Brexit: The Great Con That Will Ruin Britain

By Graham Vanbergen: It should be obvious by now to anyone with an internet connection what is happening to Britain. Whether you voted to Remain or Leave the European Union, the great con has not just worked better than expected – it is falling straight into the laps of those who intended it and funded it.

 

Peter Hitchins, the reformed Thatcherite wrote an excellent article – The Great Con That Ruined Britain, which is really a foreword to this article (and headline) and the precursor of what has happened since the start of extreme neoliberalism: “I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.” Hitchins’ latterly discovered scorn for privatisation and the free market is clear. He ended his piece with the immortal words: “I do begin to feel I was fooled into thinking that what was coming next would be any better. At this rate, it may soon be much, much worse.”

He was right – it is. This article explains how democracy came second in an EU referendum that overpowered its electoral system and overwhelmed its governing commission. It has seen MP’s scrambling to change laws and now involves wide-ranging police investigations into the shadowy individuals and organisations implicated, of which, there are many and the huge sums of money involved. Those investigations will go on for years but won’t save Britain from what is coming next.

 

Well before David Cameron announced on February 20th 2016 that an EU referendum would be held that June, shadowy powerful actors had been lobbying for years to install those who shared their extreme Brexit position into key positions of influence. They established and built organisations that would lobby the government to ensure that Brexit was not wasted as an opportunity to push forward the next stage of the global reign of free markets.

As MEP Molly Scott Cato put it: “With long experience of privatisation and co-option of national governments, they moved on to writing the rules of global capitalism in favour of the 1%. In doing so, they planned to use trade treaties to eliminate the standards and protections politicians have fought for over the past four decades, subverting the democratic process to ensure it works for the very few.”

 

The pinnacle of disaster capitalism.

If you voted for Brexit, you may well have had good reason; immigration, employment, working conditions, housing, education – but I doubt you voted for what is actually happening now.

The result is that Britain’s political system is being dismantled to the advantage of the very rich and powerful and to the detriment of the vast majority of UK citizens. We have clearly witnessed an offensive against free elections and free speech to reach this point.

Foreign billionaires, some of whom own national news corporations such as the Murdoch empire, Barclay brothers, et al, have used their considerable influence over politicians and the citizenry. Others including foreign billionaire Princes and foreign intelligence services and front companies donated huge sums to advance the Brexit cause.

The “Language of Brexit – how Britain talked its way out of the European Union” fully demonstrates the power of the printed media. In short, the book is about a mass propaganda project to change Britain’s course in history.

The story of the Brexit Syndicate names some of the bad actors involved in this great con and there are quite a few of them, including some of our own parliamentarians at the heart of government who were willing to subvert democratic processes for personal gain.

We have also heard that the so-called ‘Brexit Dividend‘ eulogised by Boris Johnson was in fact, a complete fabrication. This was seemingly a small piece of the puzzle but was close to the heart of the ‘taking back control’ slogan machine that included funding the NHS as part of its propaganda message.

We have also learned how different industries have used transatlantic lobbying firms to aggressively support Brexit in order to reduce public safeguards and regulations for reasons of profit. The fossil fuel industry is just one of many. Agribusiness is another. These organisations have been found to be spreading campaigns of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda as a means to their own ends – but they all add up to Brexit.

We now know that there is a plan to kill food safety in a post-Brexit world and we know it’s the American’s with all their poisoned, hormone injected, chemically leaden GMO junk they can’t sell in Europe that is in store for us all – soon. We know that American style mega-farms are on the way.

We also know that all those stories about taking back control of our fisheries and our fishing rights was just another huge deception.

We know that Theresa May has just about confirmed the NHS is up for sale in a post-Brexit world – we also know she has refused to deny it and we know Trump has said there will be no trade deal without the NHS up for grabs.

Just two months ago, one of Britain’s leading experts on the effects of Brexit confirmed that Brexit will trigger the break-up of the NHS. However, at TruePublica we found out that there has been a plan to dismantle the welfare state and published the awful truth. American corporations are already redesigning policy around their utterly failed, but very profitable American system of healthcare.

Civil liberty organisations Liberty and the Public Law Project have warned that the Government’s Trade Bill, parts of which it quietly published last November allows ministers to unilaterally rewrite laws like the Equality Act, even at the request of a foreign power.

 

Opaque and murky

We learned just recently about how one of Britain’s leading and most influential think tanks brokers access to Tory ministers for US donors looking to influence Brexit in their favour – another cash for access scandal.

Another investigation revealed that a transatlantic network of conservative think tanks, (which accidentally published its secret plans to influence US-UK trade negotiations) have held private meetings with senior British officials to ditch strict EU safety standards – in order to secure a sweeping US-UK trade deal. The man at the heart of this scandal is Liam Fox – Secretary of State for International Trade who has been granted unprecedented powers to do as he sees fit.

There have been many reports about the involvement of think tanks. In fact, the whole think tank/charity effort to attack Britain is demonstrated no better than its global effort through just one organisation. “Connected to no less than 450 free-market think tanks across the globe, the Atlas Network is a powerful libertarian group funded by, amongst others, Exxon Mobil and the Koch Foundation (belonging to the billionaire Koch brothers). Its overarching goal is ‘defeating socialism at every level’ according to SourceWatch, through the export of its business-friendly rhetoric and government-limiting ambition worldwide. They are doing their utmost to influence the public and policymakers, reduce health and safety restrictions and have their members feed over a less regulated Britain.

Think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute and Institute for Economic Affairs are described by people like the BBC’s Andrew Marr as undoubtedly the most influential think tanks in Britain. Both are regulars on news and current affairs programmes on the BBC, parroting their business-friendly deregulatory rhetoric, despite being ranked as the most opaque and murky think tanks in the UK when it comes to funding – especially undisclosed foriegn funding.

 

Military Strategies – civilian population

Hedge-funds and financial predators colluded with some of Britain’s official pollsters to con the nation into believing Remain would easily win. They then made millions on the back of their deception by shorting Britain’s currency, whilst others stayed away from the polls safe in the knowledge that Britain would not leave the EU as everyone had been assured.

We know for a fact that known military strategies were being used on the civilian population of Britain by the corporations facilitating various Leave campaigners. Those strategies were learned in the battlefields of places like Iraq and Afghanistan and illegally tested on dozens of other national voting systems before being fine-tuned for Brexit. These illegal strategies were forced upon an unsuspecting nation through social media of which, 70 per cent of the voting population were potentially exposed to. That scandal involving a host of global transatlantic corporations is still unravelling. Some have gone bust and some of their directors have since run for cover as they are fully aware of their lawbreaking activities. Others involve the CEO’s of household names like Facebook and PayPal.

All along, the government had locked up reports about the effects of Brexit on the future of Britain. Those reports were dire and predicted exactly what we are now learning about many months later – that “Britain would be hit with shortages of medicine, fuel and food within a fortnight if the UK tries to leave the European Union without a deal.” This is according to a Brexit scenario drawn up by senior civil servants for David Davis – who has himself abandoned ship to ensure a hard Brexit.

 

Engineered for chaos

TruePublica published an article in October 2017 entitled: How Brexit Was Engineered By Foreign Billionaires To Bring About Economic Chaos – For-Profit. Its opening paragraph was:

“far from being the result of representative democracy, this is in fact, a campaign of covert intervention by foreign billionaires to bring about economic chaos in Britain in order to create the circumstances for making huge profits. This is not the stuff of mere conspiracy theories. Clear evidence has emerged that Brexit was engineered and is already proving to be a catastrophe.”

This is no longer speculation, what has since emerged is now a matter of fact.

Major charitable organisations are being exposed as little more than a front for their pro-Brexit, right-wing assault on Britain with a view to exploiting its resources and its people. The Legatum Institute was set up by multi-billionaire New Zealand born Christopher Chandler, formerly president of Sovereign Asset Management. Its speciality is moving into markets at times of crisis. They were and still are heavily involved in influencing Brexit. Read part three of that report that went on say:

 

“In this, the Legatum Institute seems to be paving the way for its “parent undertakings”, engineering a “disruptive transition” for Brexit, then to reap the profits from chaos. Its task is assisted by useful fools and fellow travellers on the Tory right. What we have often characterised as incompetence, therefore, may be more sinister. There is money to be made out of a hard Brexit.”

 

Even the legislature itself has attempted to make it illegal for corporations to speak about Brexit negatively. Business leaders were also threatened by senior MP’s if they spoke up.

Parliament has clearly stated our long, hard, fought-for human rights laws are to be dismantled – and they are asking us to trust them with new unprecedented powers not granted in hundreds of years aside of world wars.

When Barrack Obama visited and declared Britain would be at the back of any trade deal queue, the right-wing press and media were outraged. But nothing was said about Donald Trump’s extreme right-wing war hawk and new national security adviser, John Bolton who chaired a nonprofit that promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news that entered the national narrative – again, all proven to be little more than lies, but all have powerful and persuasive arguments to many.

As I wrote in an article previously, the list of millionaires, billionaires, corporations, think tanks, campaigners and other organisations that have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into seeing Brexit become a reality is almost never-ending. There will be many more scandals emerging as the month’s roll by. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this article and many others for that matter, if you still think that the EU referendum resulting in Brexit was democracy in action – then it’s time to wake up to reality. It wasn’t. The general public has been conned by the wealthiest and most powerful, by those that have the money, means and motivation.

 

This is the end-game of neoliberalism. Civil society, largely constructed and protected by social democracy in the 70 years since the last world war is about to be forced to its knees.

 

Peter Hitchins concluded that neoliberal capitalism was going to lead to much, much worse. As so it is. The Great Con That Ruined Britain is in two parts – Thatcher’s financial reforms have led to extreme disaster capitalism and we are all about to feel what that is like at the very sharp end of its next and final phase.

For those of you that still believe that Brexit was won by millions at the ballot box just consider the sheer weight of expert voices who are not arguing about the end result, only that the result itself came about because of an epic propaganda campaign involving many more than you had ever contemplated.

Before Brexit, you had never heard about Aggregate IQ, SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica, Legatum, IEA, Atlas Network, Civitas, CPS, Policy Exchange, Sovereign Asset Management, Cobden Centre, Cato Institute and many (hundreds) more who pumped undisclosed millions into their campaigns.

Throughout the EU referendum campaigning period, you were not aware of emotional manipulation strategies that have been going on or covertly paid for voter engagement and disengagement tactics or that you were at the end of a mass population algorithm-driven micro-targeting campaign adopting military strategies designed to ‘change hearts and minds.’

And what did you vote for? Was it about the huge deregulation programme heading our way? I doubt it. You voted for your beliefs and principles – both of which were sacrificed on the altar of profiteering by people who couldn’t care less what happens to either you or your country.

Brexit has always been sold to the general public as freedom from the red tape of an EU bureaucracy that Britain escaped, not the public protections put in place over decades to ensure civil society thrives. We’ve only just started to understand what the banks did to Britain in 2008 and how austerity was a failed ideology. The next one, the great one is heading straight for us and Brexit will go down in history as an ideology like neoliberalism, just a con, but one that finally ruined Britain.

 

 

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