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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I’ve lost all respect for the rspb along with many so called wildlife conservation charities, why?, because they all believe in gigantic bird choppers!
Not long ago I had a conversation with the head of the irish bat conservation group and his response to thousands on bats being killed by wind turbines was “well, what alternative is there?”
How about, stick with what you have until something better/ more viable comes along?
But no, bats must die in the name of saving…well…bats!
I had a similar conversation recently with a young activist manning an RSPB stall, trying to recruit members/donations.
I told her I’d consider it when the RSPB started campaigning against the windmills which are slaughtering thousands of birds, including raptors and endangered sea-birds every year.
She was stunned that I had dared call the “charity” out for betraying it’s declared purpose: saving birds.
First question for any charity asking for your hard-earned cash:
How much is your CEO paid?
Nice one!
Or “what do you actually do” as opposed to lobbying.
“How much is your CEO paid?”
That is the question I always ask. If the answer is over £50 k they don’t need my money. Actually I have had to revise that slightly – I never give cash to any charity.
The local hospice shop is used as a recycling centre for our unwanted clothes but that is as far as it goes.
Large charities, tax payer funded ones and quangos have been run by my the left for years. Conservative Party governments have reinforced this rather than eliminating it.
clearly the same has happened in Whitehall where resistance to any policy vaguely supported by the public is stalked, stopped or perverted to their policy agenda.
Common Purpose infiltration.
The best way to protect wildlife in the UK is to stop the mass immigration, both legal and illegal, thus reducing housing demand. But I doubt the lefties at the RSPB would agree with that…..
“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….”
Which is why I continue to point out that donations to charities are just secondary taxation for the gullible.
£190,000 for a so-called charity boss?
The solution to this matter is quite simple – remove the RSPB’s charitable status.
Sorted.
I bet she works from home as well?!🙂
I’ve subscribed to the RSPB for years, but now thinking of cancelling
Do it. Don’t give them a penny to contribute to the almost £200,000 paid to their CEO.
I’ve just cancelled my direct debit. I’ll wait for them to contact me, then let them know that I do not want to pay a Labour Party membership fee. I want to protect birds, not leftie lecturers.
Best to get in touch and let them know why you cancelled as they might not ask and attribute it to natural loss to plausibly deny association with this event or play-down the reaction if it is significant.
It wouldn’t be the only cancelled direct debit and email commenting on left-wing activism they get today.
When you cancel a charity direct debit, they’ll be on the phone pronto. I discovered my elderly parents, neither of whom are well, were paying something like £600 a year to two charities on direct debit. I cancelled them on a Saturday and the phone started ringing first thing on Monday morning and continued to do so regularly for about three months. These large charities are bloodsuckers. I told my parents not to feel guilty: it’s for working people to give to charity if they choose. As pensioners in their 70s and 80s, they’ve done their bit!
Good to hear Valerie! Maybe see if there’s some sort of local bird sanctuary or similar you could contribute to instead. My rule is to give to small local charities rather than the corporate giants. 🙂
Stick to eating our avian chums.
Interesting how many of these gobby left wing activists are urban dwellers… They know jack s t about the countryside beyond it being somewhere to go out for the day looking for long-abandoned public footpaths so they can deliberately walk across private land.
‘They forgot the birds!’
Is this the reason I was deluged with RSPB propaganda over the summer, all based on Climate Change? I would have thought that the RSPB (and the NT for that matter) would have deemed Climate Change to be a toxic issue, best avoided in their publicity.
Stop giving them taxpayers money, and if necessary strip them of their charitable status – except we know full well that the Tories have less spine than a jellyfish.
First question to RSPB….. What is the bird death count arising from wind turbines? Does anybody count the bodies?
P45 on the way for Carey- Dawes. The RSPB and RNLI about to become the Bud- Lites of charities.