesty?
Of course, it's not only Moronica that has an invisible government - see here.
(Note - conspiraloon Ambrose Evans Pritchard from a loon publication called the Telegraph).
Latest headline from BeebTelescreen One - 'Russian Government needlessly fixes election just for practice!!'
The most cynical trick being siphoning off some of the income from national resources rightfully due to hard-working oligarchs and using it to pay wages and pensions
@anon/ Wolfie
many, if not quite all, roads lead to Goldmans...
Sterling stuff (for what it's worth)
$2.07
/ feeble
I was rather surprised to see Benjamin Zephaniah, the rasta dub poet, as a member of BAP. Benjamin, along with Enoch Powell were the only two famous people who were pupils at my school.
Maybe they brought him on board as part of the McDiversity you mentioned, but it seems he was a little too diverse and decided it was all a bit too 'Babylon' for him. Still, it was strange to see him snuggled between a Conservative special adviser and the former commander of British forces in Bosnia.
Well quite
These fruity little clubs, certainly the larger ones, like to include a few wild card members just to confuse things a little. The thought of Angelina Jolie snuggled between George Soros, David Rockeller Jnr, Alan Greenspan and Zbigniew Brzezinski over at the Council on Foreign Relations is an intriguing one
The flunkeys are one half, maybe this is the other
Jesus fucking Christ...
Awesome
Rockefeller is most definitely The Man
Well, one of them
@paul
Daily Mash on the mark re. Product Red
PRODUCT RED RAISES MILLIONS FOR APPLE, MOTOROLA AND HALLMARK
http://tinyurl.com/23shs7
Some may ask why these gigantic corporations didn't just stump up $10 million each instead of guilt-tripping shallow fucknuts into buying yet more useless shit that'll be in the bin this time next year.
“But these people fail to understand the power of marketing. And bonuses. They fail to understand bonuses too.”
And to think people laughed at its launch!
"He stressed that this was a commercial venture and not philanthropy.
"Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands. Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce," Bono said."
!!!
"According to Ad Age magazine, over $100 million has been poured into the campaign and one year later, barely $18 million has been raised as a result. Not exactly a stellar performance, considering that the campaign was launched with as much hubris and arrogance as the star could muster."
link
I think it was all down to choosing the wrong shade of red. On such details a continent's future is dashed.
Speaking about helping the po' folks, Brad, while I'm sure he means well, seems to be swimming against the tide, or pissing in the wind
Looking at bongo's figures,
6500 dying each day (*365) = 2,372,500 people.
Red 'raised' 18,000,000 giving each person $7.59 a year (or 0.02 a day), a 1 or 2% rise in their income, depending on the level of destitution, or fully 1% of annual aids treatment (according to this).
Of course, that gross figure comes before distribution costs and other expenses.
However, as product red has incurred a loss of 82,000,000, they recipients really owe $34.56 to them for this year. (That's how 'hard commerce' works, isn't it?)
I hope the passionate elvis of tax dodging still believes in debt forgiveness....
Stef,
You know what they say: "A wise man never puts all his eggs in the same basket" So you have the British American project, Common Purpose, LFI, and so on. And within these 'diverse people' one can fabricate the illusion of diversity and disagreement, proper to a 'democratic' society. I found what is common in all these groups is that, at the end of the day, there is one entity, party, country, call it what you want, that they will never criticize...
I had this experience on the web with some bloggers who claim to be pro-Plalestinians but who appear to me as disguised zionists. When arguing wiht them I often found their arguments fallacious. So I developped a test: whenever faced with a solid argument for a one state solution they usually loose their temper and drop the disguise. If there is one thing zionists are afraid from is the one state solution because it will not be the end of Israel, but the end of Israel as a real estate for jewish people worldwide...
So whenever faced with a fake diversity, one must developp the proper test. Ms Alibhai-Brown is not different, in essence, from someone like, say, Hirsi Ali...
Come on Stef, be reasonable.
It's hardly like there is some shady network of fuckers trying to soften up members of our business and social elite for some sort of scary worlwide government.
That sort of thing just doesn't happen in England
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is also a member of Julia Hobsbawm's baby Editorial Intelligence, where members (such as The Metroplolitan Police, City of London, Transport for London, the Audit Commission etc.) can (for a £4,000 membership fee) obtain information on detailed profiles of commentators and leader writers by listing the publications they write for, their interests, career histories, e-mail addresses, the names of their commissioning editors and the days on which they write.
From this March 07 article on ‘Editorial Intelligence’ from the Independent:
”Editorial Intelligence's next tasks are to pin down and profile the blogging commentariat…”
Pin down?
@Sinclair
I missed that link
Nice...
and definitely not creepy at all
@sophia
Hmmm, Hirsi Ali - where she's working now? The Rockefeller funded 'American Enterprise Institute', somewhere like that...
I completely agree with your take on fake diversity and fake debate but I would suggest that there are one or two other, er, little projects which this group avoids talking about
Stef,
I would be interested to know them.
If they make a very big issue out of private donations, then that will only help drum up support for public funding of the major parties. I think that's the aim anyway. Although how the public is going to trust them with public funds when they can't be trusted with private donations, I find hard to contemplate. I guess as long as the political class is for the most part seen as re-acting to events rather than always acting in its own interest then us little froggies can tolerate a little more heat.
The state funding of parties would bring about two advantages; the private individuals and companies who currently pay for the services of politicians could pass most of the financial burden to the public while still retaining the influence. The other advantage being that if they have tighter controls on private donations and almost universal control over deciding who is to receive public funding they would then have the power to decimate any upcoming party. A possible bait-and-switch could be in the works where in the future we'll be having proportional representation but the government funding of parties will be a 'first past the post' system.
I would be interested to know them
stay tuned... ;)
@anon 00:38
State funding for political parties?
For sure...
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