Whistleblower: Leave lobby ‘cheated’ its way to Brexit victory
A whistleblower claimed last night that the EU referendum result “wasn’t legitimate” because the “leave” campaign “cheated” by funnelling cash to a satellite group in a way that “wasn’t legal”.
Shahmir Sanni accused Stephen Parkinson of Vote Leave — now Theresa May’s political secretary — of engineering a £625,000 donation to BeLeave, the Brexit group for which he worked, then dictating that the money was spent on digital advertising.
In an interview with Channel 4 News, Sanni claimed the donation was designed to circumvent the limits on campaign spending: “I know that Vote Leave cheated . . . I know that people have been lied to and that the referen*dum wasn’t legitimate.”
Sanni and two others sent a 46-page dossier to the Electoral Commission on…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...y-cheated-its-way-to-brexit-victory-3bkvh0nxp
More rubbish from the Remoaners still trying to overturn a democratic decision after nearly two years. They keep coming up with all sorts of crap to try and somehow discredit the victorious Leavers but none of it works - certainly not in the eyes of the public.
If spending lots of money in the referendum campaign meant winning the referendum then Remain would easily have won, because they spent lots MORE than the Leave campaign - even the leaflets that were sent to almost every household in Britain to try to persuade people to vote Remain cost £9 million alone.
So it seems the Remainers were able to spend millions and millions, but an extra £625,000 spent by the Leavers is somehow a crime.
The Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal is the latest in a long line of excuses from those who – two years on – have yet to accept the democratic outcomes of the US presidential election and Britain’s EU referendum. Having exhausted their tedious theories about Trump winning thanks to the Russians, and Brexit thanks to a bus, now these people are talking up data company CA as the cause of the alleged political nightmares that are the Trump administration and Brexit Britain. Apparently Trump won courtesy of ‘Steve Bannon’s mind****ing tool’ – that is, CA – while sections of the Brexit campaign are said to have cheated by channelling money to a CA-linked firm.
These claims may have made international waves, but they look increasingly thin. This story could end up being an embarrassment for those who are pushing it. Here are five reasons everyone should calm down about Cambridge Analytica.
Big Data wasn’t always seen as a bad thing
The outrage over Cambridge Analytica’s data mining for political ends is not really about what they did – it’s about who they did it for. Before the Brexit and Trump earthquakes, social media were lionised for catalysing the Arab Spring, while Big Data was credited with putting Obama in the Oval Office. In 2012, the chattering classes gushed that data-driven strategy had put the soul back into politics and restored the primacy of the individual voter.
They’re only turning on Big Data now because it has ‘delivered’ – as they see it, anyway – results they don’t like. In their mind, the Cambridge Analytica ‘mind**** tool’ manipulated the plebs into voting the wrong way. If Hillary’s mind**** tools had been more successful, you can bet there would be celebrations right now over how Big Data gave America its first female president. So the very basis of this scare – that Big Data is inherently bad – is based on political bitterness, not cool-headed analysis.
Campaign spending doesn’t equal votes
The suggestion by Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr that the £625,000 in donations that was channelled by Vote Leave to a campaign called BeLeave and the CA-linked firm AggregateIQ effectively bought the EU referendum is perhaps the most risible of the accusations in this sorry saga.
If it were true that spending more money could ‘buy’ an election, then Remain would have won by a country mile. Electoral Commission figures put the total spending of all the various Remain campaigns at £4.6million higher than the spending of all the Leave campaigns. And that doesn’t include the cost of using the Whitehall machine to promote Remain – such as the £9.3million pro-Remain leaflet sent to 27million households, flying over Obama to deliver his pro-Remain sermon, or the now totally discredited Treasury analysis promising immediate recession and mass unemployment following a vote for Brexit. An extra £625,000 on data-mining, which doesn’t even work, was not wot won it.
Remain circumvented spending rules, too
The Observer’s two whistleblowers, Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni, insist that Vote Leave ‘cheated’ by funnelling the £625,000 from Vote Leave to BeLeave in order to flout campaign spending rules at the last minute. But Britain Stronger In Europe created five new groups to do exactly the same thing. This included The In Crowd and Best For Our Future. They split over £1million between them. Remain campaigners were fined by the Electoral Commission in December 2017 for the kind of accounting discrepancies Leave campaigners currently stand accused of. Why aren’t any of the whistleblowers and journalists up in arms about this? Because they are not pursuing a real journalistic investigation but rather a political crusade against a democratic decision they despise.
The Cambridge Analytica story is looking thinner by the day | British politics | For Europe, Against the EU | Science and technology | Social media | USA | spiked
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The great lie at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scare
Brendan O’Neill, Editor
Spiked
The idea that Brexit voters were sheep is the opposite of the truth.
26 March 2018
210 comments
There is a great lie at the heart of the unhinged panic about the role of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in the EU referendum. According to this conspiracy-theory narrative, data-mining groups like CA achieved ‘informational dominance’ in many voters’ lives, to such an extent that they could ‘change [voters’] perception of what’s actually happening’. Through exercising enormous power over the flow of information, these ‘dark, dystopian data companies’ came to play a ‘pivotal role in Brexit’. In the words of the
Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, the leading figure in this chattering-class conspiracy theory, they ‘
delivered Brexit’. That is, so great was their ‘voter-manipulation effort’ that it is not an exaggeration to say they are responsible for Brexit, as surely as the man who tells his dog to attack someone is responsible for that attack.
Let’s leave aside that these panickers about the demos really do view voters as the unwitting attack dogs of the wealthy and powerful, as malleable creatures who respond to the stimuli of filthy-rich populists. The more important point is that the narrative they are writing around Brexit is, ironically, an enormous act of misinformation. It is an act of Orwellian erasure of the truth of the recent past and its replacement with a lie. Two lies, in fact. Firstly that, courtesy of ‘dark’ but powerful networks, people came to be surrounded by Leave propaganda. Utterly untrue. The politics of Remain held far greater sway in public discussion, offline and online, in the run-up to the referendum. And secondly that many Brexit voters failed to think for themselves and instead fell victim to a ‘psyops operation’ and its ‘mass sentiment change’. This is a libel upon the electorate. Because in reality, British voters’ embrace of Brexit against the wishes of virtually the entire establishment represented one of the great acts of free, independent thought in the history of British political life.
There are many reasons we should be critical of the panic about data-mining and its ‘delivery’ of elections to sinister people who pay handsomely to ‘control mass sentiment’. It presents itself as a kind of anti-capitalist, anti-Big Tech, anti-elite initiative, but in truth it pushes a powerfully elitist view of ordinary people as easy prey for the powerful. As blank minds easily filled by the memes and messaging of ‘dark, dystopian’ groups. It calls into question the very ideal of democracy, because what is the point of asking the public its opinion if significant sections of the public are so hollow that they can allow themselves to become the playthings of ‘a member of the global 1%’, in Cadwalladr’s phrase? This Remoaner rage disguised as investigative journalism does far more to demean the value of democracy than any fat-cat paying millions of pounds to spread memes ever could.
But the most important reason to challenge the CA narrative is because it aims to rewrite the past. It is itself an act of dishonest propaganda that seeks to encourage public misremembering of the Brexit moment. The idea that Leave attained informational dominance in the run-up to the referendum, that its sly, clever messaging became the wallpaper of many people’s lives, is a myth. In truth, Remainers and their plea to keep Britain tied to the EU dominated public life. Every mainstream political party campaigned for Remain. The then two leaders of the nation – David Cameron and George Osborne – publicly agitated for Remain. An extraordinary 90 per cent of academics backed Remain. Close to 75 per cent of MPs backed Remain, and let it be known, both offline in speeches and online via tweets and Facebook posts. The House of Lords, in the words of one report, had a ‘huge in-built pro-Remain majority’. And the business world backed Remain. Often with a lot of money. According to one survey, 72 per cent of big-business CEOs backed Remain. This included the bosses of Cisco, Diageo, GlaxoSmithKline, Virgin and Rolls Royce.
The truth of the referendum period is that Britain’s political class, capitalist class and educational elite – the overseers of public and intellectual life – called for Remain. The establishment threw its weight, its power, its money and its arguments behind Remain. If there was ‘informational dominance’ in early 2016, it was by Remain. Or certainly the key message of the time was the idea that Remain was the good, respectable choice that would save Britain from economic and political ruin. The memes of populists paled into insignificance in comparison with the relentless pro-EU propaganda of the establishment. Cadwalladr and others complain about those ‘members of the global 1%’ who spent money on Leave ads, but never mention the 72 per cent of ‘the 1%’ who pleaded for Remain.
Was this not also a ‘voter-manipulation effort’? Or, in the view of those of us who believe ordinary people have the capacity to think for themselves, an effort at persuasion? Why is it ‘voter manipulation’ when a breakaway section of the business elite pays for Facebook memes but not when the vast bulk of the business elite backs pro-EU propaganda? Why is social-media information-gathering and ad-posting a ‘dystopian’ effort at changing ‘mass sentiment’, while the use of the politics of fear by the capitalist class and the political class is normal politics? Because in the view of the embittered Remainer elite, still balking 20 months later at the defiance of voters, everything their side does is good, or at least acceptable, while everything the other side did was in some way sinister. And they have the neck to accuse others of disseminating simplistic propaganda.
The reality of the referendum era and of the supremacy of Remain thinking in establishment circles detonates the second and the worst prejudice of the panic about Cambridge Analytica: that the Brexit plebs, dim voters, were misled like sheep to vote in a particular way. When the anti-CA conspiracy theorists say data-miners ‘delivered Brexit’, that the referendum result is invalid because it was the product of ‘lies and deceit’, this is what they mean: that malleable ‘mass sentiment’ was warped by dark forces and therefore the result must be undone. They are saying this referendum result is invalid because sections of the electorate are child-like, possibly animal-like, and they responded slavishly to memes and orders from on high. This is the precise opposite of the truth.
In reality, the Brexit vote demonstrated the resistance of the public to powerful political messaging. It showed that ordinary people are not the clueless, unwitting fodder of the powerful that middle-class elitists imagine us to be, but rather that we are capable of thinking for ourselves and deciding, as individuals and communities, to reject the overtures of those who are wealthier, more influential and, in their view anyway, better placed than us to make big political decisions. More than any other election of recent times, and perhaps since the expansion of the franchise 100 years ago, the Brexit result confirmed the public’s capacity for free thought. It was proof of the value and wisdom of democracy. The rewriting of this referendum as an exercise in the manipulation of mass sentiment is a grave insult to voters and to the historical record itself, for what this referendum really confirmed is just how immune ‘mass sentiment’ is to the patronising, technocratic diktats of those who have dominated society for decades now.
Indeed, this is why they are still in meltdown about the result. This is why they are pumping so many resources into uncovering the ‘dark, dystopian’ forces that must have poisoned our brains. Because they sense, rightly, that their ability to dominate the political and public narrative is weaker now than it has been for years. Their stranglehold over political information and political life has been loosened, and by the rough, non-
Guardian reading public of all people. They have been rebelled against, and they are so horrified by that, so disgusted by it, that they will try to rewrite that rebellion as an act of mass sheepish conformism. Don’t they know yet that we’re not as stupid as they think and that we won’t fall for their low, anti-demos political claims? We will resist this new nasty narrative as surely and reasonably as we resisted their fear-driven propaganda for Remain.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of
spiked. Follow him on Instagram:
@burntoakboy
The great lie at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scare | British politics | For Europe, Against the EU | Politics | spiked
