MSP’s Call For Investigation Into InfoWars Based Group After They Apologise To Jeremy Corbyn
Labour MSP makes fresh call for probe into into Fife-based black ops group.
Labour has made renewed calls for an investigation into a Government-funded infowars unit after it emerged the group had apologised to Jeremy Corbyn – and apparently admitted breaching charity law.
Leaders of the highly controversial Integrity Initiative, a registered Scottish charity, said they had written to the Labour leader after personal attacks on the LOTO were retweeted on the unit’s Twitter feed.
The Fife-based group, which is a publicly funded subsidiary of the Institute for Statecraft (IFS), apparently accused him of aiding Russia, possibly unwittingly.
In the wake of the tweets, which were exposed by the Sunday Mail four months ago, the unit and its supporters denied Corbyn had been unfairly targeted.
However, it emerged yesterday that an apology had been given, with the IFS’s founder Chris Donnelly apparently admitting that the activities breached both Foreign Office rules and Scottish charity law.
Labour MSP Neil Findlay, who is a close party ally, said: “It is right and proper that this organisation has apologised but there are still further serious questions to be answered here.
“This is a charity registered in Scotland and overseen by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, funded by UK Government contributions. It should never have been spewing out political attacks on the Labour Party and the Labour movement.
“Such clear political attacks shouldn’t be coming from any charity. We need to know why the Foreign Office has been funding it.
“This cannot be allowed to pass. We need a full inquiry into the actions of this organisation and its links to the Conservative Government.”
The Integrity Initiative, which has received £2million in public funding, had already been the subject of an Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) investigation.
The OSCR was unavailable for comment yesterday and has yet to complete its probe.
But in quotes published by The Times, Donnelly appeared to admit that the OSCR’s rules had been broken.
He said: “We put out something like 26,000 tweets.
“About 400 made reference to some political party or politician, and they were roughly equal between the main political parties, but we should not have sent [them] because the Foreign Office does not allow us to make any party political comment, nor does Scottish charity law.
“That was a mistake and we wrote letters of apology to Jeremy Corbyn. I have been special adviser to two Tory defence secretaries, and for Labour’s John Reid and George Robertson, so we are as apolitical as we could be.”
The tweets put out by the Integrity Initiative were exposed by the Sunday Mail in December, sparking a furious row across British politics.
It emerged that the charity had connections to John Rendon, whose Rendon Group was hired by the CIA in the 90s to run a PR campaign against Saddam Hussein and is said to have been behind stories of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Donnelly is an honorary colonel in military intelligence.
Another member of the board, Dan Lafayeedney, was an SAS soldier in 1978 and director Stephen Dalziel worked in military intelligence.
Director Harry Hart appears to have been the inspiration for a secret agent in the Kingsman movies.
The organisation was registered as a charity at the run-down Gateside Mills, near Auchtermuchty in Fife. But none of the other businesses there had heard of the institute before stories appeared in the media.
The Labour Party has already called for an independent investigation.
Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan at first promised a full investigation but later attempted to dismiss the scandal as “Russian disinformation”.
Integrity Initiative officials argued that other tweets had been critical of politicians of other parties.
In fact, nine tweets promoted material critical of Corbyn or Labour.
Meanwhile, a Twitter search revealed four messages from the organisation promoting positive coverage of Theresa May, while just one criticised an unelected Tory peer and a further one took aim at a Tory funder.
Our investigation found evidence Integrity Initiative’s official Twitter account was used to attack Corbyn, Labour and party officials.
One tweet quoted a newspaper article calling Corbyn a “useful idiot”, and went on to state: “His open visceral anti-Westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”
The project has also been accused of supporting far-right Ukrainian politicians who oppose Russian president Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Professor David Miller of University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, said: “It’s extraordinary that the Foreign Office would be funding a Scottish charity to counter Russian propaganda which ends up attacking Her Majesty’s opposition.”
