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The Brexit dark money lobby has a new target – climate change action
By: []
Date: 2021-12
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If Brexit proved anything, it’s that a handful of people with powerful connections can go a long, long, way.
Over two decades, a steady drip feed of newspaper stories – and some well-timed political spending – turned a marginal interest into a British national obsession.
Surely it wouldn’t be possible for British politics to be captured like this again? Well, we might be about to find out.
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Officially the UK government has committed to Net Zero by 2050, but behind the scenes an organised, well-funded opposition to climate change action is growing on the Conservative Right. And many of those at the vanguard – and their tactics – come straight from the veterans of Brexit.
A classic example of this appeared in The Telegraph this week: the day before the Budget, it reported a YouGov survey that found a majority of the British public “want a referendum on Boris Johnson’s net zero plans” by the next general election – a majority of those who expressed a preference, that is.
Even Remainers and young people wanted a public vote on Johnson’s carbon policies. Other outlets picked the story up, too. Self-styled “Brexit hardman” Steve Baker tweeted his support for a Net Zero referendum.
It is easy to scoff at The Telegraph, with its dyspeptic opinion pages filled with lockdown sceptics and cosplay libertarians. But the jewel in the Barclay family’s media empire matters. There is a reason Johnson is said to call the Telegraph his “real boss”.
The day after the Telegraph story, Nigel Farage told GB News viewers that a referendum on Green taxes “could well be my latest campaign”.
A question nobody was asking
Perhaps it’s because I spent so long looking at the dark money behind Brexit, but the first thing I thought while reading The Telegraph’s story was: “Who has paid a professional pollster to carry out a survey on a question nobody is asking?”
The answer is something called Car26.org. This, The Telegraph informed its readers, is a “new campaign group calling for a referendum on net zero proposals and a pause in eco regulations until such a ballot is held”.
Yep, you read that right. No climate change mitigation policies until a referendum on Net Zero. Sound familiar?
Brexit saw vast sums of money spent through ‘astroturf’ groups: campaigns posing as grassroots initiatives with no visible support but a deep-pocketed funder behind the scenes. A 20-something scriptwriter in Manchester spent a fortune on hard Brexit Facebook ads.
Before the 2019 general election nominally ‘third party’ campaigns spent £700,000 pushing Conservative talking points without declaring any donations.
Car26.org looks like it was lifted straight out of the same playbook. It was registered at Companies House only last month. Its public face and director – Lois Perry – is a representative for Reclaim, the culture war party fronted by Laurence Fox, the actor and anti-lockdown, anti-diversity activist, and bankrolled by Brexit donor Jeremy Hosking.
There’s more. At the bottom of the Car26 website – past the description of young people’s involvement in climate protests as “borderline child abuse” – there’s a note saying the site is “powered by Blue Sky”. Blue Sky Strategy is a tiny communications company run by a small group of Brexit veterans, including Rebecca Ryan, who is director of the astroturf Defund the BBC campaign and who used to work alongside Vote Leave’s former chief technology officer, Thomas Borwick. What a small world.
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