As George Monbiot says in The Guardian this morning in a typically robust article, this time on the eventual failure of the RSPB to challenge the government and those with power:
In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, a US intelligence agency, issued an underground guide for workers living in the Axis powers. It was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It explained how to undermine an organisation from within. Among its recommendations was “Advocate ‘caution'. Be ‘reasonable' and urge [others] to be ‘reasonable'”. It's sound advice. By being cautious, reasonable, polite and considered, our major advocacy groups might avoid political trouble. But they fatally sabotage their own objectives. Always and everywhere, the real danger comes not from speaking out and offending power, but from falling into line.
I wish to reassure readers that I have no intention of falling into line, whatever Labour and its apparatchiks might demand.
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A crucial point George makes is the persistent failure of the BBC to question the junk tanks’ (PE, IEA etc.) source of money – and to present them as ‘independent’ .
Have the governors ever been challenged on this – and have they every provided an explicit answer?
I don’t recall that happening.
The last para & the point that Monbiot makes is good – but the 1st para in the article fails to identify, explicitly, an important group – gov administrators:
“However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational life falls broadly into line. The media, political parties, even pressure groups, accept the basic premises, preposterous as they may be, of whatever variety of capitalism currently dominates”
The UK (any gov) cannot function without a civil service/gov administrators. The UK civil service has been complicit since circa 1979 in what has happened in the UK. This has parallels. Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” noted that the German civil service, were, for the most part wholly accomodating in implementing the Holocaust. The UK civil service has been wholly accomodating in implementing all of the madness that has occured since 1979. A few years back, I spent a disagreeable afternoon with some people from BEIS (as was). We (me plus my client) were the “afternoon entertainment”. The senior chap spoke to me afterwards and said he agreed with everything I said, but gov policy prevented himn speaking out in the meeting. Still happens in my dealings with the European Commission – public disagreement – private agreement. Hypocrisy? cowardice? gotta-keep-my-job? One thing for sure, the UK’s civil service has been an enabler of current malaises, & have done so knowing that what they were doing would cause evil ( – well what would you call hungry children & gov policies desgned to lead to that outcome etc etc).
Falling into line, is like behaving like sheep.
And we all knows what ultimately happens to sheep.
Not for me either.
In his piece this morning GM kept referring to the damage done to honest debate in this country by what he described as Dark Money Junk Tanks.
In the comments below the article somebody had suggested that it would be a step forward for understanding and honesty if these organisations were referred to as “Front Organisations”, a term I believe first used to describe a ploy by Stalin to set up untraceably financed organisations in his attempts to destroy western democracy.
It would certainly help put on the spot the BBC and all the other media outlets that continue to give air-time to these mouthpieces of profoundly anti-democratic billionaires.
We’ve suffered years of front groups, from the right in general but also faux, entrist and wrecker groups like IMG and more lately the Remain movement fronted by Roland Rudd that imploded in acrimony at the crucial moment. The left has never had the exposure of the right; it has had a lot of wreckers and entrists, not all of them undercover police.
Presumably we can agree that all Front Organisations should be exposed.
As for your other points, it is worth noting that the inquiry into the subversion of campaigns, charities, etc, by secret policeman has never found any instance of secret policemen infiltrating Conservative groups and as far as I remember the IMG have never dictated new laws to a Labour Government.
On a more darkly comic note there was the occasion in the !960’s when an entire Docker’s strike committee turned out to be composed entirely of Special Branch officers and the remark made by Tory Defence Minister Alan Clark who when quizzed on the subversion of the Labour Party by Special Branch replied “But that’s their job!”
This is nonsense. An ‘entire strike committee’? Surely one would suffice? Even then such a man would need to be a rank and file docker, doing an arduous and dangerous job in the pre-containerisation docks.
Some trade unionists, who hated communism and believed in capitalism, passed information to Special Branch/MI5 (one dockers’ official has openly admitted this). It would be remarkable if they didn’t.
There were stories that the FBI, during the Cold War, had so many agents in the CPUSA that they were reporting on one another. The CPUSA’s liaison man with Moscow, who even attended the Soviet Central Committee, reported to the FBI.
John Le Carre who monitored the British left for MI5, said he had a disgruntled Daily Worker seller and a CP member in a West Country branch among his informants. But the CP General Secretary, Harry Pollit’s, own personal secretary, was also his informant – so he knew more than most people what was really going on. And that’s not the half of it.
The BBC charter actually states that these alphabet soup groups from Tufton Street should NOT be allowed to pontificate about our economy without their source of
Contributors’ Affiliations
Being made known
4.3.12 “We should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities and think-tanks) are unbiased. Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context.”
I have never heard that done on any BBC broadcaster that either quotes from these groups or has one of them on to be interviewed interviewed
Thank you