Friday, December 07, 2007

European Commission: Let's Pay You to Lobby Us

Every now and again you hear a piece of journalism that is simply jaw-dropping in its revelation. Last night was a case in point, where on the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Investigation’ revealed that the EU funds lobby groups from taxpayers money that in turn lobby the European Parliament. Green groups in particular seem to be favoured ideological pals.

Listen to the programme again HERE.

UPDATE: The ever lovely Richard North points out that the splendificent EU Referendum blog covered this in July HERE.

25 comments:

Tory Radio said...

Our local MEP Roger Helmer pointed this kind of thing out last month:- http://rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/corporatism-a-huge-threat-to-democracy/

And took the time to record his thoughts here:-

http://toryradio.podbus.com/rogerhelmeragora.mp3

Beggars belief doesn't it!

Prodicus said...

... **in order** that they can **afford** to lobby the Euro Parliament.

I thought I must have tuned to the wrong radio station, it was so good.

Richard said...

Yeah, right! As revealed by EU Referendum on 18 July, run by Booker on 22 July and then picked up by The Telegraph on 18 August. Nice to see the BBC catching up at last.

Richard said...

Thank you Iain! We also covered it here (18 August),
here (22 September), here (25 October),
here (7 November) and again here (12 November).

Anonymous said...

If Iain you really don't know why this is the case, and you really do want to know why it is very much the case.

Then read and fully understand the rest of this statement. Otherwise stop complaining about something both you, your party and most of all, your leader chooses to ignore completely.

The EU is a NWO MASONIC organization from the top to is very bottom. If you dont know what the NEW WORLD ORDER is you are ignorant of the only important fact their is.

Which is the key to understanding virtually every silly crazy thing that constantly happens on this planet.

The NWO promotes MMGW as a financial scam of nation bankrupting proportions. It has invested 25 years of educational planning and disinformation costing many billions already. So pay back time is only around the corner.

One of the EUs biggest fans was Winston Churchill who was about as high up in the masonic orders as it is possible to be without being a direct member of the British Royal family.

Higher indeed then even Gordon Brown Edward Heath Harold Wilson or Tony Blair.

Winston never did have a problem with European Hegemony he just did not want Hitler to be running the show. He believed the natural inheritors of Europe was the French and the British tied closely to his rich banking cousins in the USA.

For this country under any prime minister that now does not go along with the plan is quite literally a dead man walking.

Thatcher was a big mistake and Major an even bigger one for the NWO. That they will never allow to happen ever in this country, under any conditions, ever again. They just do not have the time left to wast anymore.

Cameron has come on line with his GREEN agenda which is the only possible way he would be allowed to get elected.

AS he has, he will get elected because the Labour Party are quite frankly becoming an embarrassment for all concerned.

The MMGW issue may to some seem like a minor one. But in this corrupt command and control crazy world we now live in. It is the most important issue there currently is. By a perfectly enormous margin.

The ruling elites fund all the green parties though direct cash and charitable foundations. Just like they had done every radical group in history one way or another.

It may seem strange that the major champions of Globalisation are funding their main political opposition. But thats how the masonic orders have always operated. By controlling all sides of the political debate, so the resulting answers are always almost always exactly what the plan requires.

They are going to use this issue to change Europe and the world into a completely undemocratic nightmare of a one party, one state, one leader, one bank, one god, one religion, FASCIST dictatorship.

Or Cameron will be out on his ear within one term at best.

I ask you very politely to do as much research on the different Masonic orders that have been running most of this world for hundreds of years, as you can. Then do the same for the E.U. the U.N., N.A.F.T.A. and the Great Global Warming Scam, all the worlds Central Banks, and whats really going down in China.

If you still think this is all just conspiracy theory. Then at least I can say I achieved something by forcing you to think for a change, instead of you just following your nose though your political life.

I challenge you and every one else, that does not know what I am talking about, to do the same.

Before it is too late to save you and your families from a fate possibly worse then death.

Because we cant stop these people but we may be able to stop them taking the absolute proverbial bloody piss, for once.

James Higham said...

Doesn't surprise. The sooner we dump these leeches, the EU and set up England again, the better.

There's been a proposal to set up Tyburn again for the likes of Brown and Blair.

Anonymous said...

This is as good as the Labour Party receiving a grant of £183,000 from taxpayer's money to train its staff about the law on Donations, BEFORE any of the Abraham's donations. Obviously another complete waste of taxpayer's money.

Surreptitious Evil said...

El Beeb claim, in private, to have picked this up from, indeed, Richard's blog via reading Tim Worstall.

Of course, being the MSM and chock-full of journalist integrity and professional rigour (unlike us mere amateurs), sources were thoroughly acknowledged ...

Man in a Shed said...

So just like the Union modernisation fund then. The government takes the money from tax payers ( mostly Tory by amount contributed is my guess ), gives it to the Unions who give it back to the Labour party.

The technical term here is money laundering.

Anonymous said...

Whenever one feels anxiety about the staggering waste, incompetence and malice of our own political and public sectors, one need only look across the Channel to our beloved unelected and unnacountable StrassElsOcracy, who will leave no stone unturned in their relentless quest to find new ways to assume that our money is theirs and to waste it in the most profligate, corrupt and self-serving ways possible.

The old medieval Papacy had nothing on this lot. For sheer professionalism in their approach to mendacious exploitation of the humble toilers (us in case you're wondering) who provide their cash, we award them many kudos points in the Grand Old Orders of The Holy Exploiters of History. Bravo!

Anonymous said...

I am not sure I approve of our Government broadcaster branching out into journalism.

Whatever next!

Anonymous said...

All I want to know is: where do I sign up to become a Lobbyist?
raincoaster

Laban said...

Don't forget the kids lib charities - NSPCC, Barnados, NCH etc, who get a large amount of Government funding and act as lobby groups for changes to laws - such as making it illegal to smack a child, raising age of criminal responsibility/lowering age of consent, voting age etc. They also pass on funds to people like the Children's Rights Alliance.

Then there are all the lefty think tanks - IPPR, Demos etc who are paid by government for 'research' - obviously at market rates after a competetive tendering process :-)

Tim Worstall said...

Indeed, the Beeb did pick up the story from EU Referendum via a link from my blog.
That specific show (and its producer) get quite a lot of stuff from blogs.
Yes, wouldn't it be lovely if they said "this story brought to you by blog X" but that isn't they way it works: I'm perfectly happy with the thought that they're picking up ideas and treatments and then using the resources they have to cover the story properly.

Anonymous said...

Well personally I'm not happy for them to do this, about 95% of MSM output is incredibly feeble, irrelevant garbage, despite their 'resources', and an increasing amount of the more worthwhile and incisive material is now simply stolen unattributed from authors on the internet.
To top it off you then get some hacks belittling these web sources they steal from.
Hacks stealing from each other is of course the norm and after all they get paid for it.

Richard said...

The only trouble is, Tim, they made a crap job of the story wrongly attributing it to the EU's "Plan D for Democracy" - when the payments pre-date that initiative by many years. See here. Thus, what is a far more interesting story, they missed altogether.

What sickens me is how they actually come to the story late, only get it half right, and then preeen themselves about how "the BBC has learned".

Anonymous said...

I have dealings with one of these EU-funded groups which lobby the EU – this one was set up with EU funds specifically for the purpose! We are a minority group which has had for some time a dedicated unit in a semi-related directorate at Brussels (it isn’t about social justice, it’s about productivity). The unit got funding for a European network of networks. Yes, its purpose appears to be to lobby for the changes (including increased funding) that the unit has been asking for, but looking at it from the other direction, isn’t it part of the unit’s obligations to gather the opinions from us living the life? And in a way that gives a fair hearing to those of us most scattered and disadvantaged, and not just the bigger longer-standing groups in the richer, more advanced countries?

We could not have afforded this network ourselves, and we have little hope of raising money from the general public. We needed (and will make good use of) tax-payers’ money. We would have liked it without the ties to that directorate so that we could follow our own priorities, but getting it this way is better than nothing.

Richard said...

Mr Anonymous says: "We could not have afforded this network ourselves, and we have little hope of raising money from the general public. We needed ... tax-payers’ money."

My heart bleeds...

Anonymous said...

I am no lover of Mugabe's chaotic self-enriching dictatorship but wanted to share with you the latest Euro-news, the EU in the shape of Chancellor Merkel accuses Mugabe (with apologies for quoting directly from the BBC website) this evening - "Mrs Merkel has been tasked with expressing the EU's concerns about the situation in Zimbabwe, where Mr Mugabe is accused of economic mismanagement, failure to curb corruption and contempt for democracy."

As opposed to us here in the EU, who are routinely accused of economic mismanagement, failure to curb corruption and contempt for democracy. It's all so different!

Anonymous said...

Be wary of motives here - the EU are being attacked for funding groups that represent the disabled, single mothers, etc, giving them a voice. This is against a background of corporate lobbyists spending billions in Brussels to get their way, and all too frequently getting it. Would you have condemned the Jews for funding David against Goliath?

Richard said...

Mr Anonymous

Your naïveté is quite staggering - the EU is spending our money to create a European political discourse, thus seeking to legitimise its own lack of democracy.

It is subverting representative democracy by seeking to replace it with a pastiche of participative democracy, funding favoured lobbyist as part of "organised civil society".

That way, it can control the message - up and down.

As for David, I believe he won!

Anonymous said...

Richard - the EU is already a pastiche of democracy because it is dominated by highly paid corporate lobbyists. More than 3 billion Euros were apparently spent by lobbyists in Brussels last year. Against that background, giving a bit of money to environmental groups so they can print reports hardly seems the worse crime ever. Tories often seem to be easy prey themselves for the corporations, accepting the corporate-inspired propaganda line without question. A world dominated by just ten mega-corporate monopolies and their paid "commissioners" is not a conservative ideal, what about small businesses, diversity, the struggle of ideas and liberty?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

"Would you have condemned the Jews for funding David against Goliath?"

No, and I would have chosen to contribute myself.

What has that to do with lefty governments use tax money to fund lefty minority groups to finance lefty causes?

Richard said...

Mr Anonymous is at it again: "...Against that background, giving a bit of money to environmental groups..."

The classic cry of the rentier.
He means giving a bit of OUR money...!!

Helen said...

Anonymous @ 11.00 a.m.

The EU is not even a pastiche of democracy - it is not a democracy of any kind because of its structure and the way it legislates for all of us. The lobbying is only part of it, not the main reason. The idea of taxpayers' money being used in order to fund fairly powerful NGOs and lobbying groups who, undoubtedly, have everybody's best interests at heart, as long as those interests are controlled by the lobbyists and NGOs (often indistinguishable) being somehow related to conservative values, puzzles me. Do you know how much trouble small businesses encounter from the regulations passed by the caring EU after being lobbied by the environmetal groups they have subsidized? And freedom? Is that not somehow related to property rights?

By the way, are you the same Anonymous throughout this thread or are there many more like you?