Well that was terribly quick, Greenpeace have replied to my email already, though they don’t address my second point at all nor mention if they’ll be carrying out similar campaigns in other countries. Oh and it would have been nice if they could have spelt my name correctly.
Anyway here’s the reply:
“Hello Gioalla and thanks for your e-mail, it’s great to hear from you.
Greenpeace is backing the Take Back Parliament campaign
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/about/broken-britain-more-broken-parliament-20100507
because Government policy and political lobbying are so
fundamental to our campaigns and environmental change. The Government
has huge power, and therefore huge responsibility, when it comes to
taking firm action on issues such as climate change, war and
disarmament, etc and we want them to be both representative and
accountable.
Best wishes,
Lisa Weatherley
Supporter Services, Greenpeace UK
www.greenpeace.org.uk
More.
The company which commissioned the Take Back Parliament campaign is
THE DEMOCRATIC REFORM COMPANY:
Registered no: 07087541
Registered office: The Garden House
Water End
York
YO30 6WQ
Telephone:
Incorporated: 26 Nov 2009
This is the same address as the Joseph Rowntree Trust.
If you webcheck the company 07087541 at Companies House, it shows that a director is:
LORD DAVID TREVOR SHUTT OF GREETLAND
who happens to be the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip in the Lords.
http://www.libdems.org.uk/peers_detail.aspx?name=Lord_Shutt_of_Greetland&pPK=8e2bde2d-2c0d-4f4f-9f59-bfd972311f11
In 2005, Lord Shutt became the Chairman of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, the trust which bankrolls Power2010.
This was the same date that the JRReform Trust commissioned the Power Report which concluded in 2006 that what Britain needed was PR, and the kind of PR which would be very helpful to the Liberal Democrats.
Labour did nothing about this until about two days before the election when they suddenly became very keen on PR.
The Power Report claimed to be independent.
http://www.powerinquiry.org/aboutus/index.php#4
“Does POWER have a political bias?
No. POWER is completely independent of any political party or organisation. The Commission is made up of people from the left, right and centre of politics, and mostly of people with no particular party political affiliation.”
Completely independent? How independent you can be when the funding is signed off by the Lib Dem peer with an interest in electoral reform which would serve his party. They seem to be trying to claim they are political but not partisan.
“Since the announcement of the POWER Pledge, the campaign to ensure that these reforms are a key issue at the General Election has been funded exclusively by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd, which is not a charity and is therefore free to fund political activity.”
I know OH is taken with this approach, but I think that if it has orange and black stripes, big claws and sharp teeth, then it is possibly a marmalade cat but also very likely a tiger. I do not wish to be on the menu.
It’s like a particularly foetid blocked sewer, the deeper you go the worse it gets. My house mate is of the same opinion as OH “we need reform so anyone after it must be good”, but I don’t buy it. In this case not only is the enemy of my enemy not my friend I’m not even sure they’re actually my enemy’s enemy.
Electoral and parliamentary reform (and I don’t think one without the other will make much difference) is needed but not in a hurry and not without a lot of consultation. As it goes I think we may see a few bits done that make things worse with the rest kicked into the long grass, or this coalition of vested interest and lobbyists will manage to steal the popular voice and get their masters bidding done.
At the moment there’s an awful lot of people of the same mind as OH though.
BTW, I suspect that the reason Greenpeace didn’t approach your second point is that they aren’t, at root, a charity in England and Wales. They might be in other jurisdictions, but I don’t know about that. They tend to prefer to let people assume they are a charity, but they aren’t. Or, rather, only one of their incarnations is a charity.
Corporately, there was a good reason for that. They are essentially a PR/Pressure group who fund themselves via sales and donations, which never came within the charity definition as that previously (not now, the Charity law has changed) would have limited their scope to do political lobbying. People who think of them as a charity are less likely to start asking awkward questions.
Tip: a webcheck at Companies House is always worth doing. You can learn quite a lot from just clicking the ‘order information’ link because that gives you an index of available documents. Names and addresses sometimes appear there, and you don’t have to pay for that. You only pay if you want to start downloading full documents.
Greenpeace appears at Companies House under three different registrations:
GREENPEACE LIMITED
GREENPEACE HOUSE
CANONBURY VILLAS
LONDON
N1 2PN
Company No. 01314381
GREENPEACE ENVIRONMENTAL TRUST
CANONBURY VILLAS
LONDON
N1 2PN
Company No. 01636817
This is the one which also appears as a charity at the Charities Commission. Charity no.
284934 GREENPEACE ENVIRONMENTAL TRUST
Accounts to 2009
GREENPEACE UK LIMITED
GREENPEACE HOUSE
CANONBURY VILLAS
LONDON
N1 2PN
Company No. 02463348
It won’t surprise you to learn that Greenpeace wholeheartedly endorses the theory of global warming and has this years’s accounts say they don’t much care if it is happening because the sun is burning out or humans are causing it. They have every faith that Greenpeace can offset solar cycles by making everyone wear hemp and cycle to work.
“The Trust’s mission is to relieve sickness or suffering among humans and animals, which is a consequence of any change to their natural environment, whether caused by humans or not“.
The accounts take a bit of reading but one of the things which comes through is that Greenpeace Environmental Trust receives free facilities from Greenpeace International, which I haven’t researched yet. That presumably is registered somewhere else.
I’m afraid I fell into the group of people that thought they were a charity and wasn’t aware of their interesting corporate set up. I really should have known better and I really must get into the habit of checking companies house when looking at this sort of stuff, but I’m much more at home checking the whois data and the IT angle.
Yeah not at all surprised that they’re fans of global warming and being able to stop change. Saw one of their spokes people on the news talking about the Deepwater Horizon spill, saying that it was a rig too far and that new drilling should stop so that the price increases force everyone to stop using oil and thus save the world. As has been much discussed at work the really amazing thing is that given the huge number of off shore rigs there are this hasn’t happened before.