Play the Voice of Reason

On as Old Right a website as it is possible to imagine, Bonnie Kristian writes:

In a column at The Week in December, I argued that the endlessly aggressive foreign policy Republican hawks advocate lets President Obama get away with murder. 

When neoconservatives elements in the GOP go out of their way to insist that Obama—now the president who has kept America at war the longest—is basically a pacifist, they make it easy for the president to pass himself off as a foreign policy moderate: 

[W]ith a debate framed by Republican hawks’ incessant griping over the president’s supposed weakness, Obama is able to present his foreign policy as eminently reasonable — even restrained. 

“The measure of strength internationally is not simply by how many countries we’re occupying, or how many missiles we’re firing,” Obama said in early November, “but the strength of our diplomacy and the strength of our commitment to human rights and our belief that we’ve got to cooperate with other countries together to solve massive problems like terrorism but also like climate change.” 

But it’s only in contrast to the GOP hawks’ “bomb everything, everywhere, all the time” agenda that Obama’s actual foreign policy can be convincingly presented as strength through diplomacy, human rights, and cooperation. 

War in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria) and varying degrees of military intervention in at least four more (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) are not the marks of an isolationist president. 

The same thing is happening on the campaign trail, too, as Donald Trump’s over-the-top aggression paves the way for uber-hawk Hillary Clinton to pretend she’s the reasonable foreign policy choice. 

Of course, Trump sometimes hits the right notes on foreign policy. As Rare’s Jack Hunter points out, Trump has challenged foreign policy orthodoxy in several valuable ways. 

Unfortunately, he doesn’t stop there. 

In fact, the bulk of Trump’s foreign policy is beyond the pale, straying into territory where even the most unrepentant neocons (well, perhaps excepting Tom Cotton) fear to tread. 

As Jack summarizes, “Every shrewd criticism out of Trump mouths is accompanied by an avalanche of horrible, undesirable and morally indefensible positions.”

The upshot of this is a yuuuuge boon to one Hillary Clinton.

You see, Clinton—as Trump himself has rightly observed—has an appalling foreign policy record, hawkish and reckless at every turn. She has actually done a lot of the terrible things Donald Trump wants to do. 

But with the cover of Trump’s endlessly aggressive rhetoric, Clinton, like Obama, is able to pass herself off as a foreign policy moderate. And don’t imagine she’s unaware of this incredible advantage. 

Here’s a piece from the Washington Post this morning which offers a preview of what the general election debates in a Trump vs. Clinton race will be like: 

Clinton has begun making that argument more forcefully as her long primary battle grinds to a close. 

She will deliver what her campaign calls a major foreign policy address in California on Thursday, focused both on her ideas and leadership credentials and on what she will describe as the threat Trump poses to national security. 

“Clinton will rebuke the fear, bigotry and misplaced defeatism that Trump has been selling to the American people,” an aide said. 

“She will make the affirmative case for the exceptional role America has played and must continue to play in order to keep our country safe and our economy growing.” […] 

In an election where Clinton should (and, perhaps were she running against another candidate, would) be getting skewered day and night for her support for the invasion of Iraq and orchestration of the intervention in Libya, she will be applauded for offering voters an option of supposed restraint. 

That’s a serious tragedy for the American foreign policy conversation. 

As Trump has said, Clinton “talks about me being dangerous [but] she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.” 

True enough—but in the face of rhetoric like Trump’s, Clinton will be able to easily—though falsely—play the voice of reason.

Turn Off The Dalai Show

Some of us have been trying for years to warn you against the Dalai Lama.

He is a nasty piece of work.

One wonders quite what he has to say or do for that point to be made in certain people's minds.

Between A Rock

The media always knew about Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and the Paedophile Information Exchange.

They said nothing while those people were in government, and I remain blocked from several notable websites for having mentioned it back when it mattered.

But then Patrick Rock was arrested, and they pretended to have discovered it in order to distract attention.

Even today, they are scarcely mentioning the conviction of a man who was at the heart of Downing Street under the present Prime Minister.

Worthy of Examination and Explanation

Michael White writes: 

Why is the simmering batch of election fraud accusations against the Conservatives 2015 campaign team not making more of an impact in the mainstream media?

It’s a good question and conspiracy theorists everywhere have already come up with their default answer. It’s a plot. 

With an eye-catching fresh allegation around on Wednesday – it’s untested but has caught my attention – all this may be about to change. 

No, I don’t mean the coroner’s suicide verdict on the young Tory activist Elliott Johnson, though that would be a wholesome development too. 

Part of my theory as to why coverage has been low-key is that when one media outlet is making much of the running – Channel 4 News and Mike Crick this time, plus the Mirror – other mainstream media are reluctant to take up a rival’s campaign or seek to rubbish it. 

We’ve seen that at the Guardian over issues such as phone hacking and Edward Snowden’s revelations about data mining surveillance. 

It’s common enough, as journalists know. 

At least the Tory election story has been picked up by the system, as Private Eye’s paedophile stories were not in the 90s. 

There’s another obvious explanation this spring. 

There’s been a lot of news about and even sophisticated and well-funded newspapers, radio and TV companies (they’re all under the financial cosh) can only handle one or two big stories at a time.

Tax fraud, terrorist attacks, immigration and people smuggling, the rise of Trump, and of course Britain’s own Brexit debate, it’s been pretty lively. 

Here’s C4’s latest update from its website. Here’s a very fair Guardian summary of the story so far and why media treat it warily: fear of libel. Plus a recent update. 

As you can see (and may already have known), the allegations – now being investigated by dozens of overstretched police forces  – centre around that boring but important discipline, accountancy.

The Tories are fighting it.

Should those battlebuses full of eager party “volunteers” sent to key marginal seats the Tories needed to win for that slender 5 May majority have been charged (their hotel bills too) to the constituency’s election expenses tally rather than to the national campaign, as they were in 2015? 

That’s pretty serious. Investigations could lead to prosecutions and possibly byelections. The Tories could lose their majority. 

What a turn-up in a turbulent world. 

Tory HQ insists that the volunteers’ expenses were part of the wider national campaign so all is well, though David Cameron is – too late – starting to send out uneasy vibes, see his Robert Peston interview on ITV. 

I stress that the police, who have been given extra time by the Electoral Commission, are only at the investigation stage with no charges laid, let alone proved.

Wednesday’s instalment, billed as an exclusive by the Canary news website, opens up what looks like a significant new front, by claiming that people acting for the party also broke election law in regard to the private polling they are allowed to do during campaigns within strict limits about how they do them.

What’s at issue here is known as “push polling,” the US Republican-pioneered technique whereby you seek to influence the result of a poll by the way you frame the question. 

“Do you favour Britain leaving the EU to become a proud, sovereign state again instead of a puny province of Europe run by crooks and toadies?” would be one example of the genre. 

I emphasise that I can’t vouch for what Canary’s whistleblower is saying here – he’s said to be a man who worked on the highly targeted polling and says it breached guidelines – but it looks a solid piece of work, worthy of examination and explanation. 

Whether or not the cost of the disputed work was all declared on the party’s overall election expenses is a further sub-plot which just may be above a young whistleblower’s pay grade.

But what his bosses told him to say probably isn’t.

Ex-Tory Ukipper Mark Reckless, now a Welsh assembly member, made similar claims after he was defeated in Rochester last May.

The Canary investigation has dug into assorted expense claims and activities in several such seats crucial to Cameron’s success.

It’s worth noting in passing that polling firms linked to Jim Messina, the American political consultant who worked for Obama but was hired by Cameron, are in the frame here.

That too may or may not prove significant.

His former colleague, the more idealistic David Axelrod, who did a bit of work for Ed Miliband, calls Messina a hired gun. 

On the radio silence dimension, the New Statesman set out a reasonable explanation here as to why this has not been bigger news.

It has been reported and the Daily Mail is periodically on the case in its savage way.

It doesn’t like Lord Feldman, Dave’s Oxford and tennis pal who is also party chairman. Nor does the Mirror. 

I would add two modest further points of explanation. 

One is that political parties nowadays are run from the centre as permanent campaigns, poll-driven and slick. 

Most of those in charge are young and relative newcomers, not the old sweats of legend in all parties who knew the rules inside out, what you could get away with or not. 

So Cameron’s crew may be calculating rascals. They may also prove to be more hapless innocents. 

We’ll find out, though no sensible police force will rush to overturn an election result. Playing politics has already cost the Police Federation, the coppers’ union, much grief. 

There’s another possible explanation. Jeremy Corbyn is famously not keen to play the man rather than the ball. 

This is admirable and evident at PMQs where Flashman Dave plays both at once when he kicks Labour’s man in the balls.

Russia Today (RT) is understandably keen on the story, retaliation for the unkind things we say about the Putin way of winning.

So if Corbyn doesn’t make a fuss and leaves it to the SNP, Mike Crick and Russia Today, who will take up the charge?

Ed Miliband perhaps, it was his election defeat after all so it should be personal. 

It might even provide a welcome respite from Brexit madness.

In Bringing To Light

Vindicating Jeremy Corbyn and the Morning Star (a lone voice at the time), Zachary Gallant writes:

Last week, the New York Times published a well-researched, convincing article by Carlotta Gall on the radicalization and politicization of Islam in Kosovo.

With seemingly overwhelming evidence, the article lays the blame quite clearly on Saudi Arabia and the Kosovar officials who ignored the warnings of US diplomats against taking Saudi aid.

In bringing to light a major problem in this formerly tolerant, constitutionally-secular society and the money trail of Islamic radicalization, Ms. Gall performs an invaluable public service.

As with most works by the New York Times on Kosovo, though, despite all of its positive elements it contains within itself a fatal flaw: the New York Times has a wholly unhidden love for all things Clinton.

The administration responsible for the policies that made Kosovo what it is today was one William Jefferson Clinton under Richard Holbrooke’s deified model.

Readers of the New York Times who are not deeply familiar with the occupation of Kosovo might not notice what is missing, which is why these lapses must be addressed. 

In ignoring the massively important influence that those same US officials had in creating the factors on the ground that allowed and led directly to the ease with which that radicalization took place, they permit NATO occupations to result in radicalization again and again. 

In Ms. Gall’s article, the love of the Kosovars for America and for NATO occupation goes unquestioned, as though every single Kosovar remains thankful to their obvious saviors, the West.

The article’s very first sentence, 

“Every Friday, just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store,” 

is then underscored by the full-page picture of Bill Clinton Boulevard in the capital Pristina, where a billboard of President Clinton, with US flag behind him, welcomes the viewer. 

After seven paragraphs of explanations of the Islamist situation in Kosovo today comes the sentence: 

“It is a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo.” 

The rest of the article is an explanation of how the Saudis and Arabs bought their way in, as “where the Americans saw a chance to create a new democracy, the Saudis saw a new land to spread Wahhabism.”

Yes, generous, idealist America, coming in to this poor Muslim land to liberate it from its savage Slavic oppressors just for the sake of democracy.

This is the general New York Times approach to any form of writing about Kosovo, including top US diplomats and NATO generals buying up the country’s resources at bargain prices as a boom to the economy. 

The acquisitions included:

• Former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright nearly securing a monopoly on Kosovo’s telecommunications firms
• Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, US General Wesley Clark, getting shares in huge portions of Kosovo’s energy market
• Clinton-Global-Initiative advisor Bechtel getting the most lucrative infrastructure deal in Kosovo’s history
• Panama-Papers-linked, Clinton-affiliated Podesta Group being given an expensive advisory role for the country’s government as a boon to the country’s economy

Based on Ms. Gall’s rigorous research it seems certain that Saudi Arabia financed the rise of political Islam in Kosovo.

But just as these corrupt deals by former Clinton officials would not have been possible without the decade of NATO occupation that preceded them, nor would the Saudi money funnel have been nearly as effective in radicalizing the country.

Despite the New York Times’ phrasing, America did not make Kosovo a democracy, not by the furthest stretches of the imagination.

It should be remembered that NATO’s intervention in Kosovo did not even give the Kosovars an opportunity to pretend that they were participating in a democracy of their choosing until 2009. 

For a decade, all decisions were made by NATO and the UN. Even the Kosovar constitution was written not by a citizen or a group of citizens but by a Finnish diplomat, Martti Ahtisaari, the entire process known as the Ahtisaari Plan.

Noam Chomsky was disgusted by:

“the exuberance the war elicited in Western intellectual circles and the tidal wave of self-adulation by respected voices, lauding the first war in history fought ‘in the name of principles and values,’ the first bold step towards a ‘new era’ in which the ‘enlightened states’ will protect the human rights of all under the guiding hand of an ‘idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity,’ now freed from the shackles of archaic concepts of world order.”

His disapproval is well-justified by the article that this paragraph begins. In it, he finds fault with NATO’s political logic in taking pains to document every war crime to provide justification for their invasion because: 

“the vast crimes took place after the bombing began: they were not a cause but a consequence. It requires considerable audacity, therefore, to take the crimes to provide retrospective justification for the actions that contributed to inciting them.”

Chomsky spends his article arguing, quite eloquently and with convincing evidence, that any war crimes committed in the conflict in Kosovo were either NATO’s or precipitated by NATO’s bombing campaign. 

Chomsky speaks from the anti-imperialist left, but his postulates are supported by a surprising source: NATO General Klaus Naumann. 

In his testimony to the UK’s House of Commons Defence Select Committee on the facts on the ground in Kosovo, Naumann declares:

“I think it is fair to say that Milosevic honoured the commitment which he had made to General Clark and myself on 25 October 1998.  He withdrew the forces and he withdrew the police. There may have been some difference as to whether there were 200 or 400 policemen more or less but that really does not matter. More or less he honoured the commitment. Then the UJK or KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] filled the void the withdrawn Serb forces had left and they escalated. I have stated this in the NATO Council in October and November repeatedly. In most cases, the escalation came from the Kosovar side, not from the Serb side.”

Flying in the face of the rhetoric of the Western saviors concerned for the fate of the Kosovo Albanian Muslims, the crisis of this post-partum justification gets worse as we dig deeper. 

Such political doublespeak as the politicization of the term “genocide” in the Balkans is a travesty with such delicate topics as human rights abuse, ethnic cleansing and war crimes, yet would be par for the course in NATO-allied politics. 

In 2000, as exhumations in NATO-occupied Kosovo neared their end, Paul Risley, The Hague tribunal’s press spokesman, reported that “The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand.” 

This number flies in the face of NATO rhetoric, where spokespeople reported the Serbs had killed at least 10,000 civilians, and discredits the ludicrous charge by US Secretary of Defense William Cohen that 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and “may have been murdered,” an attempt to draw parallels to, and then exceed, Srebrenica. 

Not only are human rights not a universal value, the seemingly universal language of human rights within those communities and societies that value human rights is not universal. 

The universal language of humanitarianism is deeply manipulable and has an atrocious history of legitimating imperial expansion and the worst human rights abuses. 

If humanitarians, having already given rise to this military-humanitarian complex with their hijacked idealism, seek to do actual good in the world, to truly champion those human rights, a great deal more care must be taken in both discussing and acting on human rights abuses. 

This abuse of humanitarian rhetoric has not simply been used to villainize the Serbs. 

It has been used to remove the rights of the people of Kosovo to their own self-determination, shifting the power from Serbia to NATO. 

If it is true that the International Community ended the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, then for that they should be commended, though again it has been argued by many like Professor David Gibbs of the University of Arizona that NATO pressure caused the ethnic cleansing, and once again by NATO General Klaus Naumann that siding with the Kosovo Liberation Army covered up greater atrocities and aggression against the local Serbs. 

But the West’s true failure in Kosovo came not necessarily from the military incursion but from ignoring the advice and example of the community of veteran aid workers, volunteers, expats and non-political locals that had already been working in the area. 

Professionalism is important. 

In diplomacy, education, security, policy-making, professionals are the backbone of progress and consistency in their fields, and their contributions should not be underestimated. 

Yet too often, it is precisely the opposite that occurs: we forget that professionals are often wrong and we listen exclusively to their conventional wisdom. 

David is an eloquent British prison-warden-turned-travel-agent who used to smuggle goods to civilians in the former Yugoslavia during the wars. 

He drove a truck full of coats, food, medical supplies, whatever the refugees needed and he could get. He was not UN, not Red Cross. 

He knew how to talk to all sides of a conflict, whom to trust and how to interpret lies. “The roads were said to be impassible… so we went that way.” 

And he knew how to talk to the charitable individuals in uninvolved countries who wanted to help but didn’t trust the humanitarian community.

David once convinced a British magistrate to put a hold on a burn order (prescribed by law) on confiscated counterfeit Nike clothing and instead let him deliver them out of country to freezing Bosnian refugees. He got a plumber to donate the ductwork to a Balkan orphanage. 

David organized logistics and delivered the goods and when the conflict or dire need was over, David got out and went back to planning people’s vacations and let the fledgling nations develop their own economies. 

But the international community did not follow David’s example and for the first decade after Kosovo’s “liberation”, it was laughable to call the situation “sovereignty” or even “statehood”, much less “freedom” or “prosperity”. 

NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) began occupying then-sovereign Yugoslav land in 1999 for purportedly humanitarian reasons. At its peak, this force numbered 50,000 troops. 

When Kosovo finally declared independence in 2008, KFOR still numbered 14,000 active troops (the country won’t have its own military until 2019, at which point its army will only be as large as the current NATO forces). 

KFOR’s initial mandate was to: deter hostility and threats against Kosovo by Serb forces establish and maintain a secure environment in Kosovo, including public safety and civil order demilitarize the Kosovo Liberation Army support the international humanitarian effort and coordinate with and support the international civil presence.

Over time, however, their mandate expanded to include:

• reconstruction
• protection of holy/historical sites 
• medical assistance border 
• security interdiction of cross-border weapons 
• smuggling
• and support for establishment of civilian institutions, law and order, judicial and penal system, electoral process and other aspects of political, economic and social life

KFOR went from a military presence intended, ostensibly, for the protections of civilians and assistance of international civilian presence, to a ruling military presence filling nearly all roles, including those meant for civilians, ruling via martial law through the guise of humanitarianism for 12 years, even after Kosovo declared independence. 

Today, KFOR maintains a presence of around 5,000 troops. Perhaps this is justifiable in the eyes of the international community. After all, Kosovo’s parliament dissolved itself in 2010 after only two years. 

Their Prime Minister has been charged with mafia ties and organ smuggling from Serb prisoners of war and civilians during the conflict, and the International Court of Justice is still wavering on Kosovo’s legitimacy, nonbindingly ruling their 2008 declaration of independence legal, but avoiding saying that the state of Kosovo was legal under international law.

ICJ President Hisashi Owada said that international law contained no “prohibition on declarations of independence” and therefore Kosovo’s declaration “did not violate international law,” utterly sidestepping the vital question of whether Kosovo was in fact a sovereign nation, or a nation at all. 

Yet KFOR was not the only, or even the worst, injustice visited by the international community upon Kosovo. 

The International Civilian Representative for Kosovo ruled the country like a colonial governor until 2012, making decrees as to what the international rulers would permit the country’s citizens and government to do, decrees backed by KFOR’s remaining 5,000 troops. 

And what has this occupation by and selling off of assets to the Americans and NATO brought the people of Kosovo? 

The world’s 143^rd best economy (just above Haiti) with between 30%-45% of Kosovars living under the poverty line and 17% in extreme poverty, a 45% unemployment rate, a 60% youth unemployment rate, run by a corrupt occupier-backed government of organ smugglers and Mafiosi with severely limited international credibility. 

The same factors that have led tens of thousands of Kosovars to flee to Germany as economic refugees have turned many of their peers toward a Saudi-funded brand of political Islam. 

That extremism and poverty go hand in hand is all but undisputed, and in Kosovo poverty combined with the hopeless stagnation of an occupation that claims itself to be a democracy to create all the conditions for Islamic radicalization. 

Despite the New York Times’ attempts to pretend that the Clinton administration and their friends throughout NATO are the heroes of the tale of the Balkans and that the House of Saud is the villain, the fact is that Western occupation radicalized Kosovo.

Saudi money just made it happen faster.

The Implications Are Enormous

Bex Sumner writes:

The Conservative election expenses scandal threatens to plunge the government into crisis, as police forces across the country investigate its candidates’ election spending.

Now The Canary has uncovered exclusive new evidence that points to a fresh Conservative election scandal – one that has links right to the top of the party, and raises questions not just over election expenses, but also over whether the Conservatives broke other campaign laws that exist to ensure free and fair elections. 

A whistleblower who worked for a telephone research agency hired by the Conservative party in the run-up to the 2015 general election has made several serious allegations. 

They have told The Canary they were instructed to deny links to the Conservatives when conducting telephone surveys of voters. 

They have said the questions they were instructed to ask were misleading, pushing answers in favour of the Conservative party. 

And, while the calls they made targeted voters in specific, marginal constituencies, The Canary has found evidence that the expenses were declared as national party spending – and some do not appear to have been declared at all. 

If true, this evidence suggests that the Conservatives may have broken the law on election expenses, and a law that prohibits paying canvassers to support a candidate’s election may also have been breached. 

We have also discovered that a separate polling company worked on “local campaigns” in key seats for the Conservatives, but that spending was also declared nationally rather than locally – again, potentially in breach of election expenses laws.

The Conservative election expenses scandal threatens to plunge the government into crisis, as police forces across the country investigate its candidates’ election spending. 

Now The Canary has uncovered exclusive new evidence that points to a fresh Conservative election scandal – one that has links right to the top of the party, and raises questions not just over election expenses, but also over whether the Conservatives broke other campaign laws that exist to ensure free and fair elections. 

A whistleblower who worked for a telephone research agency hired by the Conservative party in the run-up to the 2015 general election has made several serious allegations. 

They have told The Canary they were instructed to deny links to the Conservatives when conducting telephone surveys of voters. 

They have said the questions they were instructed to ask were misleading, pushing answers in favour of the Conservative party. 

And, while the calls they made targeted voters in specific, marginal constituencies, The Canary has found evidence that the expenses were declared as national party spending – and some do not appear to have been declared at all. 

If true, this evidence suggests that the Conservatives may have broken the law on election expenses, and a law that prohibits paying canvassers to support a candidate’s election may also have been breached. 

We have also discovered that a separate polling company worked on “local campaigns” in key seats for the Conservatives, but that spending was also declared nationally rather than locally – again, potentially in breach of election expenses laws. 

The Conservatives’ entire general election strategy relied on ‘micro-targeting’ voters in marginal seats. 

A former Barack Obama advisor, Jim Messina, was hired specifically to (paywall) “help reach persuadable voters in key marginals”. 

Jim Messina and Lynton Crosby, the Conservatives’ Campaign Director, relied heavily on telephone canvassing to roll out their strategy; the party spent £4.7m (paywall) on market research and polling during the election.

If some of this work broke the law, then the implications are enormous.

The whistleblower

Return Marketing is a London-based marketing and research agency whose research arm, Return Research, works with political parties, “supplying telephone voter identification, telephone polling and other campaign services”. 

The Conservative party hired Return Marketing during the general election, paying the company £86,459 between March and May of 2015. 

Almost three-quarters of that budget was spent on “telephone projects”. 

But a whistleblower (who wishes to remain anonymous, but we’ll call ‘Alex’) who was hired by Return Marketing in late 2014 to survey voters in a number of constituencies across the country has approached The Canary with several fresh and explosive allegations.

‘Misleading voters’ 

Firstly, Alex says the questions they had to ask misled voters and pushed them towards the Conservatives: 

The questions were designed to be misleading and to push answers in the favour of the Conservative party. They misled people about other political parties and left out candidates for minority parties in most constituencies. 

Alex’s script told voters the name of their local Conservative candidate (always named first), followed by the name of their local Labour candidate. 

Alex would then mention that “there are some other candidates from some minority parties,” without naming those candidates, before asking: “Out of the candidates in your constituency, who will you be voting for?” Alex says: 

The question would completely leave off the names of the other candidates and parties like the Greens, SNP, Plaid Cymru, BNP, and even Ukip, [the] Lib Dems. People would sometimes ask who the other choices were and we wouldn’t know there were other choices unless you Googled it, like I did. One woman got very annoyed that the Lib Dem candidate wasn’t mentioned and that I didn’t know who they were. 

Another question Alex recalls was: ‘If Labour join forces with [the] SNP, would you be more or less likely to vote for Labour?’ 

Breaking electoral law? 

Now, political parties are allowed to carry out market research – including asking about voting intentions and testing campaign messages – as long as they don’t try to influence voters towards a candidate.

But Return Marketing’s polls, which reached an estimated 1,600 voters per day for several months, targeted voters in specific constituencies.

If, as Alex suggests, the questions did push voters towards voting for Conservative candidates in those constituencies, the expenses should have been declared as local, candidate spending, not national, party spending. 

The Electoral Commission’s guidance says:

• Party spending is “spending on campaigning to promote the party and its policies generally. For example, national newspaper adverts for the party, or leaflets explaining party policy.”
• Candidate spending is “campaigning to promote a particular candidate or candidates in their local area. For example, leaflets or websites that focus on one or more candidates and their views.”

But we have seen candidate spending returns for three of the seats Alex recalls targeting (Sutton and Cheam (pdf), Cheltenham (pdf) and Yeovil (pdf)), and none includes payments to Return Marketing, or for any telephone polling or canvassing.

And if the party was trying to promote candidates in those constituencies, paying canvassers to do so would have breached Section 111 of the Representation of the People Act (1983), which prohibits paying anyone to work “as a canvasser for the purpose of promoting or procuring a candidate’s election”. 

Whether or not Alex’s script promoted a particular candidate in their local area will no doubt be hotly debated. But Return Marketing’s own website suggests that the company has indeed campaigned directly on behalf of local candidates: 

With your volunteers busy using Connect2015 [the Conservatives’ volunteer phone canvassing system], it won’t be long before they’ll need some new telephone numbers… We can make the calls on your behalf, as we have done for many associations and candidates. 

Again, if that work was paid, then it would be in breach of election laws around canvassing.

The ‘missing’ expenses

Alex’s second allegation is potentially even more troubling.

While the Conservatives declared spending on Return Marketing during March, April and May 2015, they did not declare any spending in the preceding December, January and February.

Yet Alex did political research for Return Marketing between December 2014 and April 2015.

So where was the earlier work declared? 

Well, Alex claims that their work was indirectly funded by the Conservative party, through a company owned by Jim Messina:

It was all indirectly funded by the Tory party through a company called MQR (Messina Quantitative Research)…We were told not to say Messina Quantitative Research and just say MQR… [My superiors] literally told me that if anyone asked if we were directly or indirectly funded by the Tory party, we should lie and say we were not connected in any way. The reason for this was that they might then lose the contract with MQR and everyone would be out of a job. I never went back to work after that day.

Links to the top of the Conservative party 

Messina Quantitative Research was set up by Jim Messina, the former Barack Obama advisor recruited by David Cameron and Lynton Crosby as a Conservative party strategy advisor in 2013. 

Messina became part of the tight-knit team of top Tory strategists, has been described (paywall) by a senior Conservative party figure as doing “the real guts of the election effort”, and was one of the few people to accurately predict the outcome of the general election.

Alex is not the only person to claim that Return Marketing carried out work on behalf of MQR.

Online commenters have claimed they were called by Return Marketing “on behalf of” MQR or GBQR (MQR’s former name) in early 2015. And, in November 2014, The Times reported (paywall):

Return Marketing… has conducted work for Conservative candidates as well as on behalf of GBQR, the former name of Mr Messina’s company.

The Conservative party did not declare any expenses for MQR or GBQR in its national campaign spend. However, it did pay “Messina Group Inc” more than £369,000 in the run-up to the general election.

This presumably included the pay for Jim Messina himself, but it is unclear whether it includes any work done by Return Marketing or MQR and accounts for the missing spending. 

The Canary has approached the Conservative party and MQR for comment but none was provided by time of writing.

Past allegations

MQR has faced its own allegations of ‘push polling’ – polling designed to influence voters while masquerading as political research – during the 2014 Rochester and Strood by-election – a critical Conservative/Ukip by-election that has been embroiled in a separate expenses scandal.

In 2014, The Sunday Times reported (paywall):

Mark Reckless, the Ukip candidate, accused a company run by Jim Messina, the former Barack Obama aide who has been hired by the Tories, of conducting “push polling”. The company was said to have asked voters about an incident in which Reckless missed a budget vote because he was drunk in a Commons bar.

The Conservative party denied it had used pollsters to attack Reckless, saying (paywall) the incriminating question had been asked by a different polling company, Survation.

It also denied (paywall) commissioning MQR’s polling work in Rochester and Strood, describing MQR as an independent company.

In turn, Ukip accused (paywall) the Conservative party of reaching “an arm’s-length arrangement with MQR in order to bypass the £100,000 spending limit for by-election campaigns”:

‘It’s very odd that Jim Messina is calling people and saying that it’s for independent purposes,’ a Ukip source said. ‘What are they doing with this information? He’s not polling Rochester and Strood on behalf of Barack Obama.’

A more widespread problem?

The Canary has also uncovered evidence that a separate company carrying out telecanvassing work for the Conservative party engaged in “local campaigns” without those local candidates declaring the costs in their spending returns – again, potentially breaking electoral law.

Blue Telecoms, a telecommunications company based in South Wales, was hired by the Conservative party in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

The party paid the company more than a quarter of a million pounds for ‘call centre agents’ and other expenses between March and May 2015.

But a LinkedIn post by the company’s Director, Sascha Lopez, suggests that at least a part of that money was spent on local campaigning:

Blue Telecoms were originally approached by the Conservative Party to help with a small number of local campaigns in South Wales, including Gower and Cardiff North.

The company went on to run a “100 seat call centre” for the Conservatives, whose staff were paid £8 per hour, contacting “people in key constituencies to complete surveys”.

We don’t know the names of those “key constituencies”. But we do know that Gower and Cardiff North were two of the most hotly contested seats in Wales.

The Conservatives ended up taking Gower from Labour by just 27 votes. They increased their majority in Cardiff North, Labour’s top targeted seat in Wales, from 194 votes to 2,137, against many expectations.

If the company was working to “help with” local campaigns, promoting local candidates in those constituencies, that spending is required by law to have been included in the local candidates’ spending returns, assuming the work was carried out in the run-up to the general election.

Yet neither the Conservative candidate for Gower, Byron Davies, nor the Conservative candidate for Cardiff North, Craig Williams, listed any spending on Blue Telecoms in their long or short campaign spending returns (available here (pdf) and here (pdf)).

Both MPs came within £1,000 of their spending limits in each of their campaign returns, and may have been pushed over their spending limits had they declared costs for a telecanvassing campaign.

Byron Davies – who deserves credit for actually declaring costs relating to a battle bus in his expenses,unlike many of his colleagues – did include £250 for ‘surveys’ in his spending return.

However, the supplier was listed as the Welsh Conservatives, not Blue Telecoms. When asked about the spending on surveys, his spokesperson only told The Canary:

“All local spending was properly declared, in line with the Representation of the People Act.”

Craig Williams listed no surveys or work by Blue Telecoms in his returns.

And again, if the company was paid to promote local candidates in those constituencies, it would have broken the law relating to canvassing.

Another ‘battle buses’ scandal?

Among the election expenses accusations facing the Conservative party is the allegation that dozens of Conservative MPs failed to declare costs associated with campaign buses, which transported activists across the country to campaign in marginal seats, in their local spending returns.

While the party says it correctly declared the costs under its national spend, a trail of evidence left on social and other media suggests that the buses did campaign for local candidates, and so should have been declared locally.

Had they declared those costs, many of the candidates would have breached the strict spending cap that restricts candidate spending before elections.

The Conservative party’s spending on market research and canvassing was absolutely huge, accounting for almost one-third of its election spend.

If that market research – which extensively targeted voters in marginal constituencies – should have been declared as local spending by party candidates, the Conservatives are in very hot water indeed.

The Canary has approached Return Marketing, MQR, Blue Telecoms and the Conservative Party for comment.

A Conservative spokesperson said: All telephone calling was correctly declared. We will update this post with any further responses.

Get involved!

– If you worked for or were called by a company conducting polling on behalf of the Conservative party in the lead up to the 2015 general election and you have information you’d like to share, please get in touch.

– Ask David Cameron to respond to the allegations in this article.

– Use The Mirror’s ‘People’s Electoral Commission’ to help investigate alleged Conservative election fraud.

– You can report any concerns you have about electoral fraud anonymously here.

Rhea Guard Action

Chin up, Rhea Wolfson. We've all been there. Many years ago, my own home Constituency Labour Party spitefully refused to nominate me for the National Executive Committee. It was dominated by its intellectually challenged then MP, who soon afterwards became a catastrophic Chief Whip.

Just as I am proud to be banned for life from her party, from the party of the disgraceful Labour Group on Durham County Council, from the party of the MPs who literally applauded a war, from the party of Sadiq Khan's shared platform with David Cameron (as ruled out by Tom Watson on today's World at One), and from the party of Tony Blair, so I am proud to be banned for life from the party of Jim Murphy.

Murphy's parents' move to South Africa in 1979 can only have been a political act. A lot of people were made redundant and did not move to the apartheid state. Specifically, the Murphies wound up in the Western Cape, and they seem to have had something to do with Robben Island while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there.

In any event, it is worth looking into exactly what they were doing under P W Botha. It is also worth looking into exactly what their son was doing under P W Botha. He was there between the ages of 12 and 18. Culturally speaking, he is more than anything a 1980s white South African, and one raised in a home that had been set up specifically in order to avail itself of the opportunities presented by that order.

The age of conscription into the South African Defence Force was 16, or when you left school, whichever happened later. Murphy's subsequent nine years at university without ever taking a degree indicate that he has never been much of an academic shining light. He turned 16 in 1983. 

Had the apartheid regime still existed in 1994, when it was not long gone, then some sort of rapprochement with it would have been integral to Tony Blair's "modernisation" project. If there was one thing on which Old Labour was united, then it was opposition to apartheid. But the Thatcherite press expressed a very different view. Guess which line Blair would have taken.

Moreover, from September 2001 onwards, apartheid South Africa would have met every criterion, and surpassed most or all of them, for classification as a key "partner" in "The War Against Terror", which my erstwhile housemate, who went on to be the Labour Party's Head of Research, used in those days to say ought to be known by its acronym.

This has just got me blocked from Labour List. Ho, hum.