Now as promised/threatened I’m afraid I’m returning to the matter of the “take back parliament” coalition. Firstly though a correction to my earlier post in that Mark Ross appears to have no connection to Ekklesia except they published a puff blog for Take Back Parliament, so sorry about that.
Anyway onto looking at how they all sort of hang together, I’ve had to be quite restrictive in this as other wise it all spins out into far too wide a web very quickly. so I’m sticking to only looking at one or two degrees of separation. I’m also having to use a rather horrid table as being fairly new to this presenting this information in a useful fashion is quite tricky.
So anyway hopefully this will make sense and shed some more light on the Take Back Parliament coalition, who doesn’t seem to be that keen on open and transparent or that bothered about foreign influence on our democratic system.
This table just tracks down those groups listed at the bottom of Take Back Parliament and pulls out odds and sods of possibly interesting information. Before we get to that though a few facts about “Take Back Parliament”.
Take Back parliament
is co-ordinated by Mark Ross, Head of Campaigns for POWER2010
the media campaign/website appears to being run by Blue State Digitial a mainly American company but with a UK subsidiary BLUE STATE DIGITAL UK LIMITED (Company No. 06873977).
Now onto that coalition:
| Coaltion member | Controlled by | Supporters/Partners in common | Client of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power 2010 | The Democratic Reform Company Ltd Company No. 07087541 Lord David Trevor Shutt of Greetland |
| Blue State Digital |
| Electoral Reform Society | ELECTORAL REFORM SOCIETY LIMITED Company No. 00958404 | – | Blue State Digital APC SoapBox |
| Enoughs Enough | Domain registered via an anonymising service | – | Athenaeum Limited |
| Ekklesia | EKKLESIA LIMITED Company No. 05831226 | – | – |
| AVAAZ.org | Domain registered by a private US individual – Ricken Patel, organization founded by Move On and Res Publica | – | – |
| Compass | Neal Lawson Jon Cruddas | – | SoapBox |
| Open Democracy | OPENDEMOCRACY LIMITED Company No. 03855274 previous: POWER AND DEMOCRACY LIMITED |
| – |
| OBV | Charter 88 |
| SoapBox |
| Vot for a change | Electoral Reform Society |
| Blue State Digital SoapBox |
| Unlock Democracy | Unlock Democracy Company No. 02440899 Formerly: 09/07/1991 CHARTER 88 LIMITED 02/05/2008 CHARTER 88 |
| SoapBox |
| Hang em | Open Democracy | Ekklesia | – |
| BASSAC Charity number: 1028784 Company number: 2869337 | – | Novas Scarman | – |
| Greenpeace | Without knowing just which bit of Greenpeace not even attempting this | ||
| Friends of the Earth | – | – | – |
| Fawcett society Charity No: 1108769 | – | – | – |
| Democracy Matters Charity No: 1108769 | Titus Alexander – Novas Scarman Group |
| – |
| Social Liberal Forum | James Graham (Secretary and website manager) is currently the Campaigns and Communications Manager for Unlock Democracy | – | – |
| National Union of Students | Not attemtping this one either | ||
| Muslim Council of Britain charity 1084651 | Not attemtping this one either | ||
| British Muslims for Secular Democracy Company No. 05905516 | – | – | – |
| World Development Movement | WORLD DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT Company No. 02098198 WORLD DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT TRUST LIMITED Company No. 03188734 charity 1064066 | – | APC |
So there you have it quite a cosy coalition, not quite sure about the grass roots element of it, but there you go.
Just to have a quick look at some of those names, I’ve already mentioned Blue State Digital – who also have as a client those well known “grassroots” campaigners “38 Degrees”. Soap Box are apprently “communications agency for think tanks, campaigns, politicians and NGOs” with an interesting client list, so a lot like BLue State Digital. The other interesting one which cropped up in a few of those groups DNS records was APC – The association for progressive communications who apparently help grass roots movements like say “the elctoral reform society” and have an intersting list of funders.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of this as such, it’s just a tad obscure and international and not that much that speaks of a ground swell of popular non-activist self-interested involvement. The grass roots bit of thier campaign appears to have gone a bit quiet , despite there still being no-sign of PR on the political agenda, just fixed term parliaments with AV.
Anyway in the interest of our new open and transparent plotics, that’s how the take back parliament campaign and its coalition roughly fit together – at just a very few degrees of seperation.
For those that are interested this data mainly came from domain registration look ups, the various groups websites and then lookups at Companies House, The Charities Commission and the FSA Mutuals Registrar.
Good presentation. There’s a search site which can sometime be helfpul – Silobreaker.
It includes a little flash relationship mapping graphic which is generated by each search. If you click on the graphic you get an enlargement with clickable details. It makes suggestions which would not have been obvious if you were trying to generate search terms.
Searching on Blue State Digital, for example, produces a map which includes Jon Cruddas (of Compass) and references a blog which will shortly be behind the paywall on the Times website:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/politics/2009/12/labour-websites-go-vertical-jon-cruddas-and-chuka-umunna-target-tory-councillors.html.
The campaigners developed a website called http://www.torystories.com/ (don’t know who that is registered to) and the blog entry says:
December 27, 2009
Labour websites go vertical: Jon Cruddas and Chuka Umunna target Tory councillors
Jon Cruddas and fellow Compass traveller, Streatham Labour candidate Chuka Umunna, today launch Tory Story, highlighting the work of Tory councillors across Britain. Carefully researched – the launch edition highlights schemes in Surrey praised by David Cameron which later faced cuts, for instance – it aims to tell tales on Tory administrations around Britain. That will take hard work (the heavy lifting is done by two students and a Labour candidate) and funding (the press release mentions left-leaning web campaigns company Blue State Digital in passing, “Mr Cruddas used the services of Blue State Digital during the Labour deputy leadership contest of 2006/07”, but does not make clear if they are involved in this venture.)
It verifies a link from BSD to Jon Cruddas, nothing forbidden in that, but I can’t eastablish a link between torystories.com and BSD, or not from the current mapping.
Will keep looking.
A quick check doesn’t give anything useful for torystories, they’re registered via and hosted on a random US hosting company. Given how easy it is to dead end many of these look ups I’m surprised so many worked.
I’ll have to have a play with silobreaker later, it looks like it could be handy. Think it’ll take me a while to work out the right questions to ask it.
Mind having done this much digging I’m sort of convinced there’s a bunch of links that I’m not seeing, because I’m not asking the right question, but that may just be the tin foil speaking.
Had a look at the HTML page source for ToryStories, although the credits are right at the bottom of the page.
Copyright © 2009 Tory Stories. Original theme by THAT Agency, adapted by Tom Miller. Powered by WordPress.
That is Tom Miller, the blogger and Labour activist who stood as PPC in Woking.
http://elections.surreyherald.co.uk/labour/2010/03/tom-miller—labour-woking.html
Miller provided a certain amount of cruel fun as his Citizen Smiff rants and school-boyish face make him a target. The face he can’t help, but he does write a great deal of nonsense. Miller is connected with dozens of Labour productions – if he put the kind of effort in to his career as he does to Labour microsites, he’d be rich and dangerous. A quick google search trawls up a netful.
Although THAT Agency provided the template for the Tory Stories website, that may be the extent of their connection as it is a freebie from their website.
http://www.thatagency.com/solutions/blog-templates.php
Tory Stories flannel panel
http://www.torystories.com/who-we-are/
Tom Miller is credited as a writer but from the HTML source he’s more of an architect. OTOH, THAT Agency are US registered and may have done a deal for Miller on registration and hosting.
So, another frilled lizard? A relatively small creature but with the ability to look a lot bigger than it really is.