To blazes with Brexit – it’s being handled by a government that used PUBLIC MONEY to undermine the Opposition

Jeremy Corbyn: According to the Tory government-funded “Integrity Initiative”, he’s a puppet of Putin. The problem with that claim lies in the fact that the organisation making it is funded to the Tories to do so.

Theresa May’s Conservative government spent £2.25 million of our money funding a “fake news” campaign to undermine the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn – after claiming it was clamping down on fake news.

We’ve just spent months debating whether Mrs May’s handling of Brexit is acceptable but now it should be clear that the only thing she should be allowed to handle in the future is prison food.

Misuse of public funds is an offence.

The so-called Institute of Statecraft – based in an old Victorian mill in Fife, Scotland – runs a programme called the Integrity Initiative using military intelligence specialists and £2.25 million of our cash to post false information on the social media about Mr Corbyn and Labour.

According to the Daily Record, “The ‘think tank’ is supposed to counter Russian online propaganda by forming ‘clusters’ of friendly journalists and ‘key influencers’ throughout Europe who use social media to hit back against disinformation.”

But it seems clear the organisation used the money handed to it by the Foreign Office for party political purposes: “One tweet quotes a newspaper article calling Corbyn a ‘useful idiot’, that goes on to state: His open visceral anti-Westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.’

“Another added: ‘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’.”

Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry wants to know exactly what has been going on. She said: “It is one of the cardinal rules of British public life that official resources should not be used for party political purposes.

“So it is simply outrageous that the clearly mis-named ‘Integrity Initiative’ – funded by the Foreign Office to the tune of £2.25 million over the past two years – has routinely been using its Twitter feed to disseminate personal attacks and smears against the Leader of the Opposition, the Labour Party and Labour officials.

“And this cannot be dismissed as something outside the Government’s control, given the application for funding agreed by the Foreign Office last year stated explicitly that it would be used in part to expand ‘the impact of the Integrity Initiative website…and Twitter/social media accounts’.

“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?”

Labour MP Chris Williamson had tabled a Parliamentary question about the Institute for Statecraft, and received the following answer from FCO minister Alan Duncan: “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.”

Clearly, this answer is untrue. If the “Integrity Initiative” was intended “to defend democracy against disinformation”, then it had no business posting disinformation to the social media (in fact, nobody has any business posting disinformation to the social media).

An angry Mr Williamson, after the current revelations were published, said the Tories were “using public money to subvert democracy”.

Bizarrely, it is less than a year since Theresa May announced the creation of a “rapid response social media capability” intended to respond to the scourge of fake news, based in the Cabinet Office.

At the time, I wrote: “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.”

It seems I was right – they’ve just outsourced that function.

The Twitterati have, of course, been abuzz – and who can blame them?

Here’s a very good point:

This is quite right – it would be a list of people who peddle fake news that would be invaluable to those of us who want to stamp it out, although I think it would be better to hand it over to proper investigators, rather than the Cabinet Office organisation, in whatever form it currently takes.

For those of you who may have been convinced that Mr Corbyn really was a Russian puppet, here’s a quick response:

https://twitter.com/ToryFibs/status/1071821310806900736

Of course, senior members of the Labour Party are incandescent with rage:

But there is another level to this – the lack of interest exhibited by the mainstream media. This story has been in two Scottish newspapers – the Sunday Mail and the Daily Record – and on a few social media sites like Vox Political. And that’s all. It is a huge story as it involves the misuse of public funds for party political purposes.

Why are the newspapers and broadcasters not covering it (as if we didn’t know the answer already)?

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.

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10 Comments

  1. Colin Clarke December 10, 2018 at 1:12 am - Reply

    This is enough. Using public money to publish lies regarding an honourable member of Her Majesty’s Government opposition should cause an immediate dissolution of Parliament. The action regarding Brexit should be immediately cancelled as this government has used our money to create lying propaganda regarding HM opposition and there is absolutely nothing, including Brexit, that can be justified by this government. They have lied about Corbyn. Dishonour this Government now!

  2. Stu December 10, 2018 at 5:28 am - Reply

    Even if this is proven not to be a criminal act as the Government pleads ignorance by outsourcing their responsibility, at the very least it proves (yet again) that Amber Rudd is incompetent and unfit to be a Goverment minister

    Resign before you do any more harm !

    • Mike Sivier December 10, 2018 at 11:27 am - Reply

      As it was the Foreign Office that funded this, it would not have been Ms Rudd’s responsibility. Boris Johnson, perhaps – or Jeremy Hunt.

  3. nmac064 December 10, 2018 at 11:19 am - Reply

    Utter dishonesty and stinking corruption are all that Tories are good at.

  4. Darren December 10, 2018 at 11:35 am - Reply

    The Conservative Party itself must be either sued by Labour to return this money to the UK taxpayers, or compelled to do so by a court of law following criminal proceedings.

  5. Martin Odoni December 10, 2018 at 11:53 am - Reply

    One bright side to this. If they feel the need to resort to tactics this corrupt, we know the Tories are absolutely terrified that they are on the brink of falling from power. We also know that, despite their attempts to sneer dismissively at the suggestion, they realise that a Jeremy Corbyn Government replacing them is the likeliest outcome.

  6. groovmistress December 10, 2018 at 12:19 pm - Reply

    IF this becomes mainstream news, and IF the government are taken to task over it then I think we all know what the response will be. A “full and thorough enquiry” blah, blah, denial of knowledge blah, blah blah. The thing is, denying all knowledge of what was being done is itself proof of negligence. Would anyone else, other than this govt, give £2m pounds to an organisation to undertake work on their behalf without periodically checking on what exactly they were getting for their money?
    I’m getting sick to death of our Government’s arm’s length approach to managing absolutely everything, and undertaking decidedly dodgy activities and then thinking they can wriggle out of all culpability when it all goes t*ts up purely because it was out-sourced.

  7. Barry Davies December 12, 2018 at 4:10 pm - Reply

    Well Cameron used £9million taxpayers money to send out a pack of lies remain propaganda pamphlet to every home in the nation illegally before the campaign even started, but you never hear the remainers complain about that.

    • Mike Sivier December 12, 2018 at 4:40 pm - Reply

      Ah, but was it a pack of lies?
      We know that most Leave propoganda was false.

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