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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Sounds like a load of commercial tosh and gibberish to me! Go to an interview, take your cv, most suitable person gets the job!
Simples
Recruiting only on the basis of ability to do the job? The world needs to be PURGED of people like you!
And how are you going to appoint people able to do the job of purging?
Only Black and Asian purgers need apply
Or indeed how will you appoint the appointers? It’s a vicious circle…
That system worked so well, didn’t it, Dings?
Too right it did
Uber globalist McKinsey could not be expected to come up with anything else. They know its findings don’t hold water but they are the key researchers, facilitators and propagandists of corporations and governments globalist agenda. Their fingerprints are everywhere!
“Is diversity our strength? Our leaders certainly seem to think so. ”
I strongly doubt that they really think that. Hard to know what all of their reasons are, but I expect it’s partly political.
When it comes to politicians their beliefs are always amenable to the contents of a brown envelope or its equivalent.
Indeed. As Frank Herbert (author of Dune) put it:
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”
Does Herbert have experience with any other form of government than those based on periodic politalker popularity contests?
Not sure what those are but he was from the US, think he lived there all his life, died a few years ago.
“Diversity” would help companies if the companies were actively discriminating against certain types of people, rather than trying to get the best people for each job.
But as it happens, they weren’t. They were recruiting by talent.
But now they are discriminating, against white men and so not getting the best person for the job.
That’s what DEI has achieved.
Diversity is just another name for racism.
There is “no business case for diversity” because diversity is not “business” it is politics. Just as there is “no business case for Net Zero” because that is politics as well. —–So nonsense like “Diversity is our strength” is a political statement which implies that if you don’t have diversity you cannot have strength. Which is patently absurd. Companies in 1950 1960 and 1970 never had much “diversity” so did they not have any “strength? How about companies in Japan where there isn’t much in the way of “diversity”? Do they have no strength? ——But notice how diversity only works in one direction —–Less white people.
Yes, quite. And as I’ve said before, would you rather fly in a plane with a pilot* who was chosen because of their ability, or have a surgeon perform your operation because you trust them to be sufficiently skilled, than have your life put in the hands of people who were basically a tick box exercise, a sub-standard ‘DEI plant’, because TPTB had targets to meet? It’s insane really that such basic things even need pointed out.
*Even more so if planes are going to start flying with only one pilot. I don’t want some crappy, sub-par ‘woman of colour’ flying my plane just because she’s got a penis!
Yep——I always used the example of “Your 3 year old child is in a burning building. Who do you want to climb the ladder and rescue her? The 6′ 4 14 stone guy or the 5′ 1 8 stone woman?
Diversity is our strength is obviously just an purposely constructed anti-version of Unity is our strength, ie, our ability to cooperate as team against our external opponents, as opposed to loads of infighting among different groups each seeking to outmanoeuver the others wrt access to positions of influence and income. The latter is only the strength of diversity-enablers like UNWEF which absolutely don’t want some kind of united front against their evil agenda.
Good article.
Re: causality. Correlation is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for causality, is it not? So no correlation implies no causality. Or am I missing something?
Yes, another good, datacentric thread here which illustrates the con nicely;
”This plot presents a sad truth:
Media has failed it’s duty to inform the public
Instead, a business model of selling fear, stoking conflict, pandering, and pushing advertisers propaganda.
McKinsey-ification and it’s consequences has been a disaster for the human species.
It wasn’t always like this.
In the past newspapers made money by selling newspapers, and they competed on quality of research, clarity of insight, and reliability of sources.
Then newspapers started raking in massive sums in advertising revenue and things went sideways.
The issue is that the advertising revenue model fundamentally drives a race to the bottom in hacking dopamine, while favoring content that can be digestible to the largest number of people.
Clickbait for the lowest common denominator.
How’d we get here?
We unleashed an army of “Managerial Executives” on the economy who brought an industry-agnostic mindset of driving shareholder value by any means necessary.
Boeing used to be run by engineers. Newspapers by journalists. Hospitals by doctors.
Now’s its MBAs.
The net effect beyond destroying our institutions, democratic process, ability to innovate and govern effectively is this:
It drives a casino economy where returns concentrate to capital over labor.
It disincentivizes hard work.
And the media capitalizes on this collapse of civic society by selling more fear, more hysteria, inventing more wedge issues and clickbait outrage every day.
Gaslighting a generation into not having kids, opposing economic growths, and hating their own country..”
https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1774175317294473539
If there was a compelling business case for diversity, why would would businesses need to be bullied or coerced into adopting it?
I think the argument goes like this.
People from minority groups (and women, who arent a minority, but anyway) are just as capable as those from majority groups (I.e. white.men, who don’t constitute a majority anymore, but anyway) but are held back by a lack of opportunities, which don’t come their way because of the prejudice and bigotry of, essentially, white men.
In all occupations. No nuance. No exceptions. Everyone can do everything equally well. (Actually, minorities and women can do things even better in some instances, but that can be put aside for now.)
And because the people making this argument are really good people, they are willing to concede that this prejudice isn’t conscious but subconscious.
Luckily, the proponents of this idea are here to set white men straight (and white women when it comes to matters of race) and by forcing them to hire “minorities” they will discover that minorities are just as capable as anyone else. And for reasons that are not entirely evident, a workforce that perfectly represents society in all the right proportions creates some sort of goldilocks conditions that unleashes potential and companies will prosper even more for it.
And white men are too bigoted and blinded by their own self interest (subconsciously, let’s be kind) to see this so they need to be forced to hire “diversely”.. For their own good. And the good of society. Mostly the good of society. After all who wants to fight against what is good for society, right? Only white male monsters (acting sunconsciously).
It seems like a lot of people are uncomfortable with the fact that success in life* is not evenly distributed among whatever grouping lines are in vogue (race, sex etc). Significantly, this includes a lot of successful people. I am not sure why, but it seems quite common.
* measured by what seems to be important to people – money, power, status, skills – not saying these are the most important or that they are the only things that make up “success in life”
On the one hand impostor syndrome,.on the other envy?
I mean, life is very complex and random and so equal efforts and abilities don’t produce similar results.
I think most people are able to accept and live with that, but there are enough who don’t who use it as a pretext to try to re engineer society
I think most are able to accept that on an individual level, life is chancy and unfair. But more than a few are unable to accept that this unfairness (or its opposite) can apply unevenly along the lines of race, sex etc.
Over time I would expect companies recruiting for diversity rather than ability will perform worse. In some industries the result could be fatal…
Can anyone point me to a charity that works to achieve gender diversity among construction workers?
I’d.like to contribute.
If you’re talking about well-paid white collar construction workers, there probably is one
I’d stump up a few quid for the group that is campaigning for gender diversity in the night-time office building security guard sector, and of course the one pushing for racial diversity in the NBA.
Since John Lewis went all woke and diverse their profits, takings and quality has taken a nose dive. They have a black woman chairman, an Asian CEO, more women and ethnics in senior positions than you can shake a stick at, and a smattering of gay and trans types to make up the DIE numbers.
They invest heavily in black history month, all the trans nonsense, ESG and DIE and the company is a dead man standing. All the woke DIE nonsense did them no good at all and the staff are suffering as a result.