So back to the purple brigade, and many many thanks to Woman on a Raft for supplying me with some of this information (see comments here and here). I was getting quite confused as to how all the main players were related so I put together a bit of a family tree to try to make sense of it all. All of the information is in the public domain I’m just trying to put it together – in the spirit of our new open and transparent politics.
Just to try to explain that a bit the dotted lines from BlueStateDigitial show their clients, the solid lines indicate clear channels of control (e.g. Mark Ross registered the domain for “take back parliament”, the other solid lines to “take back parliament” indicate members of the coalition). Despite this starting from Counting Cats post I can’t find a direct link from this lot to 38 Degrees though interestingly they did used to be registered as “Progressive Majority”.
Anyway back to the main players the client lists of both BlueStateDigital and SoapBox Communications make interesting reading as there are a lot of familiar names in both places.
For instance SoapBox list “Charter 88″ Unlock Democracy, Compass and the Electoral Reform Society as clients all of whom are part of the TBP coalition. Their other clients include people such as UNITE, but then “SoapBox is the communications agency for think tanks, campaigns, politicians and NGOs” – so perhaps it’s hardly surprising to see so many names cropping up in the same place. Looking at the supporters list for SoapBox client “Vote for a change” quite a few other TBP coaltion members crop up such as:
Benedict Southworth, World Development Movement
Dr Matthew Sowemimo, Director – Social Liberal Forum
Ken Ritchie, Electoral Reform Society
Neal Lawson, Compass
amongst others.
There are more interesting cross links, which again are surely just due to shared goals:
Coalition member Democracy Matters is it self a coalition that includes TBP supporters BASSAC and Unlock Democracy. The same group of names also crop up supporting Power 2010 including our friends over at Ekklesia(though oddly they list the Muslim Council of Britain twice.)
Many of the other TBP members are politcal “think tanks” e.g. New Economics Foundation and Ekklesia or politically associated group such as Social Liberal Forum (Which formed out of the LibDem Beveridge Group)
So with just a bit of poking around this great grass roots movement collapses into a circle jerk of think tanks, think tank controlled “independent” sites all mainly leading back to the same vested interests they helping us all protest about.
But at least that lot are at least notionally British, here for the delectation of all those that complained about the “foreign” influence of lord Ashcroft are a few of TBP’s international members:
Avaaz.org – Ricken Patel – New York
enoughsenough.org – registered via a Canadian anonymous domain registrar
power2010.org – registered by BlueStateDigital – Washington
That of course is ignoring possible international influences such as Greenpeace.
If you can fill in any further gaps that’d be great but I suspect it wouldn’t actually be possible to plot all the interconnections in this popularist movement, but the involvement of so many people from the “old” politics the campaign is meant to be changing troubles me. The same old think tanks, quango’s and wonks representing the same vested interests – I find it hard to believe their interest in reform has the same goal as many of the people on the protests.
