The controversial political intervention by the RSPB this week via its X account – branding Government Ministers “LIARS!” – is the result of the takeover of the bird charity by a cabal of hard-Left activists, says Guy Adams in the Mail. Here’s an excerpt.
Daniel Carey-Dawes is a 35-year-old Labour activist who has devoted much of his adult life to the cause, spending four years as the party’s constituency secretary in his native Hackney and five years as its research and support officer at London’s City Hall.
He stood, unsuccessfully, as a Labour council candidate in 2010, spent a couple of years as PA to the Corbynist London Assembly member Jennette Arnold and, according to his profile on the social network site LinkedIn, also “developed policy” which “formed part of Sadiq Khan’s manifesto”.
This week, Carey-Dawes, who describes himself as a “lifelong Labour voter”, was found to be helping advance the party’s agenda via his current day job.
On Wednesday he used X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to help his employer circulate a highly controversial series of social media posts calling Rishi Sunak and two senior Tory ministers “LIARS!”
The messages looked, and read, like party-political attack adverts. They featured a sinister black and white image of the Prime Minister alongside his housing secretary Michael Gove and DEFRA supremo Therese Coffey. “LIARS!” was rubber-stamped across it in blood-red text.
“You lie, and you lie, and you lie again. And we’ve had enough,” they proclaimed, before listing, in a further 11 similarly designed tweets, occasions when the trio supposedly told untruths about environmental policy.
Carey-Dawes gleefully re-tweeted this series of posts to his thousand-odd followers at lunchtime on Wednesday, moments after they had been uploaded to his employer’s account. He then added his own commentary, writing: “Sometimes in campaigning, you just have to call a spade a spade.”
The messages, attacking a government proposal to axe EU rules on housebuilding, were also gleefully circulated by, among others, Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, the Green MP Caroline Lucas, and shadow environment secretary Jim McMahon, who reckoned they provided evidence we are in “the dying days of a Government devoid of ideas to make the county better”.
At this point, you may be wondering what division of the Labour Party was paying this young propagandist’s wages. But Carey-Dawes doesn’t work for His Majesty’s Opposition any more. Not officially, at least.
Since May he’s earned his crust as Government Affairs Manager for one of Britain’s largest charities: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It was this organisation, rather than his beloved Labour Party, that used Twitter to publish the ad hominem attack on Sunak, Gove and Coffey.
The trouble is that charities, which enjoy tax-free status, are prohibited by law from running political campaigns. While perfectly entitled to comment on matters of public policy – provided they affect a particular charitable remit – these wealthy organisations must remain resolutely non-partisan in the process. What they are not supposed to do is behave like a provisional wing of the Labour Party, abusing ministers to help score points.
The charity soon apologised – but it didn’t delete the tweets.
Amid growing controversy, the RSPB’s chief executive Beccy Speight made an appearance this week on Radio 4’s Today programme. During what many regarded as a car-crash interview, the £190,000-a-year boss appeared to have little grip on her organisation, claiming she hadn’t approved the contentious Twitter thread, saying it “didn’t go through our normal protocols”.
She added: “We do believe the nature of public discourse does matter. We campaign on policy not on people, so the framing of that tweet where we called out individual people we felt was incorrect and inappropriate and we apologise for that.”
Carey-Dawes deleted his “call a spade a spade” tweet but Speight is refusing to take down the RSPB’s original offending posts. She argues — laughably, given that it continues to be viewed by tens of thousands of people every hour — that “removing it could have drawn more attention to it”.
While the Chief Executive seems to have little clue how the RSPB came to call senior ministers “LIARS!” there can be little doubt the posts were the work of a team of senior designers and writers within the charity.
After all, five minutes after the Twitter thread had been posted, the RSPB’s director of policy and advocacy Jeff Knott, a Left-leaning conservationist who had lobbied against Brexit, could be found angrily re-posting his employer’s contentious tweets.
Knott alleged that Sunak, Gove and Coffey were caught up in a tale of “Lies, damn lies and nutrient neutrality” (referring to the issue of whether housing developments ought to be blocked if they add to nitrate levels in local rivers).
Also amplifying the tweets was Ghazala Koosar, a hard-Left lawyer on the charity’s board of Trustees, who reposted within minutes of publication and has yet to delete them from her Twitter feed.
Koosar is a prolific user of the social network, with typical posts including support for Jeremy Corbyn, attacks on the Government’s stewardship of the NHS and conspiracy theories suggesting think-tanks based in Tufton Street, Westminster, have a “malign grip on Sunak’s government”.
Worth reading in full.
Read J. Sorel’s take for the Daily Sceptic here.
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This was never about a virus!
It was never about the science either.
They got the memo too early!
Lol, if you don’t laugh at this…
Update: I soon descended into sobs.
It’s their country – let them have their own circus.
I expect the uptake is far higher than 10% in the major cities and I don’t think people are going to be checking out in the countryside. its kenya’s guardian reading class having a moral panic
That was my guess too, it will be the urban elite who have taken the vax.
Why should they care about the rural poor not having access to their bars, shops and restaurants?
Rather similar to the Soviet Nomenclatura having exclusive use of such places.
“Kill The Poor” as Jello Biafra would put it.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
Might be a problem for their houseboys, cleaners, nannys and other domestic servants.
That’ll be a bonus to the NPD grauniad-reading classes.
Coherent with the general global strategy. Impose the new order on the gentry and the plebs will eventually follow.
At this point the well to do, urbanites are the only ones they care about. For now.
They’ve set up a good system of capture with the vax for travel rules.
Orwell foresaw this quite well in 1984. The regime cared mostly about the upper.echelons. The lower classes were.left to themselves.
That’s what the Kenya thing is about.
Going to be some very empty bars.
Winter surge, in Kenya, in December ???
My thoughts exactly.
Nairobi average temperatures in November and December are 19 – 20 degrees Celsius.
In Africa It’s just a little more obviously a shakedown exercise than about health.
Shit for brains, typical of them!
No longer news and no longer surprising.
Me thinks is about international donors to public health than any attempt to handle their epidemic. He who writes the checks writes the rules. Given a) the young age of the population b) expose to other viruses c) limited benefit in stopping infections from vaccine (trending to nil over time) and d) the larger issues facing Kenya, this rule makes about as much sense as requiring everyone to have their wisdom teeth pulled before entering. I’m not conspiracy theorist but have seen and read of international donors demanding odd thing of nations in return for grants in the best of times.
So, any intrepid investigative journalist want to tackle this? Because the answers could be very illuminating.
Jabbing at risk populations made sense. Jabbing everyone didn’t make sense when we still had high hopes for the vaccine. I wonder if Kenya will be required to jab it’s 5 year olds too?
I sure the Kenyans have the infrastructure in place to police this. Thought not, none story.
Africa skipped/leapfrogged land lines so there are a lot of internet connected mobile phones.
Again, a biased intro taking the official narrative as truth.
Kenya catches up with Agenda 30. Let the backhanders begin.
Didn’t Nigeria introduce a similar policy months ago, with an even lower uptake? Any news how that has worked out for them?
Sturgeon’s 70-page dossier finds no evidence for vaccine passports
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sturgeon-s-70-page-dossier-finds-no-evidence-for-vaccine-passports
Send to your MP, MSP or MS: https://www.writetothem.com/
Headline should read, ‘African nation bows to NGO’ s financial incentives…again’.
NGO colonialism.
Has Gates been talking to them recently?
Roll on the Kenyan riots.
UNcle Bill’s altruism is well understood in Africa….
https://lichtnahrung2015.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/un-forced-tothat-admit-that-gates-funded-vaccine-is-causing-polio-outbreak-in-africa/
Our healthcare system is about to experience a tsunami! Potential side effects of jabs include chronic inflammation, because the vaccine continuously stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies. Other concerns include the possible integration of plasmid DNA into the body’s host genome, resulting in mutations, problems with DNA replication, triggering of autoimmune responses, and activation of cancer-causing genes. Alternative COVID cures EXIST. Ivermectin is one of them. While Ivermectin is very effective curing COVID symptoms, it has also been shown to eliminate certain cancers. Do not get the poison jab. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
That’s right, play the game, you wouldn’t want to end up like that Tanzanian president, would you?
Well done Kenya. I should like to see how this works out. Thankfully it’s a warm country and so no one will be left out in the cold so to speak.
That reminds a little bit of “cargo cults” behavior… Just jab enough arms and the cargo will come. After all that’s what all the great white people are doing.
We all know countries are being paid a lot of money to do as they are told.
How did Kenya get the vaccine? Where did they pull the dollars from?