38 Degrees Of (Environmentally Friendly, Organic) Astroturf

I’m wondering if something a bit funny is going on.

There is, suddenly, a great hullabaloo about electoral reform. We are all a-sudden babbling at each other, or rather the political class are, and we are echoing them, peppering our conversations with talk of FPTP, STV, and AV and PR and so on. Up and down the nation, the pubs (both of the remaining ones) are full of drinkers agog with excitement regarding the issue of fair votes, and there is great talk from the noblest Lord to the lowest serf about how there is a “progressive consensus” and a “progressive majority” and, well, the Lib Dems and the Labours are all “progressives” so they’re really the same and thus the Tories lost, because the majority didn’t vote Conservative. Of course, the Labours got less last time than the Tories this time, and after the last election the masses were not bubbling with excitement about how there was an anti-socialist majority, and it was time for a change to ensure that it should remain in power in perpetuity then. So what has changed?

One interesting thing was the sudden appearance of an odd gang of pre-packaged electoral revolutionaries called 38 Degrees who, as is the mode these days, came complete with their very own colour, purple, and apparently now if you happen to wear something purple you’re part of the people’s movement for PR (PuRple. Geddit?!) and “fair votes”, which appears to be a new slogan like “progressive consensus”. Indeed, it looks like “social democrat” is being officially retired here in lieu of “progressive”, in line with American terminology (see also “liberal”) which isn’t surprising as, since at least the late 1960s, the European left have been a slavish copy of the American left who, in turn, are now a slavish copy of the nineteenth century “Progressive Movement”, those nice Victorian worthies who invented Eugenics and Scientific Racism among their more (arguably) worthy campaigns.

So, something’s looking a little bit lacking in spontaneity here for my liking, even if some Libertarians are quite thrilled and donning their purple shirts, or at least their purple website backgrounds, with great eagerness. And even drooling Old Labour dinosaur Roy Hattersley is now a PuRple Proportionally Representing PRogressive. It’s the in thing! Everybody’s doing it! Gimme a P! Gimme an R!

Etc.

So who are this 38 Degrees mob? Wander for yourself round their website and you’ll soon see. According to their website (which as I write this is dreadful slow; looks like there’s a lot of PuRple Revolutionaries taking a look) front man David Babbs is the former Head Of Activism at Friends Of The Earth, and the funny little cabal around him is just stuffed with left wing extremists with direct Green connections, apparatchiks from the watermelon network. And where’s their funding coming from? Well, they espouse a worthy desire to be funded by donations, but for now, sadly, they’ve had no choice but to be funded by Big Green Business. How sad for them. Notable names being Gordon Roddick (husband of Saint Anita, and co-creator of environmentally friendly snake oil merchants the Body Shop) and one Henry Tinsley, who made his fortune with a business called Tinsley Foods, but is now another snake oil merchant, being a director of of organic food company Whole Earth and an eager funder of far left causes, and “progressive” politics.

Now on the board of 38 Degrees, along with Roddick and Tinsley, we find a certain Ben Brandzel. He’s got quite a pedigree, he is “Director of New Media Campaigns and Fundraising for the Democratic Party and Organizing for America (succesor organization to the Obama campaign). Former Advocacy Director of MoveOn, Adviser to GetUp, Campaign Director and Founding Board Member of Avaaz and North Carolina Online Campaign Director for Barack Obama. Consultant to NGOs and progressive political parties globally.” And all over their website we find their aspiration to be the British version of MoveOn, that infamous American arse-roots organisation that is part of the Soros network and has had considerable influence with the so-called Democrat “Shadow Party”, by setting itself up as as sort of one-stop activism shop. If you’ve got a campain, MoveOn can supply you with activists! It’s a new way of doing that community organising thing; instead of the old days of starting a campaign group and having to recruit supporters for each new group, MoveOn and its ilk work by organising a pool of activists and protestors who can just be bussed around (in an internetty sense) from “issue” to “issue”. Same with 38 Degrees. They have a list of “campaigns” and, the idea is, the same activists can be just cloned from one to the next. Instead of separate organisations having to “logroll” together, you just have however many nominally separate campaigning shopfronts you like, all based on the same small activist/general purpose protestor base. After all, since everybody’s a “progressive”, it’s all the same campaign anyway, iznit? You’ve got to hand it to these guys, it’s a very efficient system, even if it makes a complete farce of the idea of motivated grass roots supporters. But that would be one reason they were able to conjure up a flash mob on Proportional Representation the other day.

But it looks as if this has all been planned. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy; the political class don’t need conspiracies. All they need is a bit of organisation and collusion. Roddick and Tinsley are both donators to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties and “non-partisan” 38 Degrees. Here’s Tinsley handing out to Labour in February 2008. 38 Degrees website, according to Whois, was set up at the start of November 2008. Then in 2009 we find notable Labour worthies starting a quiet push for electoral reform to prepare the ground. The reason is pretty obvious. They knew that Labour was unlikely to get a majority. But there was still a very good chance that Labour and the Liberals combined might be a majority in a hung parliament, especially under these rare conditions when a Conservative Government was going to need a massive, unprecedented swing to get an outright majority. And so we have this narrative developed by the Proggie Network that, just like America, everybody who isn’t a hated “conservative” is a “progressive”. The details of what you believe on policies don’t matter. You’re not one of them, so you must be one of us!

So, this was the plan then, I think. There was an expected hung parliament, with the Lib Dems able to make up a majority government with either the Tories or Labour. The “we’re all progressives in this together” narrative is trotted out to justify the two smaller (in terms of votes and seats) forming a coalition at the expense of the Conservatives, and 38 Degrees provide a pre-packaged gang of protestors in fashionable purple to represent a supposed public mood for Proportional Representation. Labs and Libs form a coalition, introduce PR without any referendum or real public input, and the “progressive coalition” rules forever more, bringing in the Green policies desired by the likes of Babbs, Tinsley and Roddick- and in the process punting lots of money in the direction of their kind of businesses- while 38 Degrees, like their American Cousins, become something the “Progressive Parties” are ever more dependent on for campaigning purposes and public consent engineering.

So what we’ve seen over the past few days with the strange Lab/Lib manouevering is the shambling zombified corpse of that plan. Labour did even worse than expected, and were unable to actually form the required coalition. But 38 Degrees had their flash mob ready, and deployed it anyway, and the “progressive majority/consensus” slogan was ready to go, so out it came, while the colluders have run around Whitehall trying to enact the plan that was now, in terms of parliamentary arithmetic, a practical impossibility.

That’s my take on it, anyway.