You can read part one HERE
In this second part of this article it’s time to take a bit more of a detailed look at Stop Funding Hate itself and to give as much of its history and what and who influences it, as I can piece together.
According to publicly available information from places such as Wikipedia etc, the Stop Funding Hate group (SFH) was set up in August 2016 by Richard Wilson, a former corporate fundraising officer for the once ethical and politically independent, but now thoroughly left wing, Amnesty International organisation. Their reason for existence is to influence the content of newspapers that they don’t like such as the Mail, the Express and the Sun. They do this by using their activists both online and offline along with assistance from groups like Tell Mama/Faith Matters and the Citizens UK group to put pressure on companies to remove their advertising from these publications. SFH is now working closer with Citizens UK presumably because this group can put a lot of Lefty activists on the streets at quite short notice. They have had some successes with companies like Lego, Paperchase etc, submitting to their bullying, but they have also had some failures. The most notable failure that they have had is with the Co-Op group who, after an investigation brought about by pressure from SFH, realised that going along with SFH would hurt their bottom line as not only do they gain a lot of trade advertising in newspapers that a lot of people read, but many of their customers buy the Mail etc from the Co-Op.
SFH got a lot of publicity and support from the online Left which inhabits social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and used crowd-funding to raise £102,721 in start up and campaigning costs. The group didn’t originally become officially and legally incorporated as a Community Interest Company (CIC with the reference number 10737024 ) they were originally a Private Limited Company called Stop Funding Hate that later changed its name to Campaign for Ethical Advertising, about which more later. The address that SFH used to register the CIC with Companies House does not relate to premises that they work from or from which they co-ordinate their campaigns, but is instead an anonymous mailing and Registered Office address (International House, 24 Holborn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2BN) supplied by a business services company called Registered Address Ltd (of the same International House address).
This is odd as I’ve worked for community organisations and small charities and the usual procedure is to use your working office address or the property you work from as the legally required Registered Address for the service of official documents or for banking purposes. It does look strange that an organisation that seems to want in their view more honesty and transparency from the Press, should shroud themselves in mystery this way? In addition ALL the directors of the CIC also list their addresses as ‘International House’. SFH are in effect a ‘Brass Plate’ company which is something defined by Business Dictionary as: “(a) Firm without any ‘real’ existence other than a brass nameplate (on a panel with other nameplates) at its registered (legal) address.” This is the sort of ‘Brass Plate’ company structure it should be noted as being very similar to that used by accountancy firms in tax havens who create companies in low tax or zero tax environments for the purposes of clients in high tax areas to avoid or evade tax.
There is a little information out there about, and some images of the Directors of, SFH and I shall now delve into as much detail as I can put together at present about them and what they and the other entities they are associated with are involved in.
The first is Colin Baines. Websearches show that Colin Baines is an ‘Investment Engagement Manager’ with the Friends Provident Foundation and was formerly with the Cooperative Bank (the banking arm of the Co-operative Movement in the United Kingdom). The Friends Provident Foundation is a standard SJW type grant making organisation that works for ‘financial inclusion’ and nebulous things like ‘a fairer world’. They, the Friends Provident Foundation, are dishing out simply enormous amounts of grant money to various left leaning financial projects, universities and social justice organisations.
Colin Baines the extremely well connected director of the Stop Funding Hate group
One of the grants in particular caught my eye from 2016, which was £60,000 to the Open Democracy organisation, a group also funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, for a New Thinking on the British Economy project. This, according to the blurb that is on the Friends Provident Foundation site, state that the project is intended via online and offline methods to ‘influence decision makers’ in order to create a ‘just and resilient UK economy’. However it’s likely that some form of ‘stealth socialism/Social Justice’ rather than free markets is solution that this project will push. The outline of what the grant will be used for and the nature of the project (mysteriously described as a ‘series’ ) lists a number of left wing and environmental organisations who might be interested in working in conjunction with the Open Democracy Foundation.
For readers’ information, I don’t go along with any of the tin foil hat Soros conspiracy theories, some of them are barking (beyond Barking, totally Upney in fact – sorry London joke, could not resist it there). But, I can see good reason, if you are a conservative or a libertarian or a patriot or are just in favour of keeping democracy and administration clean, to be concerned about some of the projects funded by Mr Soros’ organisations. To be fair Mr Soros and his employees probably think that they are ‘doing the right thing, but then so did ‘Bloody Mary‘ when she burned Protestants at the stake. However, that said it makes me uneasy so see this sort of Left wing money-go-round between the Open Democracy and Friends Provident Foundations, and the amounts being spent on such a nebulous and suspicious thing as ‘influencing’.
The £60,000 dished out to the Open Democracy Foundation it should be said, is not the only nor is it the largest grant that the Friends Provident Foundation has given to various left leaning think tanks, study centres or other groups. Although without a doubt some of the groups and projects funded by the Friends Provident Association may well be useful and worthwhile, there appear to be an awful lot of groups and projects that lean to the left or towards Social Justice.
In a democracy I believe that it should be the ballot box, and what Edmund Burke called the ‘little platoons’ of voluntary associations, that should have the power to influence our government and society, not wealthy sometimes paternalist Leftists whether from home or from overseas, who are the sort of groups that the Friends Provident Foundation is funding quite lavishly. You can find the list of Friends Provident current grant recipients via the link below.
https://www.friendsprovidentfoundation.org/programme-overview/grants-listing/
The next director whose activities it might be interesting to examine is Rosemary Jane Ellum. This lady is steeped in Left wing and Green causes. She is also a director, along with another director of SFH Mr Richard Cameron Wilson, of another CIC pressure group vehicle, The Campaign for Ethical Advertising (UK Company number 10430968 ). At the present time neither SFH nor The Campaign for Ethical Advertising (CEA) have submitted accounts, but then they have not been incorporated long, The Campaign for Ethical Advertising was incorporated in October 2016. Interestingly CEA gives its previous company name as Stop Funding Hate and is incorporated as a Private Limited Company working in public relations. It looks as if CEA had a name change resolution in March 2017 and stayed as a Private Limited Company and spun off SFH as a free standing community interest company although sharing some directors with CEA. I can imagine that this may have been done for tax minimisation reasons and also because a CIC is a more appropriate vehicle for a political campaign organisation.
From what I can gather about Ms Ellum, she says she is an NGO worker and searches show up an individual with her name working for a women’s development charity. Ms Ellum appears to be the usual middle class Leftie do-gooder probably doing some good and some bad, but definitely NOT the sort of person who I would trust to edit my bloody newspaper for me. I can well imagine that this person may well not be the best type of person to bet on to protect your rights to speak and hear and read what you want. I certainly would not. When I was on the Left myself, I met a number of people of similar interests, political stances and backgrounds to that apparently shared with Ms Ellum, who were authoritarian to put it bluntly about the issue of freedom of speech and of the Press and were sometimes distinctly sniffy about the media consumed by us ‘proles’.
We move on now to the third Director of Stop Funding Hate, Catherine Anne Marisa Taylor, a Commercial Property Solicitor, born in 1981 and practising in the London area. She, or someone of the exact same name, appears to have Leftist sympathies as she apparently stood for the Labour Party as a candidate in the 2009 European Parliament elections for the East Midlands Region. As with the previous director, my impression is that Ms Taylor is the usual middle class Leftie with similar censorious attitudes to the press and a similar disrespect for the idea of free speech, where the speech and the media is not to their liking. There are no other company registrations in Ms Taylor’s name.
The next Director is Eleanor Margaret Thompson, who was born in 1984 and who describes herself as a ‘campaigner’. Nothing concrete showed up about any campaigns that she might be involved in nor any indication of political party alligences.
I suspect that at least two of the directors of Stop Funding Hate are what I would call ‘affinity’ directors, that is individuals who don’t take much part in the running of an organisation or act as front desk faces, but agree to act as directors because they support the aims of a particular community interest company. Sometimes this works out well with the ‘affinity’ directors chipping in their specialist knowledge occasionally but taking more of a back seat; this should not be an issue in well run small organisations. In other less well run entities the situation may be different and weaker willed ‘affinity’ directors may well be dominated by more powerful boardroom personalities, lessening the influence of these second tier directors. I will not speculate at this point as to which category Stop Funding Hate comes into but time may tell on this matter.
Finally we come to one of the more high profile Directors of Stop Funding Hate, Richard Cameron Wilson. Forty-two year old Mr Wilson is as said above, also a director of the Campaign for Ethical Advertising. Mr Wilson describes himself to Companies House as an NGO worker and he has been employed by Amnesty International as a Corporate Fund-raising Officer. His story is very interesting. From writings that Mr Wilson has published himself, both he and his family appear to be dyed in the wool socialists with heavy pro-migrant and pro-refugee leanings.
Meet your latest left wing censor Richard Wilson of Stop Funding Hate
His mother has taught ‘refugees’ from the third world in the UK and the family are very involved in the politics of some of the hell holes in East Africa by way of their aid work. Because of that, the family have been touched by tragedy. Mr Wilson’s sister Charlotte was killed in an ambush on a bus in Burundi. Ms Wilson was an aid worker engaged by the Voluntary Services Overseas organisation and was extremely committed to her aid work in Rwanda and Burundi and had even become engaged to a local Burundian man, Richard Notereyima.
On the 28th December 2000, after spending Christmas with some other volunteers in Rwanda, Ms Wilson boarded a bus known as the Titanic Express with Mr Notereyima in order to meet her fiancé’s family in Burundi. En route the bus was ambushed and Ms Wilson, Mr Notereyima and 17 other people were ordered out of the bus and shot dead by members of a Hutu militia. A Guardian article dated 4th January 2001 told the story of the massacre. This piece includes the information that Ms Wilson defied VSO advice against travelling overland in Burundi and to stay within certain areas, advice that Ms Wilson wilfully and consensually ignored, a decision that ended up with Ms Wilson’s death. This awful tragedy has inspired Mr Wilson to write a book about his search for how his sister died and who killed her, a book called ‘Titanic Express’. Since the death Mr Wilson has not only campaigned hard to try to bring his sister’s killers to justice but has also become more involved in the politics of Africa, the continent that was wholeheartedly adopted by Mr Wilson’s sister.
Whilst I cannot fault this family’s collective desire to do good in Africa and although I feel compelled to have some sympathy for Mr Wilson and his family because of the tragedy that has befallen them, he is a man who sees the world through his ideology. This ideology it needs to be said is a very Leftist and pro-migrant one, as well as being pro-censorship and authoritarian. Mr Wilson has stated publicly that he wants to impose his own views on newspapers. Mr Wilson comes over in press and other media appearances as an arrogant man with a desire to control what people read or see when it clashes with his own views and that of his colleagues and co-activists.
The Daily Mail has fought back against Mr Wilson and his Stop Funding Hate group, as well they should, SFH are bullies who cannot stand the thought that others may not share their views. Those involved with SFH accuse the tabloid press of creating a situation where ‘refugees’ are discriminated against, or shown in stories in a bad light or pictured as if their presence is detrimental to British society.
Unfortunately those involved with SFH fail to understand that the tabloid press would not print such stories if they did not reflect the concerns of their readers. Documenting and reporting on the failures of many leftist policies concerning multiculturalism, the welfare state, Britain’s border porosity disaster and migrants and ‘refugees’ who take the piss is a legitimate activity for the Fourth Estate. I’ve lived in a number of areas of Britain that have been heavily ‘enriched’ by those from cultures and societies that are, in the main, not compatible with our own. Because of that experience, I can see that the tabloid press are not pushing some evil top down ‘fascist’ world view, as the likes of SFH may well believe, but are merely reflecting the reality of life for many Britons. There is an excess and an inappropriate immigration problem, there are bogus refugees, there are a large number in Britain who not only come from incompatible societies and cultures but who burden us both economically and with the crime and disorder that they commit. This is not ‘peddling hatred’, this is fact, the average citizen or subject sees these problems in their daily lives and because of that buys the newspapers that they do. The purchasers of newspapers by those who have to deal with and put up with the problems caused by migration and other social policies, don’t buy the Guardian for obvious reasons. They don’t want to read lots of happy clappy guff about how wonderful multiculturalism is, because that doesn’t reflect their experience.
People buy these tabloid papers because they reflect their work, social and cultural experiences and their political views, views that Mr Wilson and his Stop Funding Hate group along with their allies, wish to remove from public view. When I see such a desire for censorship, I ask myself ‘now who is the real ‘fascist’ here?’
What is glaringly noticeable from examining Mr Wilson’s writings and background is that he and his family are imbued with a gnawing animus against the Daily Mail, the Express and the Sun. They hate the tabloid press with a passion. Mr Wilson and other members of his family blame the tabloid press for stirring up hatred against ‘refugees’. However, it is plain they fail to see that the papers may only be responding to pre-existing worries among the public about the problems that some of the Wilson family’s ‘refugee’ pets might be causing. Commenting on the press interest that the murder of Ms Wilson stirred up, Mr Wilson, wrote a personal blog post about his dealings with the press. To keep things in context and by way giving background I will quote in full his article,
Richard Wilson said:
My first book, Titanic Express, focusses on the death of my sister Charlotte in a massacre in Burundi in December 2000. To give some background on my involvement in the recently launched “Stop Funding Hate” campaign, I wanted to share this excerpt (p42).
There was a knock on the door around three that afternoon. The tactful and sympathetic man on the doorstep was from the Daily Mail, and he was asking to speak to Mrs. Wilson. He told my mother how sorry he was to intrude at such a difficult time, but he had a letter that he would like to give her. Would she be prepared to look at the letter, have a think about what it said and then give him her answer in around an hour? My mother agreed.
The letter from the man from the Mail offered his condolences, and asked if my mother would be willing to give an interview to his newspaper about Charlotte’s life. When he returned an hour later, my mother invited him in, sat him down, and calmly explained why she simply couldn’t do it.
She told him that she was an English teacher, and for the last ten years she had been working with people who’d fled from some of the world’s most troubled countries. Iranians and Iraqis, Congolese, Somalis, Bosnians and Kosovans, Turkish Kurds, Eritreans and Ethiopians – even a couple of Burundians had made it into her classroom. All had lost some members of their family – some had lost everyone.
Several were still receiving treatment for the torture they had suffered. Those who were allowed to work at all had grinding, menial jobs. Large numbers faced the prospect of being forcibly returned to the warzones they had fled, amid government protestations that these countries were “safe”.
She had lost count of the number of times a student had mentioned in class that another loved one back home had been killed. And she had lost count of the number of newspaper articles she had seen portraying refugees as liars, cheats, frauds, “bogus” people.
When the stories had first begun, in the mid 1990s, my mother had dismissed them. But then they’d continued, year after year, painting a picture that she just could not recognise of the desperate, traumatised people that she worked with every day. She and her colleagues had begun to wonder if there was something more complicated going on. It hadn’t escaped their attention that so many of these stories were emanating from the Daily Mail, and its sister paper the Evening Standard. My mother had seen the effect of these stories on government policy, and she’d seen the effect of those increasingly harsh policies on her students. She would feel she was betraying them now if she had anything to do with the Daily Mail.
The man from the Mail took this so well that I felt quite sorry for him. More than anything, though, I felt proud of my mother. I knew something of the horrors she had heard from her students over the years, and the effect she herself had suffered from being so close to such suffering. I knew how angry she had been about the distortion and duplicity of newspapers like the Daily Mail. And yet, just three days after suffering one of the worst blows of her life, faced with a representative of an organisation that she and most of her colleagues regarded as something close to “hate media”, she’d shown a calmness and dignity that I found quite extraordinary.
Now I have worked for the tabloid press many years ago and of course as in any industry, there have been abuses by dodgy reporters and in some cases a lack of truth telling. Also some papers have sometimes climbed aboard campaign trains and engaged in promotional activities that may have been ill advised.
Like any industry, the world of newspapers has its faults. None of the problems, some of which the British newspaper industry has acknowledged and attempted to deal with, negates the fact that a free press, even the type of press that Mr Wilson doesn’t like, is vital for the proper functioning of a free and democratic society. But it seems that Mr Wilson doesn’t want a free press, he wants a press that promotes a particular political and ideological view. For Mr Wilson to use the term ‘hate media’ to describe those organs which publish opinions that they disagree with, or facts that he and his family and chums might like to be kept a little quiet, is hyperbole. Mr Wilson is merely possessed by delusion that his narrative is the correct and virtuous one and that the opinions of others as expressed by certain newspapers, is wrong and evil.
Everything I’ve read so far about Mr Wilson and his views of the press show him as someone who I would most definitely not trust with my freedoms to write, read, say or think what I damn well want. He has a deep seated ideological and political bias, is a middle class emotion-driven do-gooder whose familial tragedy has driven him further into an ideology that seems not be shared by either the newspapers he criticises or the general public as a whole. Mr Wilson is one of those whom some American commentators would describe as a ‘feels over reals’ type of guy. He is plainly led by his emotions and does not countenance any challenge or alternative view to his own narrative. On top of that he seems to care more for the Africans and his ‘refugee’ pets in the UK than just about anything and anyone else, something which is bound to annoy some people. He certainly doesn’t appear to care that others have a right to have an alternative opinion to what Mr Wilson possesses. Mr Wilson is a modern and very British version of Dmitry Shepilov the Stalinist editor of Pravda the Soviet propaganda organ and as such should not hold any sway over either the conduct or the content of our press.
Conclusion:
The Stop Funding Hate group is a small group of highly motivated left wingers, with contacts in organisations that are splashing huge amounts of grant making trust money around often to causes with which many ordinary people would not be in complete sympathy. Those involved in this organisation have very strong feelings about what news and opinion we as a population should and should not get. Those behind Stop Funding Hate are quite prepared to use their slacktivist army of indoctrinated left wing divvys to intimidate companies that advertise in papers that they don’t like.
Their linkage with other groups such as Tell Mama and Citizens UK, both entities that are consistently hostile to honest reporting about issues such as migration and Islam, should give cause for concern and is something that needs to be publicised, highlighted and countered. The influence of these groups in political and administrative circles should be seen as a threat to freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. Those behind Stop Funding Hate are more than entitled to hold the views that they do, but they should not be the arbiters of what is published in newspapers.
The censorious Left in the form of Stop Funding Hate and those associated with them, have realised that they cannot convince people with credible evidence that their policies with regards migration, multiculturalism, Islam, ‘refugees’ and other social matters are good, sound, just or effective. This is because there is a growing amount of evidence out there to show that many of these policies have not been beneficial to Britain, its people or its society. Because they cannot convince with credible evidence, their instinct and their desires are to try to censor information or news reports and ultimately to shut down the newspapers themselves that are inconvenient or which disturb their political or ideological narratives. We should see Stop Funding Hate and those associated with them for what they really are, which is people who have no respect for press or individual freedoms and who cannot tolerate any information that disturbs their world view.
What we have with regards Stop Funding Hate and those working with and who are associated with them is an example of what the writer Quentin Letts once called ‘a nexus of left wing schoozery‘. We have do gooding leftists operating in an intellectual and political bubble using their muscle to force out other points of view. This not what a society that believes in viewpoint diversity should tolerate or allow. These people are the enemies of freedom although they hide their hatred of freedom in nice sounding words like ‘fairness’ and ‘honesty’ and they should be treated accordingly. It is shameful that this small group of shouty, authoritarian leftists have been allowed to force their views on us and our press by the back door technique of threatening advertisers with boycotts which often amount to little more than a few Lefties not buying some thing that they would not have bought anyway. The press and its advertisers should stand up to these bullies and call their bluff because if they succeed in influencing the press then we will no longer have a press that can truly be called free.
