Every half hour BBC News is running a three minute puff piece which is even more sinister for what it hides than for what it says – and By God! That is sinister enough.
“Now the BBC has learned about an alternative No campaign which calls itself No Borders a group determined to rouse the emotions many feel about being Scottish but also British. Gavin Essler has this exclusive report:”
GAVIN ESLER: “A recording studio on the outskirts of Edinburgh. A group of musicians putting the finishing touches to a song which they hope could save the United Kingdom”
(Pretty girls caterwauling unpleasantly). The song is part of a new campaign called No Borders. Their website goes live today on the anniversary of the Union”
(Long speech by Malcolm Offord of No Borders – not a single question asked).
GAVIN ESLER (orgasmic voice): “Here in the very heart of Glasgow in fact almost anywhere you go anywhere in Scotland you’re never far away from our three hundred years of shared British history…. Putting the passion into the campaign to save the United Kingdom is exactly what No Borders say they are about.”
(Another statement from Malcolm Offord. Still not asked any questions).
GAVIN ESLER ‘The idea is a grassroots campaign to rival that of the pro-independence campaign, based on those who wish to remain in the UK. A retired care nurse from Glasgow Elizabeth Bashir is one of those who has given her testimonial.
(Pro-union view from sweet old lady.)
(14 seconds to spokesman for Yes campaign – presumably this is BBC “balance”.)
(Pretty Girls Caterwauling Again).
GAVIN ESLER “In the music industry they say you should never rewrite a hit, and No Borders say the Union has been a great hit worldwide for three hundred years. But others say it might be time to sing a new song.”
Now this long propaganda piece for the No campaign is disgusting in itself for its internal bias, and for the fact that the very much larger grassroots movement the Radical Independence Campaign has never been given any publicity by the BBC (and the failure to reference the longstanding anarchist No Borders movement). It is not even news – it is two days since “Vote No Borders” was given an even longer bout of free publicity on Newsnight Scotland.
But what makes this propaganda utterly unforgiveable is that Vote No Borders is not a grassroots campaign at all but a government organized campaign which has mysteriously acquired start-up cash of 400,000 pounds with no declared origin.
The registered office of Vote No Borders, a private limited company, is at 24 Chiswell Street, London, EC2Y 4YX . Which is perhaps surprising for a “Scottish grassroots campaign”. The directors are Malcolm Offord and Fiona Gilmore.
Now pay close attention: Fiona Gilmore is chief executive of Acanchi a PR Consultany which specializes in “Country Branding”. Its clients include Israel, Dubai, Bahrain and “England”. Yes, it actually specifies “England” on the company website. Acanchi also works for DFID – in short, it gets UK taxpayers’ money, plus Israeli and Gulf Arab money. Are you familiar with the word fungibility?
Malcolm Offord, it turns out, has donated over 120,000 pounds to the Conservative Party plus made personal donations to Michael Gove. He is the author of the report “Bankrupt Britain” on the Conservative Home website. In his paper Offord suggests that further cuts in UK public spending should continue to be made even after the present debt crisis has been passed and urges government to:
“Reform the bloated benefits system of this country to reduce the burden on the state and, just as importantly, boost the growth rate of the country”
And the wee retired care home nurse Elizabeth Bashir? Well, she’s not quite as “grassroots” as shown by the BBC either.
That picture is definitely the “grassroot” Elizabeth Bashir interviewed by the BBC. There is also an Elizabeth Bashir from Glasgow on Facebook who “likes” Vote No Borders [reference here deleted as it has been pointed out, I think fairly, it was to something probably meant as a joke]. This lady has expensive tastes for a grassroot, her other “likes” are Svarovski Crystal, the swanky Aura club in Mayfair and Faz Collection clothes. Strangely although she calls herself Elizabeth Bashir, Glasgow and supports Vote no Borders, everything she “likes” which has a geographical location is in London. It is conceivably a different Elizabeth Bashir from Glasgow, perhaps a daughter, but the coincidence of the Vote No Borders like is very strong.
It took me an hour with google to find all this. That the BBC continues to propagandise this fake “grassroots campaign” without revealing Offord’s Tory Party credentials, his belief in never-ending cuts in public spending and welfare benefits, and Acanchi being a consultant paid by government to boost the UK image is completely beyond anything that can remotely be described as legitimate.
It is the most abhorrent example of a fake story, entirely contrived state propaganda, being put out by a state broadcaster.
UPDATE
From commenters below: The “Vote No Borders” website domain was registered by Gary Waple, who works in the Prudential Regulatory Authority of the Bank of England!!!! Before that he worked at the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates – that British government and Gulf money connection pops up again.
ANOTHER UPDATE
The Guardian also is pushing it. Amazing how neither the BBC nor the Guardian noticed who Mr Offord was, or who his fellow director is, or asked where the money came from. We have a huge responsibility in social media to combat the ultra-powerful combination of the entire mainstream media with the British state, the City of London and their overseas neo-con allies.
I ask every single person who reads this to do what they can do to get this news out – it may open eyes about the BBC, media in general and the hidden hands behind the No campaign. Feel free to copy and paste anywhere you want. But please everybody either blog or tweet about it, put it on your facebook page, email people about it or if you can’t do any of those, just tell three people. The only way we can beat the massed forces of the state and the ultra-rich is by a deliberate and purposeful exercise of people power. That will never happen unless everybody tries. Do something. Now. It does not matter where you are in the world. Knowledge is universal – that is the root of every power the people can hope to have.
FURTHER UPDATE
Brilliant! This post is currently being read by more than one person every two seconds. I hope it’s being read some other places by now too. Don’t stop, we need much more than that to equal the numbers who will view the execrable mainstream propaganda.
If the term Fourth Estate is one applied to describe the ‘press’, traditionally the printed version, what term can we use to describe the televisual and audio versions?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
“Where any of us live has no bearing on the legal right of people to decide their own destiny in the international order.”
I never said otherwise. Freedom of speech also means that English residents whether they are Mr Offord or Craig have the right to comment on the Scottish referendum.
everyone should switch off BBC ( London Pravda ) and you would not have to listen to the CRAP
Cruachan
Airdrieonian
Do you really seriously want to entertain the view that there is no mud slinging from the Nationalist side – and that it comes almost exclusively from the other side?
Important.
BBC FUNNELLED 3/4 MILLION POUNDS IN SECRET KICKBACKS TO CBI
Posted on May 2, 2014
Consternation and outraged gripped the Independence campaign as the BBC admitted funnelling at least three quarters of a million pounds (at today’s equivalent value) of public money in kickbacks to the CBI.
cbi since 1980
The revelation came buried in an online BBCNews report where James Cook, Scotland Correspondent, of BBC News, reported:
‘The corporation said it had been a member “since at least 1980″ and its membership was linked to investment in development and training in the creative industries.’
suitcase of pounds
The BBC had previously stated it had been secretly a member of the CBI “for at least ten years“.
We ourselves contacted the BBC and asked why the had given this original statement of “at least ten years”, when they knew it to be grossly misleading, and why they had kept from licence holders for decades, the pertinent fact that they were bankrolling a partisan political organisation in violation of their charter.
We still await an answer from the state funded broadcaster.
The BBC throughout this referendum campaign has given generous ink and airtime to CBI claims of Scotland’s inability to govern itself and the cataclysmic consequences if it dare try.
/..
http://www.weourselves.com/bbc-funnelled-34-million-pounds-in-secret-kickbacks-to-cbi/
The headline is misleading. The sum is £750,000.
The actual blurb here. 5,000 viewings in a day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckLDmwwb5sc#t=113
I like the way that Esler stands beside the statue of the lion. A Scottish lion or an English lion?
The singing IS dreadful.
When will the royals be seconded into the No Borders/Better together campaign? They and the aristos do own a large part of Scotland after all.
http://www.highlandclearances.co.uk/clearances/postclearances_whoownsscotland.htm
Scotland has the most inequitable land ownership in the west. Why?
As the grouse season opens, reforms are gathering which would allow tenant farmers to buy their land and end centuries of privilege that have made the rich ever richerhttp://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights
Fred (09h21)
Thank you for taking the trouble to find that out.
Aaronvitch’s book Voodoo Histories is actually a rather poor treatment of the subject, in my view. One long extended and highly selective sneer that is short on the evaluation of evidence and long on ad homs. The agenda is laid out clearly in the table of contents – a sort of lazy ‘guilt by association’ in which the Dr David Kelly case stands on equal footing with the Da Vinci code. A number of eminent medical experts have gone on record to record their doubts about the Kelly suicide verdict, to belittle their genuinely held views by equating them with belief in the Da Vinci Code strike me as intellectually dishonest.
The point is, history is full of conspiracies and to deny them all as an article of faith, which Aaronovitch does, is as vacuous as believing them all. Aaronovitch is aware of this but he just can’t bring himself to believe in any. The nearest he gets to a British conspiracy he subscribes to is the Zinoviev letter of 1924. Jim Crace in his Guardian ‘Digested Read’ column always finishes his piece with a one line summation of the book in question. With Voodoo Histories it would be, ‘Don’t worry, everything you’ve been told his true.’
Have you actually read the book?
“One long extended and highly selective sneer that is short on the evaluation of evidence and long on ad homs.”
Do you really believe that it would be possible to Aaronovitch to do an evaluation of all the evidence supporting various conspiracy theories in one book rather than a whole library? There are plenty of cases where he rebuts particular pieces of evidence if you care to look. And isn’t to say otherwise really just an ad-hom?
As to saying he gives equal standing to the Da Vinci case and Dr David Kelly based on the the table of contents, rather than looking at what each chapter says, isn’t that a rather lazy association?
“The point is, history is full of conspiracies and to deny them all as an article of faith”
If you bothered to read the introduction you will see that it is clear that he doesn’t deny all conspiracies and he pretty clear what he is and isn’t targeting.
‘Have you actually read the book?’
Yes.
This should be right up your street Craig I got it off Facebook this morning, but do not know the origin.
I do however consider it to be DYNAMITE!!
Why the better together campaign are desperate to deceive.
The underlying wealth of a nation is based on “securities”. The securities that you hold as a country will dictate how strong that your currency is and at what rate and how much money that you can borrow against these securities.
e.g. .If you own your house outright you can borrow against that “security” as the bank know that they have your house as collateral Securities for most countries are based on gold reserves held or by oil, if you are lucky enough to have that resource.
Forget everything else for a moment and think about this. ONE day after a YES vote everything changes for both Scotland and the RUK. Westminster know this and are absolutely terrified. One day after a YES vote the complete future oil reserves currently under the control of the UK government LEGALLY pass to Scotland and the RUK are left with less than 10% as defined by International maritime borders.
The official handover will take longer but the markets will react immediately.
The assessment of the future oil reserves held in Scottish waters are valued at anything between 1&4 TRILLION pounds!
Maybe never in history have the people of a country had so much power in their own hands. These incredible assets will support any currency that Scotland chooses, will allow the nation to borrow at extremely attractive market rates and support a Scottish Central Bank should this be required at any time in the future.
The RUK‘s fiscal position one day after Independence would be nothing short of a disaster.
Without a currency Union with Scotland the pound will collapse and the credit rating of the RUK will plummet? The RUK will be forced to go to the markets with current debts of 1.4 Trillion pounds just having lost their greatest ever asset and futures securities against their massive debts.
How do you think that they will be perceived?
I would put it to better together that it is they, and not Scotland who need a currency Union and that is exactly what will happen in the event of a YES vote.
Project fear have every reason to be frightened, losing the Scottish contribution to GDP and future Oil securities must be pretty much how the government of the day felt when they lost the American colonies.
Imagine how C A Moron will feel!
Habbabkuk
“Does it receive anything? I’m doubtful, but feel free to develop that and show me I’m wrong!”
https://www.google.co.uk/search?redir_esc=&client=ms-android-samsung&hl=en-GB&safe=images&oe=utf-8&q=bbc%20funded%20eu&source=android-browser-type&qsubts=1399097920424
Caadfael;
Don’t be too dazzled by the wild estimates of North Sea Oil reserves. For a start off they don’t include the rising costs of extraction which is becoming increasing difficult as the fields mature.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/scottish-independence-blog/2013/sep/04/scottish-independence-oil-treasury
@ Resident Dissedent
That’s my experience.
I live in Scotland.
Project Fear has been the Playbook for the vast majority of the “old” media.
The BBC in Scotland are a disgrace. Their TV, Radio and Internet content have a thin veneer of neutrality but their placing and emphasis of stories follow the same editorial line, which is pro-No.
Believe what you like.
Anon
Thanks for those links! I’ve read a few of them and I must say find nothing especially reprehensible or sinister there. It appears that the grants are mostly for “research and development”, by which I understand not “R&D” but “research” and “development” (in foreign, non-1st world countries). In your “euroreferendum” website link Richard North – no friend of the EU, as you know – gives a lengthy list of various media-related development projects undertaken by the BBC in non-1st world countries for which it has received EU funding; while you could of course argue that the BBC doesn’t need to do those projects (in order to save its own and EU money), they seem reasonable enough to me. BTW, just in case Mary’s reading this, I’ll tell her that one of the projects Dr North lists is to help train and develop Palestinian journalists! 🙂
Do we need to discuss this further when there is more important work at hand on this blog….(if you get my drift).?
Perhaps some historians will remember the roles of the Cameron’s at Culloden who fought for England and whose direct descendant is in power today.
My forebears founded the academy in Edinburgh and many schools especially in the north of Scotland, I think that the vote should be made in Scotland, made by Scottish people for the Scottish people and I am most certainly seeking to live in a post split Scotland myself if they carry the vote through for independence.
At least I can say I come from a proud and ancient Scots family who never sold out for castles and land unlike a certain PM forebears…
I’m still trying to understand what “[Esler’s]orgasmic voice” is.
Ian Watson
If they’d let my ancestor continue in effective military command, we wouldn’t have lost! Another story. When my parents lived at Incheswood I used to walk across Drumossie Moor to and from the pub. Coming back after midnight, it was extraordinary how many people you saw in the middle of the night, just quietly remembering, and remarkably often singing under their breath. Some things are burnt deep into a nation’s soul.
But you are wrong about the Camerons. Lochiel was on our side. The Camerons played an extremely noble part throughout. It was my father’s middle name and is my son’s name. It wouldn’t be otherwise.
One thing the unionists have done is give an entirely false picture of Culloden, including the absolute rubbish that there were more Scots on the English than the Jacobite side. Completely untrue, but drummed into people for generations.
“If they’d let my ancestor continue in effective military command, we wouldn’t have lost! ”
You a Jacobite then Craig? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have a lot of time for Catholicism or the Divine Right of Kings.
“If they’d let my ancestor continue in effective military command, we wouldn’t have lost!”
I take it the “we” you speak of is the Italian Catholic who invaded with a French army.
Kempe
” “If they’d let my ancestor continue in effective military command, we wouldn’t have lost! ”
You a Jacobite then Craig? I wouldn’t have thought you’d have a lot of time for Catholicism or the Divine Right of Kings. ”
No, I am in fact a Republican. My ancestors were Jacobites. They were in fact Catholics, but the majority of Jacobites, including those at Culloden, were not. Most were in fact Episcopalian, and not a few were Church of Scotland.
That the Jacobites were predominantly Catholic is another of the lies we were taught at school, like the myth about the huge number of Scots on the English side at Culloden. The biggest lie at all has been the suppression of the specifically Scottish Nationalist sentiments of the rebels, now being unearthed by manuscript research – Maggie Craig’s book is a good place to start.
The biggest lie about Culloden and the ’45 in general was that it was a Scottish war for independence whereas the intention of the Jacobites was to replace Britain’s constitutional monarchy with a (Catholic) absolutist one of the type that had already provoked civil war in England and was to cause even more bloodshed in France later in the century. It would have put political and social development back at least 100 years and probably provoked another civil war or revolution.
I think Scots and English have good reason to be grateful that it failed.
Ref Charterhouse, previously associated with Offord, is involved in this share flotation of Saga which is in their portfolio of currently owned interests.
April 30, 2014
Half of Saga shares could go to public
Saga is preparing to offer up to half the shares in its planned London listing to retail investors in what is shaping up to be one of the biggest ever allocations to the public in a UK stock market launch.
About 700,000 of Saga’s customers have registered interest in taking part in the flotation of the insurance-to-travel group, which fired the starting gun on its offering on Wednesday.
[..]
A retail allocation of that scale would dwarf the 20 per cent allocated to the public in the flotation of Royal Mail last year.
“I’m determined that we should give customers a good share of this,” said Andrew Goodsell, executive chairman of Saga, which sells a range of products to the over-50s.
The offer has yet to be priced, but the people said Saga’s private equity backers Permira, CVC Capital and Charterhouse hoped investors would value its equity at as much as 20 times earnings.
The shares are expected to offer a dividend yield of between 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent as Saga eyes paying out between two-fifths and half of earnings. This would translate into a market capitalisation of between £2.5bn and £3bn.
The company said on Wednesday it planned to raise net proceeds of £550m from the float, helping reduce net debt to £700m.’
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/57b7ead0-d02f-11e3-8b90-00144feabdc0.html#axzz30lV048CF
Another City killing is in the offing
Yes, The Guardian is sinking lower as it is now using Michael McConville, the son of murdered Jean McConville, to make out that Gerry Adams is threatening of tear up the GFA when he is only defending himself over her murder.
Adams is sending McConville a letter in which he includes the names of IRA gunmen who killed his mother, and is asking him if he is ready for the backlash if he releases them. They must include hard-liners in the Army Council. and apparently Seas O’Callaghan who later became a British tout, and obviously wanted to sock this murder and others to opponents like Adams.
Guardian coverage of the murder and Adams is what one would expect from the worst Unionist rag.
And the BBC has an article about Michael McConville vowing to fight on for justice after Gerry Adams’ release by the police as if he is still guilty of his mother’s murder, and nothing is being done about it.
Prosecutions of such crimes are left up to the CPS, and it could still go after Adams for being a member of the IRA – what he has always denied, and looks as if he could never be convicted of.
The whole thing is just politically motivated.
With the fawning of the BBC, there will be some discreet link to the CBI ( of which it is a member ) , I’m sure.
I’m not sure which is more shocking. The deceit of this “grassroots” organisation or the ineptitude of Gavin Esler.
The BBC bias and out and out propaganda just gets worse and worse, but it’s hardly a surprise considering what they have been getting away with during this referendum campaign.
Breaking News, according to Sky, Patten has resigned!
And well he would, given the BBC’s latest indecencies against young girls.
Still think that Chris Patten has left because of more serios efforts against the Scottish referendum when the NIPS has followed Gerry Adams advice – you know, the IRA leader who arranged Jean McConville’s murder – when the same service has followed his advice about who really did it!
ProbAbly another one of his allies in SF who was another MI5 informer who worked to see the IRA was ended – what would make it look as if Adams had arranged her murder.