Monday 28 July 2014

Sponsor Our Operation Restore Democracy Organiser

Sponsor a community organiser.
Funded, per month
 
Help fund a community organiser.


We are fundraising for a paid community organiser to join our team, and help us punch out.

Introducing Operation Restore Democracy


Scotland has a severe problem.  We are currently discussing our nation's future against a backdrop of a deliberate establishment campaign to pauchle the vote.

These things cannot and should not be said lightly.  So let's spell out what has been going on.

The press is almost wholly London owned, and with the exception of one Sunday newspaper with a small circulation of centre left readers, is entirely against independence.  In Britain the press regulates itself.  Printing scurrilous nonsense and prurient drama and generally being right wing and miserable about everything is what the press largely exists to do.  It has excelled itself during this campaign, and has basically served as a platform for leading the news agenda with NO campaign press releases regurgitated.  So far so banal.

More information on this graphic here
What has really been chilling has been the role of the state broadcaster.  We are now into what is termed the regulated period of the campaign, so the state broadcaster is supposed to be neutral, and provide equal airtime and spokespeople for both campaigns.  This graphic below - and its subsequent edit - published last week during the regulated period *here* by the BBC, summarises the problem.  Remember this is the state broadcaster.  What you are witnessing is deliberate propaganda on behalf of the Unionist Government's state broadcaster to lie about Scottish economics.  Notwithstanding the edit to assert a stronger lie, their figures were already completely bonkers.

Scott Minto unpicks how the BBC may have arrived at these bonkers figure here: "it appears that the export figures have also been massaged to imply that Scotland exports vastly less than it does in reality..."

Scottish exports are not a matter of interpretation.  They are a matter of public record.  The data is published annually.  It has been widely reported, as in this graphic from the Financial times in February.

This is not happening at random: a mistake by some daft hack.  There is a pattern.

John Boothman is BBC head of news in Scotland.  He is a former Labour party activist, who has given media training to the Labour Party.  His relationship to Paul Sinclair - the man who writes Johann Lamont's speeches and scripts most of her questions in Parliament; her chief spin doctor - has been exposed by former BBC journalists.

The fact that the state broadcaster is effectively being bossed by Labour into becoming a mouthpiece for the NO campaign, explains much of the broadcaster's biased Scottish output.  Who knows who ordered the changes and lies about Scotland's exports on the UK section of the BBC website, but clearly somebody did - why edit something to make it more inaccurate?

Are we having a fair poll?  When the news agenda is so heavily biased, and the state broadcaster is pumping out literal propaganda, and the YES movement is only really able to put across its message on the unmediated doorsteps and in social media, the odds are certainly uneven, and the mainstream media is essentially united against democracy for Scotland.  Nonetheless this isn't the only aspect of democracy that is being undermined by establishment figures.

We are currently experiencing high ranking political figures lashing out at the organised people protesting in demand of a fair poll and for the Unionist state broadcaster to stop trying to subvert democracy.

Senior Scottish Labour MP Jim Murphy has described the anti-BBC bias demos - reflections of grassroots anger, which have drawn thousands of participants into the BBC's neuk of Govan - as, "The nationalists' attempts to bully broadcasters and boycott businesses." 


There are real tensions being exposed by senior figures in the Establishment's apparent desire to control all discourse, and lock down the debate, and the actual fragility of democracy in Scotland.  To put that another way, the role of citizens in the public discourse, and our very ability to be able to shape debate, beyond a narrow group of elite voices is contested within official Scotland, and there is a powerful lobby arrayed against us.  And we now know without a shadow of a doubt that the official purveyors of truth are lying to us, in the service of the state and their establishment interests.

The puerile and pointless bitterness of the NO
campaign is an attempt to obscure the issues
and to poison the discourse to shut down debte.
It is time for citizens to assert our power, to secure the position of ordinary citizens and our right to a voice, to ensure it is widely heard and above all that we never again experience the paranoid and authoritarian present of an establishment united as one against the ordinary people in revolt.  That is Operation Restore Democracy.

To that end the fightback against these corrupt elites begins in earnest on the Monday morning after the referendum.

A paid organiser will set to work on uniting the people of Johann Lamont's constituency into the biggest headache she has ever experienced.  Let's make the leader of the establishment in Holyrood, and her spin doctor Paul Sinclair (the man with the ear of Robert Boothman at the BBC), very acutely aware of our presence.  We need to strengthen the role of citizens in public life.  At the moment 22,000 children in Scotland are reliant on food aid - where are the voices of their friends and neighbours?  One man, Paul Sinclair, can effect a pro-Union propaganda position - that ignores these 10s of 1000s of Scots very existence - is the leading news item on the national radio station, the leading headline of a television news bulletin, but hundreds of thousands have no say at all in public life in Scotland.  That is a problem.  Let's fix it.  Together.

You can help sponsor a community organiser and make this happen here and now. 

This is what we will do:-

"We will canvass Johann Lamont's constituency extensively.  We will ask people what five things they want to change locally, and we will get them active in changing these things.  We will essentially talent scout on an epic scale.  We will find people who want to become leaders, and we will push them and encourage them to plot, to map, to take programmatic public action.  Who knows what skeletons this process may uncover for Lamont.  Either way it is unlikely to be comfortable for the titular leader of Unionism at Holyrood, who seems happy to inertly preside over the fourth poorest constituency in Scotland, while talking about 'something for nothing,' without a thought to the bitterly ironic hypocrisy of the statement.  And if she doesn't do a good job in facilitating the people in changing their neighbourhoods and their lives, it's hard to imagine all these organised citizens will be such great fans of her come election day in 2016.  Scottish society is changing.  It's time we Judoed the forces that are smoorin oot democracy.  And remember folks - they said we couldn't win an investigation into Glasgow Labour presiding over corruption - we won a police investigation.  They said we couldn't win a different tariff for combined heat and power low energy users in the Wyndford.  We did.  Consistency, people power, and organisation are the only things that ever changed society, the only things that ever gave a corrupt establishment Scotland the dry boke.  And that's precisely the feeling we intend to engender in the leader of the anti-democracy forces at Holyrood."

Sponsor a community organiser.
Funded, per month
Help fund a community organiser.


If you can't help financially, but you can help with canvassing in Johann's Lamont's constituency, we'd also like you get in touch.  

Facebook
Twitter: @PowerCIC
Email: nick.durie[AT]googlemail.com