The Acanchi Effect 207


The financial position of ailing marketing firm Acanchi underwent a startling transformation in 2012 just as they started work on creating the fake grassroots movement “Vote No Borders”.

In 2011 Acanchi’s auditors noted “The Company made a loss in the current year of £197,003, and at the balance sheet date its liabilities exceeded its assets by £385,162”. The company had a turnover of £25,631 against cost of sales of £21,283 and “admin expenses” of £201,125.

In 2012 Acanchi started work in Cambridge and London on developing the “VNB” PR campaign against Scottish Independence, which is surprising given that BBC propaganda portrayed VNB as a spontaneous movement of local Scots. We know they started in 2012 because one of Acanchi’s staff, Jessica Quiney, posted it on her CV on Linked-in. The CV page was deleted yesterday but not before Wings Over Scotland grabbed a screenshot.

This work for the No campaign coincided with an amazing turnaround in Acanchi’s financial fortunes. In 2011 they made a loss of £197,003. In 2012 they made a profit of £103,292. The income from sales went from £25,631 in 2011 to £348,835 in 2012.

There is a very interesting explanation given in the Directors’ report to the Acanchi annual accounts for 2012. It is signed by Gary Waple, the man who registered the “Vote No Borders” domain and who now works for the Regulatory Commission of the Bank of England. Mr Waple states in the 2012 Acanchi Directors’ report:

The nature of Acanchi’s business is that the award of government contracts is subject to external delays beyond the Company’s control. As stated in last year’s financial statement, the Directors’ forecast that there would be a significant improvement in these financial statements. This was achieved as the result of the company being awarded contracts in the current period which had been the subject of long on-going discussions in the past.”

So what was young Jessica Quiney doing at Acanchi at this period? Well, in 2012 she:

“collated and formatted material promoting the pro-Union arguments in opposition to the SNP’s call for Scottish independence including development of narratives, a positioning strategy and a programme of micro-initiatives for this project.”

In 2013 Jessica was:

“Involved in the development and implementation of a proposal and subsequent micro-initiatives for a campaign supporting the No vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014”.

Vote No Borders had nine adverts in one single edition of the Daily Record newspaper in Scotland this week, each giving the story of a single “grassroots” Scots punter and why they are against independence. These “narratives” were developed by Jessica Quiney, a Cambridge classics student, born in England and educated at Northampton High School. I can see no evidence she has ever been to Scotland. Interestingly the photographer, Claire Borley, who took all the photos of “typical Scots” for the No Borders campaign which are appearing in the newspapers, is also Cambridge based.

Claire Borley’s cv gives a stunning glimpse into just how real and gritty this “Scottish grassroots campaign” is:

Born and raised in Cambridge, my professional life has always been about communication.

After gaining an English degree and jumping in at the deep-end in Bermuda as a PA with limited shorthand but fast typing, I worked in television production in London. Here I built up a wide variety of skills working for the Walt Disney Company, Buena Vista International, Buena Vista Productions, Roger Bolton Productions, Wall to Wall TV and Windfall Films.

After spending a number of years on the production side of a visual industry I felt it was time to develop my own creative abilities. With this in mind I returned to Cambridge and continued to work successfully as a freelance photographer for advertising, editorial and corporate clients as well as private clients, musicians and performers.

My aim is always to capture the personality and essence of the individual moment and make each project unique for the client. This leads to much of my work being used for PR, marketing and multi-media broadcast. I enjoy working below the line (direct mail, flyers etc), above the line (mass media advertising) or through the line (bit of both).

Young Jessica Quiney has done nothing wrong. Despite the fact that Fiona Gilmore, 100% owner of Acanchi, was now by 2012 raking in 100 grand a year in profit, poor Jessica was not even being properly paid – she was an intern, an example of the appalling exploitation of our young generation and the total lack of respect in modern society for the value of labour against capital.

But what cannot be forgiven is the BBC’s extraordinary promotion of VNB as a genuine grassroots organization – in total just under 150 minutes were devoted to showing Gavin Esler’s puff piece on the BBC News Channel, not to mention at least 20 minutes on other BBC news programmes.

It has recently come to light that the UK government has been rocked by private polling costing £56,000 of taxpayers’ money, which shows a major fall in “No” support. It is incredible that the government even thinks it is legitimate to pay with taxes for private polling to be made available to only one side in the referendum campaign. It does make you wonder, what else do they think it is OK to pay for? My strong expectation is that the poll of which news has been leaked is only the latest in a series; polling statistics are the basis of PR strategies such as the one Acanchi has been developing for the No campaign.

I cannot leave the subject of Acanchi without referring to this report that:

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, in October 2008, it was the turn of British firm Acanchi, hired by the foreign minister “to craft the new image” (“Foreign Ministry, PR firm rebrand Israel as land of achievements,” 6 October 2008). The firm’s founder toured Israel as part of the mission “to create a brand disconnected from the Arab-Israeli conflict that focuses instead on Israel’s scientific and cultural achievements.”

I have deep contempt for Fiona Gilmore. To try to create a “brand image” for Israel that leaves out the Palestinians, is the moral equivalent of creating a “brand image” for the Nazis that leaves out the concentration camps. Anyone who can tour Israel as the guest of the Israeli foreign office to that end, is not somebody I would wish to associate with. She is however the ideal partner for Malcolm Offord, the Vote No Borders financier – and major contributor to the Tory Party and to Michael Gove personally – who argues that Britain needs much more drastic cuts to welfare benefits. There must be something about food banks that gladdens the Tory heart. The prospect of not having any in Scotland evidently terrifies them.


Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

207 thoughts on “The Acanchi Effect

1 5 6 7
  • Ba'al Zevul (Bokonon Rastafari)

    If Europeans had arrived in Australia or the Americas with the attitude you mention then, after our germs had done their stuff, there could have unfolded an era of trade and cultural cross-fertilisation. Now how rich could that have been?

    Well, yes. If the Vendian glaciation had not occurred, the explosive Cambrian diversification would not have happened, and we wouldn’t be here at all…also arguably a Good Thing. I offer WIRDATRD only as a logical policy for advanced governments with immigration/integration issues to deal with. The Romans themselves did not extend the principle outside Rome, it’s worth noting. Whether in Britain, Syria, Dacia or Asia Minor, the Romans invariably did as the Romans do. Which wasn’t always bad for the inhabitants, either.

  • Herbie

    Ba’al

    Well. At one time the British pushed a racist nationalist script but now they push a globalist anti-racist script.

    If you were inhabiting the nationalist script then it might be difficult to transition to the new globalist script, and we have plenty of evidence of that.

    Your own claim to function outside such scripting would suggest you’re conditioned by neither, and therefore you’re unlikely to suffer this problem.

  • Herbie

    Jemand

    “It helps, tho’, if migrants participate in the Australian way first before introducing us to their ways.”

    Dunno why you demand that. You didn’t.

    Like your demand that they don’t nick your stuff, when you’d nicked theirs.

    It’s rank hypocrisy.

  • Ba'al Zevul (Bokonon Rastafari)

    At one time the British pushed a racist nationalist script but now they push a globalist anti-racist script.

    I did get that much of what you were saying. The main difference as far as I can see is that the former treats foreigners (weak foreigners, that is) as shit, while the latter treats everybody as shit. Fewr people got treated as shit under the former system, in fact…

    heh.

  • Jemand

    Well put BZ, @8.30a
    – –

    Mary, stop pretending you speak Latin and kindly oblige me by disengaging in anti-Australian propaganda. You’re kids must have grown up terribly depressed having such a negative mother.

  • Jemand

    Herbie, you’ve already demonstrated your hostility to good reason and polite conversation so why don’t you just relax and help yourself to a nice warm cup of stfu?

  • Herbie

    “Fewer people got treated as shit under the former system, in fact…”

    Not really. They were merely distracted from the shitiness of their treatment by feeling superior to others.

    It’s all functional. At one time they needed a racist mentality to encourage subjugation of others.

    Now they need to encourage tender feelings towards others so that they can push down the cost of labour through immigration.

    The old reverse ferret trick.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHi16zEsSFI

  • Ba'al Zevul (Bokonon Rastafari)

    Oh ffs, Herbie. The whole mindset was different then. Racism wasn’t even a concept. Differently coloured people who couldn’t speak English (or German, French, Russian, insert wannabe colonial power here) were inferior, and part of the White Man’s Burden. End of.

    Re what Jemand is saying, and I really don’t know enough about the indigenous people of Australia to offer an informed opinion on their state, but more universally, if someone nicks your car, are you really going to forget it because your grandpa fenced off part of the thief’s grandpa’s tribal stamping ground? Are you buggery. You’re going to report it to the police. Be practical.

    Bearing in mind perhaps that your grandpa really didn’t want to be there in the first place but had been transported for snaring a rabbit?

    Hypocrisy applies to the same person saying one thing and doing another. Not someone saying the opposite of what his distant ancestor said.

  • Herbie

    You’re talking about an economic system which employed racism. It’d be more accurate to say that they didn’t care about racism than that the concept didn’t exist. It certainly did.

    The thing about Jemand is that he enjoys pointing out that these brown fellas just nick peoples stuff. That’s what they are. That’s what they do.

    In such circumstances it’s reasonable to point out that his antecedents did exactly the same thing.

    I fully understand that people will wish to report current offences, irrespective of historical causation, but it does no harm to provide some context.

  • Ba'al Zevul (Bokonon Rastafari)

    You’re talking about an economic system which employed racism. It’d be more accurate to say that they didn’t care about racism than that the concept didn’t exist. It certainly did.

    And I disagree. Until early in the last century, perhaps slightly earlier in intellectual circles, but not in the general perception, we were still rocking to the notion that it was up to us to civilise Johnny Dark Foreigner and bring him up to our standard. (Looking at Boko Haram, I’m not sure we were altogether wrong.) The assumption that he was inherently inferior was not disputed. Looking back from here, that’s racism. At the time, no-one thought twice about it. That was the, er, script. The word didn’t appear.

  • Mary

    PPS My stepchildren are very well adjusted thanks and are leading useful and fulfilling lives. No depression here.

    Did you bring yours(if any) up to be racist like yourself?

  • Herbie

    You’re switching between the word racism and the concept.

    The word itself isn’t that important.

    The concept has existed for quite some time. You’ll see it in the Talmud, and in Aristotle.

    Anyway, the leaders of the economic project we know as colonial plunder, will not have thought to themselves, “let’s go off and civilise these natives”. They’ll certainly have explained it that way to their people and armies and so on, much as they now tell us they have a responsibility to protect poor foreign peeps from evil dictators.

    They knew what they were doing even if ordinary people were inhabiting a false script.

    You mention Boko Haram as an example of something beneath our standards, yet Boko Haram are working to western direction.

  • ESLO

    “You mention Boko Haram as an example of something beneath our standards, yet Boko Haram are working to western direction.”

    Yes of course they are dear – have you forgotten to take your medication again?

  • Jemand

    So car theft is actually caused and consequently justified by historical land theft… Oh, that makes perfect sense now. I’ll pass that news on to my mother who will be happy that her $2000 in cash went to a good cause motivated by a perfectly fair desire to put right past wrongs.

    (stoopid kunt)

  • Jemand

    Yes Mary, my half Asian daughter is racist. You’re a dickhead like your mates here. How does one say GFYS in Latin?

  • Herbie

    “In the nineteenth century there were a few authors who told the truth about the Native Americans. There was one in particular, her name was Helen Hunt Jackson who wrote a powerful book about what was done to the Native population that was called, A Century of Dishonor. Theodore Roosevelt hated the book and in his multi-volume history, what was called The Winning of the West, he devotes many pages to attacking Helen Hunt Jackson. And it is an honour to her when you go to a library, pull that book off the shelf and you say, well you know what, the argument that’s always made, back then they didn’t know better. That it was “the times”. And you realize that’s a crock of shit. Except those who wanted to know better did know better. And there were people, to their eternal honour who told the truth. People like Helen Hunt Jackson.”

    http://normanfinkelstein.com/2014/an-alienated-finkelstein-discusses-his-writing-being-unemployable-and-noam-chomsky/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Century_of_Dishonor

    https://archive.org/details/centuryofdishono005246mbp

  • Jemand

    Yes, yes ok Herbie we get it – YOU are the noble keeper of the golden key to the library of true history and Justice. Now fuck off like a good little imp because you’re fooling no one but yourself.

  • doug scorgie

    Jemand
    21 May, 2014 – 2:14 pm

    “Yes Mary, my half Asian daughter is racist. You’re a dickhead like your mates here.”

    Jemand you are racist against brown or black skinned people. You have demonstrated that repeatedly over time.

    Whether or not your daughter is racist I don’t know but I do know that your Asian daughter is white Asian not brown.

  • Herbie

    Jemand

    That was Norman Finklestein’s view I quoted above.

    As you know, he like Chomsky and many others, bears witness.

    An ancient form of affidavit.

  • Jemand

    Hello, “I’m black” Dougie.

    You do recall, don’t you, that you unwittingly confessed to being an anti-white racist by declaring yourself to be absolved of any of the collective guilt you accuse white people of for the historical crimes committed in the names of their respective countries?

    The “I’m black” defence was your racist explanation that only white people are guilty for the crimes of their national forefathers while black Britons are freed of this burden. I think I’m getting used to this version of how things work.

    Or maybe you meant to say that the UK is not your country, because you are black, and therefore you can’t be guilty of crimes committed by the people of that country. I’ll leave you to explain that one.

    Oh, and kindly don’t ever talk about my daughter again, thank you. The idea of a creepy racist man thinking about my little girl makes me feel quite sick.

    . . .

    Herbie, I didn’t even bother to read your latest attempt at being relevant. You never will be. You’ll remain a stupid obnoxious cnut for the rest of your useless life – just accept it as fact and move on. You understand that I’m trying to save both of us time tho’ you’ll notice mine is clearly worth more than yours.

1 5 6 7

Comments are closed.