Bilderberg: Making A Mockery Of Ministerial Transparency Data
BILDERBERG: MAKING A MOCKERY OF MINISTERIAL TRANSPARENCY DATA
http://www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=19891#19891
Written by Guest on Wednesday, 27 May 2015
George Osborne and Sir John Kerr meet at Bilderberg 2014
http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/12-blog/1267-bilderberg-making-a-mockery-of-ministerial-transparency-data
Charlie Skelton is a writer for Have I Got News
For You and the Guardian. The TI-UK blog features
thought and opinion from guest writers as well as
TI staff. Any opinions expressed by external
contributors do not necessarily reflect the views
of Transparency International UK.
“Information is power,” said David Cameron in
July 2011. “It lets people hold the powerful to
account”. However, not all information is of the
same quality. Good information is power. But bad information is disempowering.
The annual Bilderberg Conference is a
particularly acute example. At the annual
conference, participants have an implicit
commitment to confidentiality over their
meetings, undermining the public commitments of
transparency over lobbying and the value of the
UK’s Ministerial lobbying and gifts & hospitality
transparency data. Where information is
published, it has been found to be internally
inconsistent, incomplete and inaccurate.
In the Treasury's quarterly transparency data for
April-June 2014, in the list of George Osborne's
“overseas travel”, is the record of a trip made
on “30 – 31 May 2014”. Destination: Switzerland.
Purpose of trip: the Bilderberg conference. One
tiny mistake: the 2014 Bilderberg conference
wasn't in Switzerland. It was in Denmark.
A slip of the fingers by a 19-year-old doing work
experience at the Treasury, perhaps. But this
error is indicative of the quality of the data
published about ministers' participation in the
annual Bilderberg conference – a yearly
international summit of 130 or so high-ranking
politicians, royalty, arms firms, media barons,
bank bosses, IMF chiefs, NATO heads and corporate CEOs.
Staying with the 2014 conference for the moment:
George Osborne records his attendance at this
event in his list of “meetings with external
organisations.” However, the Secretary of State
for International Development, Justine Greening,
who was a participant at the same conference, has
completely failed to declare her attendance in
her quarterly transparency data for the period.
Greening (pictured below) thinks it best to
declare a chat she had with the Clean Cookstoves
Alliance, “to discuss the issue of Clean
Cookstoves in developing countries”, but not
worth telling the public about attending a
three-day policy summit with the Chairman and CEO
of Shell, the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of
HSBC, the Chairman and Chief Executive of BP, the
Chairman of Fiat, the Executive Chairman of
Google, and her own Chancellor. Maybe it didn't seem important enough?
Going back a couple of years to 2013, David
Cameron recorded his trip to the Bilderberg
conference in Watford in two different
categories: “meetings with external
organisations” and “hospitality” received. And he
was there for a single evening. Greening was out
in Denmark for the entire conference, and never
mentions it. The hospitality, the travel costs,
the meetings. Not a whisper. She meticulously
declares getting a “flight upgrade” from British
Airways the previous month, but not three days of
private banqueting and accommodation at a 5 star
luxury hotel in Copenhagen. It's farcical.
We're left with a situation where two senior
British ministers attended the 2014 Bilderberg
conference in Copenhagen. One didn't declare it
at all, and the other declared it as a visit to Switzerland. Viva transparency!
Even though Osborne did partially succeed in
declaring his overseas travel to the Copenhagen
conference (even if he got the country wrong), he
fails to declare any “hospitality” received for
the days he spent there. In the same quarterly
return he's careful to register a lunch with
former World Bank boss Robert Zoellick (albeit
misspelled as “Zellick”) but not the many meals
he shared with Zoellick at Bilderberg. The same
gap occurs in 2013: no mention of hospitality.
Osborne did, however, declare the hospitality of
Bilderberg back in 2011. Was that the one year he
managed to get a seat at dinner?
The declarations around the Bilderberg conference
highlight a sort of scattergun approach to
Ministerial transparency data. Back in Osborne's
2011 declarations, he lists Bilderberg under
“hospitality” but fails to record the 2011
conference in his list of “meetings with external
organisations”, which he does in both 2013 and 2014.
Similarly, Kenneth Clarke, when a minister, chose
to register his attendance at Bilderberg in 2013,
but not in 2012. And even in the year Clarke did
admit going to the conference he made no mention
of the hospitality received (which, judging from
the colour of his face when he left, was plenty).
It's impossible to say whether these
inconsistencies and inaccuracies are due to
carelessness, dishonesty, or civil service
whimsy. But what's certain is that they undermine
one's confidence in the overall trustworthiness
of the ministerial transparency data. I've only
examined one small area. Are these the only
errors and omissions in the data? It would take
an extremely muscular leap of faith to think that's the case.
It begs the question: is anyone actually checking
this stuff? Or are we meant to say: “fine,
they've published a spreadsheet and stamped it
with the word “transparency”, I guess that's ok then.”
This brings us to another more general failing of
the ministerial transparency data: the form in
which they've been recorded. For example, the
column of data headed “name of external
organisation” is being made to accommodate
everything from single journalists to
corporations to major international conferences.
In Osborne's most recent return, we have the same
column in the spreadsheet being used to record
meetings with “Mail on Sunday (Georgie Greig)”,
“Dr Kissinger”, “HSBC” and “Bilderberg
conference”. As if these are somehow equivalent
bits of data. They're simply not. They're not the
same order of things. Trying to fit them all in
the same spreadsheet column is what the logician
Rudolf Carnap called “a confusion of spheres”.
(Never mind the fact that the Editor of the Mail
on Sunday is “Geordie” Greig, not “Georgie”
Greig. Another gold star for the Treasury intern).
A similar category error occurs in the next
column along, where the phrase “general
discussion” is being used to describe both a
40-minute chat with a journalist and the entire
content of a visit to Bilderberg: multiple
meetings and seminars on multiple subjects that
took place at a major, multi-day international
summit. The same phrase can't meaningfully cover
both events: there's too vast a difference of scale.
When used in reference to Bilderberg, the phrase
“general discussion” has, in the terminology of
Karl Popper, tremendously low “explanatory
power”. It lacks what Popper calls “informative
content”. Saying you had a “general discussion”
with the “Bilderberg conference” is close to
saying nothing at all. (Which is what Justine Greening actually did).
The problem here is: you don't have a “meeting”
with the Bilderberg conference, like you might
with Geordie Greig. You have a series of meetings
during it. It's a sort of meta-meeting,
containing seminars, breakout meetings, Q&As,
breakfasts, lunches, dinners, drinks, and private
discussions. Perhaps with the Chairman of HSBC. And it lasts three days.
We witnessed George Osborne engaged in one of
these breakout meetings in Copenhagen, where, for
a good 25 minutes, he sat in earnest discussion
with Sir John Kerr, who's the Deputy Chairman of
Scottish Power and was then a Director of mining
giant Rio Tinto. It was intense. We watched it
take place. We've got photos of it. And if
anything could be classified as a “meeting”, this was a meeting.
Osborne was there in Copenhagen, in his official
capacity as Chancellor, very definitely having a
meeting that he subsequently didn't declare
having. What Osborne should have entered in his
list of “meetings with external organisations”,
if this list is to mean anything at all, is
“Scottish Power (Sir John Kerr)” and “Rio Tinto (Sir John Kerr)”.
Again, are we to suppose this is the only
“meeting” at Bilderberg that our Chancellor
overlooked? The one that we happened to be able
to document? That can't possibly be the case, a
fact which further erodes our trust in the data.
“Every effort has been taken to ensure that this
is as accurate as possible” insisted the Treasury
on one of Osborne's earlier declarations. “Every
effort” has been spent creating data this patchy?
That's tragic. Don't forget: the public is paying
for the preparation and publishing of this
inadequate information by our public services,
information which it's then supposed to use to
hold the public services to account.
One of the government's seven “Information
Principles for the UK Public Sector” is that
information should be “fit for purpose.” And
these transparency declarations fall well short of that standard.
The official spreadsheets look a lot more like
“information” than they actually are. In the case
of George Osborne telling us he went to
Switzerland and had a “general discussion” with
the “Bilderberg conference”, the information is
close to being garbage. In the case of Justine
Greening, we don't even get the garbage.
David Cameron urged us to use transparency data
to hold the government to account, but if we
really want wield this information, we need to
know it's information worth wielding. Before we
hold the government to account, first we have to
hold the transparency data itself to account.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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