Why the panic among Boris Johnson’s allies? Because they know Brexit is unravelling

There is an air of desperation in attacks from those on the right and their supporters in the press. They fear if Johnson falls, the Brexit deception will crumble too writes Michael Heseltine in The Guardian

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Did something change this month? Having proclaimed the Brexit referendum triumph of 2016 as the unique achievement of Boris Johnson and praised his historic success in the election three years later with the slogan “get Brexit done”, did the wreckers of the European dream slowly begin to realise that if Johnson goes, it shifts the sands from beneath their feet?

I’m the president of European Movement – Andrew Adonis is chair – and between us we agreed that this link needed a public airing. Learning from the direct and simple messaging of the anti-European newspapers, we felt the phrase: “If Boris goes, Brexit goes” said it clearly enough. Adonis duly tweeted it, to the horror of the pro-Brexit press.

The past few weeks have been a torrid time for the prime minister. He designed a set of restrictions he said were of critical importance for our safety and for the ability of the NHS to cope with the pandemic. He was right to do so. But disclosures since give the clearest impression that he not only broke the rules, but that he also misled parliament.

Johnson said he would accept the findings of Sue Gray’s inquiry, in stark contrast to his treatment of Sir Alex Allan’s report into the home secretary’s behaviour in 2020.

I believe he is entitled to insist that matters are not prejudged prior to the release of the full findings of the Gray inquiry, and the completion of the Metropolitan police investigation. I do not believe in the rule of the mob.

But a great deal hangs on this. If the prime minister is found to have lied to parliament and to the people, what defence is there to the allegation that the Brexit cause – mired in similar controversy over lies and dissembling – was conducted with the same disregard for the truth?

We all have a clear memory of the Brexit campaign and what was said. That we were being run by Brussels. That European restrictions were holding back our economy and lowering our living standards. That we could keep all the benefits of the single market and customs union, while negotiating trade deals with faster-growing countries in a world that was shifting east. That we had to regain control over our borders. That there would be no new border between Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain, and that the Good Friday agreement, having ended years of strife, would be fully honoured

Theresa May became prime minister and immediately handed important offices of state to the three leading Brexiters. Boris Johnson went to the Foreign Office. David Davis went to the Department for Exiting the European Union, and Liam Fox to the Department for International Trade. They had their hands on the levers of power for two years before Johnson and Davis resigned, claiming their jobs were impossible.

Having ousted May, they claimed that a bare-bones trade deal – without most of the benefits of the customs union and the single market – was “oven ready” and would “get Brexit done”. In a straight contest with the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn, Johnson secured his mandate.

Except their deal didn’t “get Brexit done”. Within months it had seriously frustrated trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and the government threatened to tear up the very deal it had itself negotiated to safeguard the position of Northern Ireland. Lord Frost resigned from the cabinet as Brexit minister last December after less than a year, complaining of the Covid strategy but also bemoaning that, regarding Brexit, the correct agenda was not being pursued.

Characteristically, he gave no detail as to what that agenda should have been or who was holding it up, but the villains were familiar: the metropolitan elite, the civil service, the BBC, Brussels, the remoaners – more or less anybody, and now including myself and Andrew Adonis. Everyone except the actual people in positions of power.

That is why February 2022 feels so significant. The cry has been growing louder. The right wing has been circling. Letters have been landing on the chairman of the 1922 committee’s desk. Something must be done. Reshuffle the pack, create a new government department and put yet another Brexiter in charge to pluck all those low-hanging plums that proved beyond the reach of predecessors.

Anyone with experience of Whitehall knows what happens next. The nameplates will change and the same civil servants will have new titles without actually moving their offices. But they will face exactly the same questions that have now been unanswered for five years. What is Brexit all about?

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lord Frost’s spiritual successor in his new role as minister for Brexit opportunities, has a novel approach. He told the Sun last week that he is bypassing the civil service to ask if anyone else in the country has any ideas about Brexit benefits. Sun readers are invited to write to him with suggestions and he will see what can be done. But that too is revealing. One of the first tests officials apply to new ministers is to ask if they know what they want and to assess whether they have the ability to communicate that to them. I am afraid that Rees-Mogg has not passed this test, which is all the more surprising as he had plenty of time lounging on the government frontbench, listening to suggestions from Brexit-supporting Tory MPs.

So did something happen in February 2022? Maybe it’s just a feeling, a cloud no bigger than a man’s fist, the first breath of wind before the storm when the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph employ two of their most renowned columnists to attack Andrew Adonis and myself, merely for making the point that their hero may have feet of clay and take the Brexit house down with him. Perhaps they have smelled the wind, just as I have.

Learn from Northern Ireland: beware entrenching Brexit divisions

 The unloved backstop in May’s deal offers a new strategic advantage writes MATTHEW O'TOOLE in THE FT


In my hometown, as with a handful of others in Northern Ireland, there is an Irish Street, English Street and Scotch Street. They were named to reflect the origins of people who have lived alongside one another for centuries, without ever quite becoming one people. 

These streets long predate the creation of Northern Ireland following partition in 1921; they predate the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. At the most basic level, they reveal the enduring dilemma of that part of Ireland: how to accommodate more than one thing. How to live with ambiguity without antagonism. A task at which we have failed in the past with appalling consequences. 

The Northern Ireland backstop is now routinely described as the central barrier, or stumbling block, in agreeing orderly terms for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. This view has become conventional in London — particularly among Brexiters, but also many Remainers — with little attempt to understand the prior problem that required solving. This tendency has been compounded by the extraordinary power currently wielded at Westminster by the Democratic Unionist Party, which does not welcome ambiguous interpretations of Northern Ireland’s current status, nor of its history. It opposed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which enshrined the principle of consent (Northern Ireland remaining in the UK until a majority voted otherwise) but added several asterisks that qualified UK sovereignty. 

That the DUP is the only party representing Northern Ireland in the Commons is itself further evidence of the place’s ambiguity. Sinn Fein, which holds the rest of the seats but does not take them, has never recognised the legitimacy of the UK parliament’s authority. 

It is the persistence of this dividing axis in one small corner of Europe that was always — and I do mean always — going to complicate Brexit. But something more is happening: at the very moment Northern Ireland’s divisions again require subtle accommodation, Britain’s own divisions are making that impossible. Guided by the baleful influence of the DUP, whose guiding mission is to assert Northern Ireland’s unadulterated Britishness, Britain is becoming more like Northern Ireland. 

Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland secretary, was rebuked recently for implying precisely this — that the region’s divisions contain warnings for Britain at large. Northern Ireland, she wrote, “in particular, knows the damage that division can do”. Notwithstanding her previous confessed ignorance on the place she now governs — not knowing that unionists tended not to vote for nationalist parties, and vice versa — Ms Bradley was not wrong. 

Brexit has created — or perhaps revealed and clarified — an intense division in British politics, and in British life. As in Northern Ireland, reality itself is increasingly defined by the split over EU membership. Contradictory narratives — of national self-harm versus thwarted national liberation — are congealing in the veins of Remainers and Leavers. Several studies, including a recent analysis by polling expert John Curtice, have shown how entrenched Remain or Leave identities have become: far more fundamental than attachment to any political party. Voters on each side are now invested in these identities in a way that prevents compromise. 

There are clear limits to this analogy, dictated by respect for Irish history and its ancient and recent traumas. Britain is not the same as Northern Ireland, which is precisely the point of the backstop. It should, however, be careful about becoming any more like it, however maddening each side of the Brexit divide finds the perceived distortions of the other. 

It is also wrong to imply both sides are as bad as each other: fault lies largely with the Brexiters, whose zeal has driven the country to this precipice. But whether Britain ends up leaving the EU or not, its divided society will need to a find a way of accommodating tribes that have become remarkably entrenched in little more than two and a half years. 

In a few days, I travel back to Northern Ireland to spend Christmas. The place whose ambiguities are at the centre of Brexit, but where the views of most people are eerily absent from the debate in London. The backstop, unloved by virtually all sides in British politics, is mostly welcomed in a land that has learnt to live with constructive ambiguity. It remains a useful diplomatic concept as an alternative to purity and further division. 

The backstop guarantees Northern Ireland access to both UK and European markets. It offers the place something it has rarely known: strategic advantage. The chance to put its contradictions to a more productive use rather than hostility. 

If only divided Britain would give it the chance.

How to defeat fake news: Lessons from Ireland's abortion referendum

Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian

In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on abortion, we should not lose sight of what did not happen. A vote on an emotive subject was not subverted. The tactics that have been so successful for the right and the far right in the UK, the US, Hungary and elsewhere did not work. A democracy navigated its way through some very rough terrain and came home not just alive but more alive than it was before. In the world we inhabit, these things are worth celebrating but also worth learning from. Political circumstances are never quite the same twice, but some of what happened and did not happen in Ireland surely contains more general lessons.

If the right failed spectacularly in Ireland, it was not for want of trying. Save the 8th, one of the two main groups campaigning against the removal of the anti-abortion clause from the Irish constitution, hired Vote Leave’s technical director, the Cambridge Analytica alumnus Thomas Borwick.

Save the 8th and the other anti-repeal campaign, Love Both, used apps developed by a US-based company, Political Social Media (PSM), which worked on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. The small print told those using the apps that their data could be shared with other PSM clients, including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.

Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.

Fake ‘facts’: A Save The 8th no campaign poster. Photograph: Laura Hutton/Alamy Live News

First, trust the people. A crucial part of what happened in Ireland was an experiment in deliberative democracy. The question of how to deal with the constitutional prohibition on abortion – a question that has bedevilled the political and judicial systems for 35 years – was put to a Citizens’ Assembly, made up of 99 randomly chosen (but demographically representative) voters. These so-called ordinary people – truck drivers, homemakers, students, farmers – gave up their weekends to listen to 40 experts in medicine, law and ethics, to women affected by Ireland’s extremely restrictive laws and to 17 different lobby groups. They came up with recommendations that confounded most political and media insiders, by being much more open than expected – and much more open than the political system would have produced on its own.

It was these citizens who suggested entirely unrestricted access to abortion up to 12 weeks. Conservatives dismissed this process, in Trump style, as rigged (it wasn’t). They would have been much better off if they had actually listened to what these citizens were saying, and tried to understand what had persuaded them to take such a liberal position. The Irish parliament did listen – an all-party parliamentary committee essentially adopted the proposals of the Citizens’ Assembly. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of “the people” actually knew pretty well what “the people” were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience.

Second, be honest. The yes side in the Irish debate handed its opponents a major tactical advantage but gained a huge strategic victory. It ceded an advantage in playing with all its cards turned up on the table. Technically, the vote was merely to repeal a clause in the constitution. There was no need to say what legislation the government hoped to enact afterwards. But the government chose to be completely clear about its intentions. It published a draft bill. This allowed opponents of reform to pick at, and often distort, points of detail. But it also completely undercut the reactionary politics of paranoia, the spectre of secret conspiracies. Honesty proved to be very good policy.


Yes campaigners did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause

Third, talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody. The reactionary movements have been thriving on tribalism. They divide voters into us and them – and all the better if they call us “deplorables”. The yes campaigners in Ireland – many of them young people, who are so often caricatured as the inhabitants of virtual echo chambers – refused to be tribal. They stayed calm and dignified. And when they were jeered at, they did not jeer back. They got out and talked (and listened) without prejudice. They did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause. They risked (and sometimes got) abuse by recognising no comfort zones and engaging everyone they could reach. It turned out that a lot of people were sick of being typecast as conservatives. It turned out that a lot of people like to be treated as complex, intelligent and compassionate individuals. A majority of farmers and more than 40% of the over-65s voted yes.

Finally, the old feminist slogan that the personal is political holds true, but it also works the other way around. The political has to be personalised. The greatest human immune system against the viruses of hysteria, hatred and lies is storytelling. Even when we don’t trust politicians or experts, we trust people telling their own tales. We trust ourselves to judge whether they are lying or being truthful. Irish women had to go out and tell their own stories, to make the painful and intimate into public property.

This is very hard to do, and it should not be necessary. But is unstoppably powerful. The process mattered, political leadership mattered, campaigning mattered. But it was stories that won. Exit polls showed that by far the biggest factors in determining how people voted were “people’s personal stories that were told to the media”, followed by “the experience of someone who they know”.

Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.” If democracy can create the context for that humane exchange to happen over and over again, it can withstand everything its enemies throw at it.

Signs that Britain may not Brexit after all the fuss

Sean O'Grady in The Independent

Is this it? The moment when the May premiership is over? Could Corbyn end up taking power in a matter of weeks? It’s at least possible, though I concede it sounds far-fetched at first.

In history, some British Prime Ministers have had their premierships wrecked by the “Irish Question”. Others, in more recent times, have been destroyed by Europe. Theresa May is unique in managing to combine both famously intractable and insoluble issues into one lethal cocktail.

And so, it seems she is about to swallow the poison. Her premiership may be even shorter than many anticipated, and a Jeremy Corbyn-led government could be a fact of British life by the time the snows melt next year. Here’s how.

From what we can discern, the Government is perfectly happy to concede “special status” for Northern Ireland / Ireland in the Brexit talks – anathema to the Ulster Unionists. This is because the Government desperately needs to get onto the second phase of the process – the trade talks for the whole UK – and MPs, without being too crude about it, are happy to sign whatever the EU sticks under their nose and worry about the consequences later.

In the end, they will risk their support from the DUP to get moving on Brexit. Jobs (Tory MPs’ included) are at stake. After all, ministers such as David Davis always say that “nothing’s agreed until everything’s agreed”, so having now ratted on the Democratic Unionists, they can, in due course, re-rat on the Irish and the EU, after a trade deal is sorted out. 

With a bit of luck, some creative ambiguity and some more bribes and false promises for the DUP, Theresa May might just pull it off. Perfidious Albion would have foxed the Unionists in the wider national (i.e. Tory) interest.
For such an unlucky Prime Minister, it would be a bit of a turnaround – but, as in horse-racing and football, the form book does count for something; the litany of May’s calamities suggest she won’t, in fact, get away with it.

The DUP could quite conceivably get so angry that they’d scrap their agreement with the Tory-minority Government and resolve to get rid of them. Then May would have to appeal to the Opposition parties, especially Labour, to rescue her in the Commons.

Fat chance. If Corbyn wants, he could find any number of grounds for voting May out of office, but failure of Brexit is a pretty good one. He could then either cobble together a new Frankenstein coalition or, more realistically, follow the provisions of the Fixed Term Parliament Act to secure a fresh general election. With an eight-point poll lead over the Conservatives, wouldn’t you?

Of course that would mean the DUP would let in the “Sinn Fein-loving Corbyn” (as they might see it), so they’d have a tough choice, but they might have sufficient fear about what their constituents in Ulster would do to them if they kept the treacherous Tories in power that they’d feel they have nothing to lose.

In which case we’d have an election in, say, February, and perhaps another hung Parliament – but this time with Labour as the largest party, able to govern in its own right, though constrained by parliamentary arithmetic. 

The incoming government would ask, if it was sensible, to put Brexit on pause while it changes policy, and the EU would happily oblige if there was a chance of reversing Brexit – via, say, a second referendum. Or Corbyn and Keir Starmer could just agree to stay in the single market and some version of the customs union. Arlene Foster might in fact be able to live with that.

In which case, by spring, it would all be over for May, Boris, Gove and the old gang, and they could get on with their civil war in earnest.

Not for the first time, the ball is in Jeremy Corbyn’s court, both in terms of unseating Theresa May and stopping Brexit, or at least a hard Brexit. The Irish Question and the European issue will, not for the first time, have altered the course of British history, and end prematurely some once-glittering political careers.

Two-thirds of Tory MPs want Britain to quit European Union

Toby Helm and Henry McDonald in The Guardian


Party sources say Brexit support is rising – despite David Cameron’s preference for staying in EU – but U-turns are possible

 

David Cameron with the European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Photograph: Ints Kalnins/Reuters

Two-thirds of Conservative MPs now support Britain’s exit from the European Union, despite David Cameron’s clear preference for staying in, according to senior sources within the party.

Key figures in Tory high command say analysis of public statements and private views expressed by their 330 MPs shows that at least 210 now believe that the UK would be better off “out”.

The surge in support within the parliamentary party for leaving will greatly encourage “out” campaigners, who believe many people will take their lead from local MPs when they decide which way to vote. However, party managers say the total number of Tory MPs who will join the campaign to leave could turn out to be significantly fewer – around 110 – if in the next few months opinion polls begin to point towards a close result or a win for the pro-EU side.

“Certainly at least two-thirds want to leave as it stands,” said a senior party figure. “But if things are very tight some will be bought off by offers of patronage and will be reluctant to take a different line to the prime minister. Plenty will not want their careers blighted by being on the wrong side of such an important debate.” The Observer has also been told that soundings taken by MPs show the “vast majority” of grassroots activists now want to quit the EU – and that most will not be swayed by whatever deal Cameron achieves in his attempt to renegotiate UK membership.

EU referendum expected in September as hopes fade of deal next month



Last week Cameron, in effect, conceded that his party was split from top to bottom over Europe when he agreed that members of his government, including cabinet ministers, would be allowed to speak out against the official line during the campaign, which is expected to be later this year.

While the holders of the top offices of state – including the chancellor, George Osborne, the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond and the home secretary, Theresa May – are likely to back staying in, other senior ministers, including the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of the House of Commons, Chris Grayling, and the Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, want to campaign to leave.

The spotlight will inevitably now turn to Boris Johnson, who attends cabinet in his role as mayor of London and sees himself as a future leader of the party. A longstanding critic of the EU, Johnson has yet to indicate whether he will campaign to stay in or leave.

The ability of Villiers to remain as Northern Ireland secretary if she sides with the “out” campaign was being called into question on Saturday night as opposition MPs said leaving the EU would not be in Northern Ireland’s interests, could harm the peace process and damage Northern Ireland’s economy. The Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder, who speaks for her party on the referendum campaign, said Villiers should stand down, saying a Brexit would not be compatible with her role. “It would be highly inappropriate for Theresa Villiers to remain in her post while campaigning to leave the EU,” Bearder said. “Leaving Europe would risk stoking sectarian tensions and undoing years of peace-building, much of it funded through EU peace programmes.

“It would also fundamentally transform the UK’s relationship with the Republic of Ireland and put at risk the open land border we currently share. Government ministers should not be able to campaign for an EU exit if this completely goes against their role and responsibilities.”

Osborne: PM giving ministers free rein on EU referendum is not a U-turn



The only Irish nationalist party represented in the House of Commons also questioned whether Villiers could remain in her post. Colum Eastwood, new leader of the Social Democratic and Labour party, said Britain’s departure from the EU could put at risk Northern Ireland’s £1.6bn of trade with the Irish Republic. “While Theresa Villiers is obviously entitled to engage in the internal and long-running Tory battles over Europe, her role as secretary of state for Northern Ireland places upon her a separate responsibility. That role should require her to represent the best interests of people in the north. A Brexit is not in our interest. It is not in the interest of our economy or in the interest of our society,” he said.

“All the evidence, all the major voices in our agricultural and business communities, have warned that a Brexit would devastate the fundamentals of our economy.”

Meanwhile, the EU spokesman of the strongly Eurosceptic Danish People’s party, Kenneth Kristensen Berth, said he did not believe the UK should leave. “I fully understand the British people’s scepticism, but the answer is not to leave now. The answer is to work within the EU framework to slim down the EU cooperation, and that’s a job that will be significantly harder without the British.”

James McGrory, chief campaign spokesman for Britain Stronger In Europe, said: “It shows how isolated Ukip and the Leave campaigns are when even rightwing Eurosceptics in other countries are arguing that Britain should remain in Europe.

“Europe needs reform, but leaving altogether would take us to very extreme fringes of the international community, where even far-right outfits like the Danish People’s party don’t want to be.”

Offshore secrets revealed: the shadowy side of a booming industry

A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies

• David Leigh, Harold Frayman and James Ball
• The Guardian, Sunday 25 November 2012 20.00 GMT

The existence of an extraordinary global network of sham company directors, most of them British, can be revealed.

The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the Guardian, the BBC's Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has uncovered a booming offshore industry that leaves the way open for both tax avoidance and the concealment of assets.

More than 21,500 companies have been identified using this group of 28 so-called nominee directors. The nominees play a key role in keeping secret hundreds of thousands of commercial transactions. They do so by selling their names for use on official company documents, using addresses in obscure locations all over the world.

This is not illegal under UK law, and sometimes nominee directors have a legitimate role. But our evidence suggests this particular group of directors only pretend to control the companies they put their names to.

The companies themselves are often registered anonymously offshore in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), but also in Ireland, New Zealand, Belize and the UK itself. More than a score of UK agencies sell offshore companies, several of which also help supply sham directors.

One British couple, Sarah and Edward Petre-Mears, who migrated from Sark in the Channel Islands to the Caribbean island of Nevis, have sold their services to more than 2,000 entities, with their names appearing on activities ranging from Russian luxury property purchases to pornography and casino sites.

In 1999, the government claimed Britain's sham director industry had been "effectively outlawed" after a judge, Mr Justice Blackburne, said the court would not tolerate "the situation where someone takes on the directorship of so many companies and then totally abrogates responsibility". But our findings show this has failed to be policed.

These nominee fronts conceal a wide variety of real owners, including those that are perfectly legal, from Russian oligarchs to discreet speculators in the British property market. Their only common factor is the wish for secrecy. Some of the owners we have identified include:

• Vladimir Antonov, the London-based billionaire Russian purchaser of Portsmouth FC, who is currently fighting an extradition request from Lithuania, where he controlled a bank. He denies wrongdoing.

• Yair Spitzer, a north London software engineer who bought and sold London flats. He said: "We were advised by UK accountants that this structure … was perfectly legal."

• The Hackmeys, a wealthy Israeli family, one of whom used a BVI company to buy a £26m London office block. Their spokesman said: "The deal was introduced by a [confidential] joint venture partner who set up the deal and structure."

• Nicholas Joannou, whose Armstrong Group sold shares from an address in Berkeley Square, central London. The Guardian was unable to contact him.

• SP Trading, which was linked in 2009 to a Kazakh businessman and an arms to Iran scandal. The nominee directors in Vanuatu turned out to have no knowledge of the company's true activities. They told us there were "very few cases of misuse by clients".

In a parallel investigation Monday's Panorama on BBC1 is due to show a company formation agent offering to assist its undercover reporter to escape tax. The agent, James Turner, of Turner Little in York, offers nominee directors in Belize and says: "They won't even know that they were a director, they just get paid."

A representative of a second company, Atlas Corporate Services, is asked for maximum confidentiality. He explains that many of its nominees are not even aware of how their names are being used. Jesse Hester, who runs Atlas Corporate Services from Mauritius, is seen assuring a potential client that the UK is unlikely to catch up with him. "Tax authorities don't have the resources to chase everybody down … They reckon it's probably the same rough odds as probably winning the lottery," he says.

The revelations launch a week-long series onthe Guardian site designed to strip away anonymity from offshore companies, the most shadowy aspect of the UK's financial industry. The British Virgin Islands are a particularly successful hideaway, thanks to the exceptional secrecy on offer. This Caribbean territory, which is ultimately controlled by the UK, has sold more than a million anonymously-owned offshore entities since launching itself in 1984 as a tax haven.

The purchasers are often people who, for a variety of reasons, some perfectly legitimate, do not wish to advertise what they are doing with their wealth.

But a worldwide research effort has been launched this year by the ICIJ. It aims to identify, country by country, thousands of the true owners.

The Guardian has collaborated with the ICIJ, a non-profit organisation, to analyse many gigabytes of the British data. This week we intend to reveal the names of more owners. We do not suggest criminal wrongdoing by them. Among those we have contacted, not all go so far as to employ nominee directors. Some insist they have done nothing improper, and are merely taking advantage of legitimate tax breaks or the opportunity for privacy. Critics say, however, that the islands' system can be open to abuse because of its lack of transparency.

Gerard Ryle, the director of the ICIJ, said: "We are applying specialist software to crunch through literally hundreds of thousands of offshore entities to look for patterns. We are marrying our findings with old-fashioned shoe leather and interviews from key insiders who can provide further context on this little known and loosely regulated world. We are satisfied that the information we have is authentic."

Ryle believes the ICIJ's global project, when it is completed next year, will haul into the open a shadowy financial system estimated to conceal the movement around the world of trillions of dollars.

Offshore secrets

Guardian team: David Leigh, Harold Frayman and James Ball.

The project is a collaboration between the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) headed by Gerard Ryle in Washington DC. Guardian investigations editor David Leigh is a member of ICIJ, a global network of reporters in more than 60 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories that cross national boundaries. The ICIJ was founded in 1997 as a project of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington DC-based non-profit.