Thursday 4 April 2019

Fake grass roots simple messages for China and Free Trade

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/03/grassroots-facebook-brexit-ads-secretly-run-by-staff-of-lynton-crosby-firm

A PR company was paid large amounts to construct the look of fake grass-roots campaigns putting edited, simple, rather stupid messages to MPs as though the will of the people. There was an MP in parliament who seemed to believe them just the other day, the MP for Cleethorpes, who said that the leave vote was an emotional vote to leave everything remotely connected in the mind of a Brexiteer with Europe and (unstated) have free trade with China instead. They also pretend to think that a second referendum would have the same question as the first. Another MP interjected - 


Photo of Antoinette SandbachAntoinette Sandbach Conservative, Eddisburylink to speech

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. The vote itself was on our membership of the EU. It was not about our future relationship. All those emotional matters may well have been sold to the people during the campaign, but the vote itself was about our membership, so it cannot be prayed in aid when considering how our future relationship should be shaped.



Photo of Martin VickersMartin Vickers Conservative, Cleethorpes link to speech

Needless to say, I strongly disagree with my hon. Friend.
  • The people voted to leave the structure of the economic union, and they wanted to slam the door closed.
  • They wanted a clean break.
They were not thinking about our future relationship; they said, “We’ve had enough of the existing relationship.”
He says 

  • "needless to say, I strongly disagree" and his vote disagrees but he does agree
  •  "they were not thinking about our future relationship".
Maybe he sees politics is a team sport and chose a team. Maybe he was also influenced by adverts from similar-looking people who would claim to be constituents of any MP but turned-out to be paid by a PR firm run by someone called Lynton Crosby. 
Very similar to a favourite theme of this blog - Ethical Fashion Forum and Pants to Poverty, the grass roots group which pretended not to have heard to the welfare state or UK manufacturing, or to think that "ethical" was a stupid vague word used tactically, and seldom had a video seminar without someone from the PR firm Futerra lurking in the background. 
By the way, I thought the name "Lynton Crosby" was familiar. My local MP, Zac Goldsmith, seriously thought he was a good PR agent and massively lost the London Mayoral campaign by using Crosby's nasty underhand PR tactics. Nevertheless he got a knighthood from whatever system organises these things.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/its-lynton-crosby-who-made-zac-goldsmiths-campaign-so-nasty-and-now-hes-being-knighted-a7016801.html


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