Tomorrow Tony Blair is making a major speech on Europe, which I’ll be attending. Ahead of the speech, I received a press release entitled “Blair for EU President campaign starts tomorrow: Join us!”. According to the press release,
Tomorrow (November 28) Tony Blair will kick-start his campaign to become the EU’s president. We will be there to support him between 9-9.30am…Members of the London office of the Blair for President Preparatory Committee will be waiting to greet Tony with colourful campaign posters carrying the slogan: Tony Blair for EU President – Integrity in Action
Now this lot sound like an interesting bunch so I went to the website that their press release linked to – which gives the address of the “UK Preparatory Committee Blair for President” as 72 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8TH. Their phone number is given as 02034275621. Those are the same contact details as “Democracy Movement” an organisation which describes itself as:
Britain’s largest non-party pressure group campaigning against the ever-further centralisation of political decision-making in undemocratic EU institutions.
They’ve also held at least one joint event with The Bruges Group, who describe themselves as “A neoliberal think tank which researches and publishes against European federation and against British participation in a single European state.” Sound like Blair fans to you? Or a group that would want any EU President? No, it rather sounds like a bunch of rightwingers running a false flag operation to me.
The contact name given for “Tony Blair for EU President” is “Marc Henri”. Presumably this is a typo, and the person putting themselves forward as a supposed Blair cheerleader is in fact Marc Henri Glendenning – the Campaign Director of the Democracy Movement, a former Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students and a speaker at the 2008 Libertarian Alliance Conference. The Daily Mail once described him as one of a number of ‘Thatcherite guerrillas’.
He also works part-time (and unpaid I’m told) as the political director of the People’s Pledge – the campaign for an EU referendum.
If you’re a Libertarian trying to set up a fake campaign for Tony Blair’s candidacy for EU President, at least make it look convincing, and take more than five minutes to spot…However if Mr Glendenning has in fact experienced a damascene conversion to Europe and Tony Blair, we welcome our latest comrade with open arms…
Update: The People’s Pledge contacted us with the following statement:
“Marc has set up, in his own time, what is clearly a spoof campaign, to highlight the importance of the EU presidency. The Democracy Movement has a long history of spoof campaigns to highlight certain issues on which they campaign.”
Take a look at the website for yourself and see if you think it’s clearly a spoof…
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