SUGAR BABIES REVEAL WHY THEY WANT TO FIND A SUGAR DADDY AT ANNUAL EVENT

Kashmira Gander in The Independent

“What if I want to be a trophy wife?” asks a woman in the audience at the Sugar Baby Summit at the plush Ham Yard hotel in central London. Self-confessed sugar baby Clover Pittilla, who is addressing the room at a podium on stage, pauses for a moment and replies “I say do it. Just live your dreams.”

Pittilla is a 21-year-old pharmaceutical student, and one of the speakers at the third Sugar Baby Summit event organised by dating app and website Seeking Arrangement. The app enables sugar daddies, and some mummies, to seek out so-called sugar babies to shower with gifts, cash and luxury experiences. In return, sugar babies knowingly provide a pretty face and good company. Today, both experienced and wannabe sugar babies have paid £150 to learn how to attract high-net-worth-individuals. They’ll put these skills into practice at a party in the evening. The competition is intense, as Seeking Arrangement permits sugar daddies to have four sugar babies at once. 

And this complicated world of course has its own vocabulary. The sugar babies are told that vanilla, or conventional, relationships are not what sugar daddies are into. And salt daddies are men who just want attention but don’t want to part with their cash.

To some, the oh-so-romantically named Seeking Arrangement is empowering women and men to be brutally clear about what they want in their relationships. The website and the summit are places where they can find one another and forge, more often than not, relationships with massive age gaps without judgement. It offers privacy for the 40 per cent of sugar daddies and mummies who are married. Sugar babies, meanwhile, find lovers, friends and mentors. Others might argue that Seeking Arrangement users might pretend that the power balance between babies and daddies is equal, but in a world where it lies with the person with the fattest wallet it is therefore, well, creepy as hell.

Stood on stage in a short blue gingham dress and glittery silver stilettos, her long blonde hair swept to one side, Pittilla fits the ultimate stereotype of a sugar baby. She tells the around 70 people in the audience that her sugar daddies have enabled her to travel the world and study without having to resort to eating beans on toast to make her student loan stretch. Her spiel mirrors the adverts on the Seeking Arrangement website, which invite students to sign up and lessen the load of their crippling debt. Students are given further incentive to join with free premium membership.

But the crowd is more varied than one might assume. The (mainly) women here are of all ages, body-types and ethnicities. Some, like Pittilla, are dressed in stunning, hyper-feminine clothes, with towering heels, long hair and spotless makeup. But there are plenty of women in casual clothes that wouldn't be out of place in an office. And one guy with blonde hair dressed in black with a man bun. And they're hanging on Pittilla’s every word. When at one point she scrolls quickly through her presentation slides, one woman shouts “you’re going too fast!” Other panels cover cyber-security, fashion and making a first impression, staying motivated, and how to manage finances. 

Clover Pittilla advised shared her tips at the Sugar Baby Summit

First off, Pittilla stresses to the audience that being a sugar baby isn’t sex work and that the men are not paying them. She then reels off bullet points on from her presentation which unintentionally highlight that finding and keeping a sugar daddy is a little complex. Have your own life and don’t put everything aside for a man, but be flexible, she says. Be honest and assertive, but don’t be argumentative. Perhaps hint at what you want and don’t ask for money outright because you’ll seem entitled, and no one likes that. If he doesn’t call you or doesn’t text back, “don’t be argumentative because no one likes that, either”. “Make him feel needed, because guys like to be needed,” she adds.

“He’s paying you,” Pittilla lets slip during her presentation, quickly correcting herself to add “well, no he’s not. He’s definitely not paying you. What he gives are gifts”.

Emma Gammer, a 28-year-old sugar baby who married and divorced a sugar daddy, follows Pittilla's presentation. Gammer advises women to include keywords in their profiles that attract sugar daddies. "Student, model, nurse." Some professionally shot “sexy and sassy” photos to send to potential sugar daddies are also useful, but she urges the audience to avoid men who talk too much about sex and ask for photos but never to meet. Those who flake repeatedly are also a waste of time, she adds. “Some will even go as low as pretending there’s been a family death to avoid meeting you.”

Doesn’t it all make dating seem a bit cold and businesslike? But that’s the beauty of it, suggests Seeking Arrangement founder Brendon Wade, who thinks he’s nailed the formula for successful relationships. Asked why people should become sugar babies rather than finding a match the conventional way he tells The Independent: “You could do that. You could make numerous mistakes and you could fail that way. I’ve been married and divorced three times. Or you could learn the faster way. A lot of sugar babies are teaching the newbies the sorts of mistakes they have made and what they've found to be the most successful way to finding relationships that they truly enjoy.”

Wade adds that he’s going through a “messy divorce” so he’s using the website himself at the moment. As the founder, he’s the original sugar daddy, he adds.

As a younger man, he was “shy, dateless and incapable of finding a woman” he recalls. His mother told him that if he concentrated on his studies and became successful, women would flock to him.

“But when I was in my thirties I had a Bachelor degree and an MBA and I was still dateless. I tried to solve that and date. I was not successful. I would create profiles on dating apps and write hundreds of message but still had no luck. So I thought 'why not base a concept on my mother's idea?'” 

Wade compares using Seeking Arrangement to honing your career skills. “Your career is very important. That’s why you create a CV. But romantic relationships are equally important. But people aren’t using the same goal oriented approach. Most of us beat around the bush, date, and don't specify what we want. We fall in love, and then perhaps months or years later we realise ‘wow this is a mismatch’. What we need is to do is teach people how to date effectively,” he argues. After all, he goes on, in the past parents would set up arranged marriages based on what their child had to offer on paper, so what’s the harm in modernising that approach?

Among the women taking a punt on Ward’s idea is Natalie Wood, a 31-year-old beautician. She has has been using Seeking Arrangement for a few years. One man whom she met on the website flew her to Indonesia to meet him, gave her £10,000 and money for shopping, she says, beaming. Unfortunately, that relationship broke down a few months in because of the man’s circumstances, but he continued to look after her afterwards, she says. At the summit after-party she hopes to pin down some sugar daddies who might otherwise be too busy to meet her. 

Natalie Wood was given £10,000 by a sugar daddy (Seeking Arrangement)

“I really like this website because you can be honest about what you want. I want someone successful, an older mentor. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money, and enjoys a luxury lifestyle. And if he’s not in London I can go on this website and find him internationally.”

In the end, she hopes to find a man to help her set up a salon and, ultimately, someone to marry. Her friends recommended that she try the website in the first place, and she’d happily do the same, she adds.

Others are more nervous about people knowing that they are at this event, presumably because of the stigma attached to unconventional relationships based around money.

I want someone successful. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money
Natalie Wood, beautician and sugar baby

Donna Summer, a 32-year-old beauty therapist based in Hastings, says she’s nervous about being here today, and hasn’t told her friends or family that she’s using Seeking Arrangement.

“I was very apprehensive before I came here that there would be more beautiful women than me,” she says quietly. “I'm going to the party after this and I'm a bit nervous.” Summer was scared the event would be “dodgy”, but is now happy to seek advice from veteran sugar babies on whether or not she needs to declare the money she is given for tax, and other financial questions.

“I’m getting older I don’t have much time left to find someone, so I thought ‘let’s just take the plunge and do it’. Life’s too short, and you’ll probably end up in some horrible relationship anyway. So why not do this?” she reasons.

One 26-year-old from London, who asks to be identified as Nina Sky, has been using Seeking Arrangement for four years, and forged one two-and-a-half-year relationship, and one which lasted under a year. “I’ve been to many countries, gotten gifts. You name it: bags, pets, furs. Loads of things,” she says.

Sky has always been attracted to older men, and is foremost looking for a “gentleman”. A man who is settled emotionally, financially and mentally. She doesn’t have an age limit, but draws the line at someone with poor hygiene.

“I had a Tinder profile up until recently but I just think this is so much better for me. I’m very direct and I like to know where I stand from the beginning. It just avoids confusion,” she says. But Sky disagrees that she takes a businesslike approach to dating. “It’s not a business. It’s finding a mutually beneficial agreement and if it leads to love, then amazing. But I think you need to know what you want.”

The women add that they are unfazed by people who want to judge them, or accuse them of being gold diggers. And of course the sugar daddies aren’t here to defend themselves against anyone who might accuse them of taking advantage of people. They’re at the party, where the press aren’t allowed.

“I would say to someone who might call me a gold digger that I’m reaching out to find what I want. If I want a better life and to make my life the best, I will,” says Wood. “Maybe they're just jealous of my fantastic lifestyle.” And who said romance is dead?

The courts and matters of faith

Peter Ronald deSouza in The Hindu


We need to make a distinction between matters of conscience and matters of faith


There is an uncanny similarity of argument between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) on controversies that have to do with belief. This is illustrated best in their respective positions on the Ram Setu and the triple talaq debates.

In 2005, on the Ram Setu issue, the RSS stated that their opposition to the UPA government’s plan to dredge a canal between Rameswaram, off the coast of Tamil Nadu, and the islands of Mannar, near Sri Lanka, was a “matter of faith and hence required no substantiation”.

Twelve years later the counsel for the AIMPLB has offered a similar argument in the Supreme Court when making his client’s case on the practice of triple talaq. A Constitution Bench of five justices is to decide on whether the practice of divorce by triple talaq is consistent with the protections guaranteed to individuals by the Indian Constitution. In opposition to pleas that the practice be considered unconstitutional, the AIMPLB counsel stated that triple talaq “is a matter of faith. Hence there is no question of constitutional morality and equity”.

This argument that matters of faith be given special status needs to be assessed. Why should matters of faith be given immunity from scrutiny?

Three responses can be offered to this question. Let me, on grounds of brevity, refer to them as (i) the special status of faith, (ii) the issue of validity, and (iii) ethical codes in modern democracies.

Special status of faith

At the outset we must acknowledge that faith, as religious belief, must have special status in any constitutional order. It constitutes the core of an individual’s sense of self and is the basis of a believer’s conscience.

Belief is a matter of personal choice and no external authority, whether state, cultural community, or religious congregation, can tell an individual what her beliefs should be. To do so is to violate the individual’s freedom of conscience guaranteed by most constitutional systems and human rights covenants. But on matters of faith, an important distinction has to be made.

All ‘matters of conscience’ are ‘matters of faith’, but not all ‘matters of faith’ are ‘matters of conscience’. It is only matters of conscience that are protected by the freedom-granting provisions of the Constitution. Matters of conscience are individual-centric. They have an ethical core that guides the choices that an individual makes.
They endow the world with meaning and give the individual purpose. In contrast, the ‘matters of faith’ which the RSS and the AIMPLB are referring to — while they may look similar to ‘matters of conscience’ — are not so for they are group, not individual, centric. They have a component that is based on evidence, whether this is textual, historical, or empirical. In other words, the belief is contingent on the evidence. For example it would take the following form: ‘we believe X because it is said so in our holy book’.

It is the ‘because of’ component that demands analytical and scientific scrutiny of the matters of faith. Does the holy book actually say so? Did Lord Ram really build the Setu?

Further, when matters of faith have harmful social consequences, they must be subject to scrutiny since the Constitution guarantees the individual protection from harm.

This is the basis of all social reform in our history.

When the AIMPLB says that triple talaq has evolved in the last 1400 years, it has inadvertently conceded that the practice is not cast in stone. Let the court’s intervention be part of that evolution.

The issue of validity

The many advances in linguistics, cultural anthropology, gender studies and, of course, the natural sciences can make the probing of the ‘because of’ component of the belief very exciting. For example, a textual analysis of a holy book using a study of old and new grammar, or the etymology of the word, or its placement in a sentence are all ways of arriving at the meaning of the statement.

Textual analysis has advanced considerably and hence is available to determine the validity of the interpretation being offered by scriptural authority. The many schools of Islamic jurisprudence are testimony to this plurality of interpretations.

To that can be added the modern tools of linguistic analysis, gender studies, human rights jurisprudence, and cultural anthropology. The validity of triple talaq must be subject to textual interpretation. Similarly with the Ram Setu claim. It too must be scrutinised by modern science.

Ethical codes in democracies

The most difficult issue in this debate is how to respond to the situation where, after scrutiny, the matter of faith is found to be valid but considered by many in need of change such that it conforms to the contemporary ethics of human rights.

When the counsel for the AIMPLB says that there is “no question of constitutional morality and equity” in matters of faith, he is building a wall, a fashion these days, behind which the orthodox will police their community. Such a wall must not be built. It has no place in a constitutional democracy.

The Life of Muhammad

Courtesy BBC

Part 1

 Part 2

Part 3

Noam Chomsky on worldwide anger

Labour party’s future lies with Momentum, says Noam Chomsky

Anushka Asthana in The Guardian


Professor Noam Chomsky has claimed that any serious future for the Labour party must come from the leftwing pressure group Momentum and the army of new members attracted by the party’s leadership.

In an interview with the Guardian, the radical intellectual threw his weight behind Jeremy Corbyn, claiming that Labour would be doing far better in opinion polls if it were not for the “bitter” hostility of the mainstream media. “If I were a voter in Britain, I would vote for him,” said Chomsky, who admitted that the current polling position suggested Labour was not yet gaining popular support for the policy positions that he supported.

“There are various reasons for that – partly an extremely hostile media, partly his own personal style which I happen to like but perhaps that doesn’t fit with the current mood of the electorate,” he said. “He’s quiet, reserved, serious, he’s not a performer. The parliamentary Labour party has been strongly opposed to him. It has been an uphill battle.”

He said there were a lot of factors involved, but insisted that Labour would not be trailing the Conservatives so heavily in the polls if the media was more open to Corbyn’s agenda. “If he had a fair treatment from the media – that would make a big difference.”

Asked what motivation he thought newspapers had to oppose Corbyn, Chomsky said the Labour leader had, like Bernie Sanders in the US, broken out of the “elite, liberal consensus” that he claimed was “pretty conservative”.

The academic, who is in Britain to deliver a lecture at the University of Reading on what he believes is the deteriorating state of western democracy, claimed that voters had turned to the Conservatives in recent years because of “an absence of anything else”.

“The shift in the Labour party under [Tony] Blair made it a pale image of the Conservatives which, given the nature of the policies and their very visible results, had very little appeal for good reasons.”

He said Labour needed to “reconstruct itself” in the interests of working people, with concerns about human and civil rights at its core, arguing that such a programme could appeal to the majority of people.

But ahead of what could be a bitter split within the Labour movement if Corbyn’s party is defeated in the June election, Chomsky claimed the future must lie with the left of the party. “The constituency of the Labour party, the new participants, the Momentum group and so on … if there is to be a serious future for the Labour party that is where it is in my opinion,” he said.

The comments came as Chomsky prepared to deliver a university lecture entitled Racing for the precipice: is the human experiment doomed?

He told the Guardian that he believed people had created a “perfect storm” in which the key defence against the existential threats of climate change and the nuclear age were being radically weakened.

“Each of those is a major threat to survival, a threat that the human species has never faced before, and the third element of this pincer is that the socio-economic programmes, particularly in the last generation, but the political culture generally has undermined the one potential defence against these threats,” he said.

Chomsky described the defence as a “functioning democratic society with engaged, informed citizens deliberating and reaching measures to deal with and overcome the threats”.

He blamed neoliberal policies for the breakdown in democracy, saying they had transferred power from public institutions to markets and deregulated financial institutions while failing to benefit ordinary people.

“In 2007 right before the great crash, when there was euphoria about what was called the ‘great moderation’, the wonderful economy, at that point the real wages of working people were lower – literally lower – than they had been in 1979 when the neoliberal programmes began. You had a similar phenomenon in England.”

Chomsky claimed that the disillusionment that followed gave rise to the surge of anti-establishment movements – including Donald Trump and Brexit, but also Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France and the rise of Corbyn and Sanders.

“The Sanders achievement was maybe the most surprising and significant aspect of the November election,” he said. “Sanders broke from a century of history of pretty much bought elections. That is a reflection of the decline of how political institutions are perceived.”

But he said the positions the US senator, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, had taken would not have surprised Dwight Eisenhower, who was US president in the 1950s.

“[Eisenhower] said no one belongs in a political system who questions the right of workers to organise freely, to form powerful unions. Sanders called it a political revolution but it was to a large extent an effort to return to the new deal policies that were the basis for the great growth period of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Chomsky argued that Corbyn stood in the same tradition.

​Enemies of the state​:​ the 40-year Tory project to shrink public services

Polly Toynbee and David Walker in The Guardian

Just as he reaches the end of his inspection, the environmental health officer spots the meat pies. A stack of them have tumbled on to a shelf on the floor of the storeroom, not in the chiller. A flicker of alarm crosses the transport cafe owner’s face. Pies are big on his menu. He sighs. “Well, it’s complicated,” and the story unfolds. The pies used to be made by so-and-so but the company owners split acrimoniously and it’s all a bit chaotic now.

“Ah, yes,” says the inspector. “I know this one.” He has the local background and, as he probes and prods, the cafe proprietor admits sheepishly that the pies arrive with a scrappy piece of paper, no official invoice, dubiously labelled “organic” with no list of contents, paid for in cash to an old chap called Gramps off the back of a lorry.

Here in Huntingdonshire, the number of environmental health officers has been cut by a third over the past five years. “But the number of food outlets grows, 1,300 on our patch, with a high churn in ownership,” says the chief officer.

These public servants are a quiet lot, meticulous, precise; just another workaday arm of the state that goes unnoticed. It’s the taken-for-granted state. If a waiter swears the chicken tikka masala contains no peanuts, we expect someone to have checked, as the wellbeing of those with severe allergies depends on it.

But austerity is sweeping all this away. Local knowledge and expertise dissipate. Who remembers, before new building starts, the location of contaminated land, industrial waste, disused gas works? Pest control is on the wane. There is no out-of-hours anti-noise service.

A boy plays on an iPad at an early-learning centre. The idea of the state and what it provides has been systematically derided. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

The fast-disappearing environmental health officer – in England, their numbers down by 25% over five years – is just one example of how the state is shrinking, its capacities dwindling and its fabric stretching thin. This is not just a regrettable deficit-reducing necessity, but a long-term political project to return us to a pre-second world war dominance of the private realm. And so far, that seems to have worked, with relatively little complaint from a public that has widely accepted the story of the exchequer’s “maxed-out credit card”. Opinion polls suggest a sense of resignation that has allowed the functions of the state to be dismembered, fragmented and degraded as deliberate policy.

Diminished trust in the public realm is part of the explanation for the Brexit vote. “Take back control” was a perverse slogan that cleverly captured a feeling of things falling apart. That is because the idea of the state has been systematically disrespected and derided as a concept to be regarded with suspicion. People may rely in their daily lives on myriad unseen state services, yet they are encouraged to despise the bureaucrats who keep everything running.

The shrinkage was no emergency operation to balance the books: it was the realisation of a 40-year rightwing project to downgrade, downsize and disparage the public realm. David Cameron and George Osborne committed to push the state down to 36% of GDP or less, for ever, and Philip Hammond repeated that target in the March budget. Current spending is now just under 38%, with the target of 36% to be reached in 2020. Getting there means a volume of public services greatly smaller than in equivalent European countries. People ask why German roads, health services and civic environments are so superior: the answer is that their state is larger than ours, at 44% of GDP. Why is Danish wellbeing so much higher than ours? Their state provides more comfort, being in receipt of 50% of GDP.

In the general election, Brexit occludes the question, which ultimately every election has to be about: are we willing to pay for a state that secures wellbeing? The Tories won’t admit that Brexit demands more not less government. Theresa May has talked of the good that government does, but has declined to face the fiscal consequences. For its part, Labour (and the Scottish Nationalists) won’t acknowledge that soaking “the rich” and raking in more from uncollected taxes won’t provide enough revenue: median earners and all of us have to pay more.

Meanwhile, the NHS is now squeezed more harshly than ever in its history. Schools are losing staff in the latest cuts. This April’s removal of an epic £12bn in credits and benefitswill cause inequality to take off as steeply as it did in the 1980s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with a 50% rise in child poverty by 2020.

What is less reported is how the thinning of public services weakens bonds of community as the emblems of orderliness disappear – the vanishing park keepers, estate caretakers, station masters, guards, crown post office counters, district nurses, health visitors, local police on the beat and community support officers.

When she was home secretary May cut police numbers by a fifth. Crime is falling across the western world, but the work of the police is increasingly about reassurance and social order. The thinning blue line fills the gaps left as other services stretch and snap: it is the last resort. On a typical night shift in Bedford and Luton, police hear the cries of distress, the suicide attempts, the terrified, the psychotic and the shrieking family rows that remind us that people will always need help; the police are often the only ones left to respond.

School are losing staff in the latest round of cuts. Photograph: Dave Thompson/PA

What is the social glue that binds us to Britishness if not the things we share collectively? Government underpins pride in who we are. When fine old town halls from Sheffield to Hornsey, north London, are sold off as boutique hotels, when councils sell slices of parks, when libraries and local museums close, we lose what defines us. Contracts with Capita, Virgin, Sodexo and the rest are written on water. The sale of everything from power stations, property and basic transport systems to foreign powers is a form of treason other countries resist.

Marketisers, outsourcers, asset-strippers and state-shrinkers are not patriots: they surf the world on seas of money, undermining community and nationality. The NHS and the BBC stand as last bastions, but under constant assault from anti-statists affronted by their very success.

Part of the dismembering has been the deliberate complexification of services and blurred lines of responsibility. Successive governments’ attitude to services has been to cut bits off, chop them up and, bizarrely, force their limbs to compete with one another, trying to portray them as commercial. Schools must be academies in chains with reassuringly market-oriented names – Enterprise, Oasis, Reach or Harris (named after the carpets magnate). The NHS must be broken into trusts vying with each other for business. The frail must hold individual budgets to purchase their own care privately. Some of these services may be good – but this approach indicates a flight from the idea that the state itself does good.

Outsourcing, offloading and privatising leaves less of the state and less that is ostensibly ours, even though it is still paid for by our taxes. Gigantic, mainly overseas companies and often foreign governments own slabs of utilities, land, property and infrastructure that were once ours.

Not even our sewage belongs to us. The government created a company called Tideway, comfortably underpinned by Treasury guarantees, to work on behalf of privately owned Thames Water to construct a £4.2bn tunnel to carry sewagealongside the river. Thames Water is owned by shifting international investors, whose sealed, ambiguous contracts include Chinese corporations supervised by the Communist party, although cheaper finance could be raised by the British state. The National Audit Office is rightly anxious about the taxpayer’s huge liabilities, but Tideway managed to frighten ministers with warnings of raw sewage spilling into the Thames. So who gains?

Sir Ian Byatt, a former Treasury official who was the first head of Ofwat, the water regulator, gives a forthright answer: neither the fish in the Thames nor households will benefit. “Thames Water is an incredibly complicated company. There will be an array of extra dividends sliced and diced into the pockets of all these different interests along the way.” The state could do simpler, smaller schemes more cheaply. Paying needlessly high interest rates, the cost of the super sewer will be added to all Thames Water customers’ bills, who have no choice but to pay. Digging has just begun.


What we do together through our taxes … is worth more than any private gain through market transactions

Since the Thatcher privatisations, the UK has been subject to a giant experiment in the ability of markets to sustain the common interest, with light-touch regulation. Over time, the failures have multiplied. The government itself now inveighs against the cartel grip of the big six energy companies. Markets dashed for gas, regardless of security of supply; they ditched nuclear and only turned to wind and solar with hefty state incentives, then stopped as soon as those were axed. However faltering, only the state can confront climate change – which is why the right clings to climate change denial.

Localism has often been another assault on the state, breaking up central government to cast chunks down to impoverished councils, handing over the axe. Cuts of a fifth in English council budgets between 2010 and 2015 have been grossly unfair, poor Liverpool cut hardest, rich Dorset least. Soon councils will keep their own business rates, worsening regional inequalities: Westminster makes so much it could pay its denizens a dividend, while Middlesbrough is left penniless.

Our ageing population needs more, not less state support. Take podiatry, an unglamorous backwater of the NHS, cut back by commissioners struggling to finance A&E or maternity. But feet matter, too, never more than with the rocketing cases of type 2 diabetes. Southampton is typical, where we found how cuts to NHS foot care have serious consequences for mobility: every week in England, 135 diabetics have gangrenous limbs amputated that could have been saved if foot ulcers had been caught sooner. Across the NHS, cuts in prevention lead to higher spending later.

In Shropshire, the sudden axing of the Link bus service connecting 5,000 people across a string of villages has wrecked many lives: those without cars who used to travel daily to Bridgnorth for work, shopping or doctor’s appointments are now left isolated with just one weekly bus, driven by a volunteer. Compare that with the borough of Reading, a rare council that clung to running its own buses when John Major privatised most: it makes £1m a year so efficiently that 93% of journeys are taken by its popular buses, not cars. That’s just one challenge to the prevailing politics that claims the state always does everything worse.

What confronts Britain in the 21st century is a class of problem that only collective action can solve. How to stop inequality being amplified generation after generation? The country’s 3,500 children’s centres were one of Labour’s best achievements, founded on all the evidence that helping children in their early years makes most difference. But many centres have shut, had vital services ripped out, leaving others no more than shells for skimpy private nurseries. But on a recent visit to Springfield children’s centre in the West Midlands district of Sandwell, we saw parents on the edge of despair rescued; listening to their stories should weaken the hardest anti-state heart.

Only the state can deal with looming problems in productivity, regional imbalance, energy, climate change, automation, reskilling. Take research and development. The Sheffield engineering startup Magnomatics is developing a magnetic gearbox for hybrid cars that was invented at Sheffield University in 2000 and cuts fuel consumption by 35%. Such projects take patience and funding, both in scarce qualities among short-termist venture capitalists; only state support with adequate research funds could see the gearbox through to use in cars for 2022. But Britain has a lot less R&D for these “catapult” schemes than competitor countries.

Take another case of creative state funding: the Royal Shakespeare Company took seven years to develop the worldwide hit Matilda the Musical, “the most difficult and expensive show”, according to the executive director and “nothing short of a miracle” according to reviewers. No commercial producer could invest that much for so long: now it yields great dividends for the RSC and the exchequer. But though the cultural sector, broadly, brings in £77bn a year, funding for Arts Council England has been reduced and the next generation of creators are being stymied by a Gradgrind curriculum with few schools able to afford art, design, drama, music and dance teaching.

  The A&E department at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham. Public servants soldier on with swelling caseloads. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

The old anti-state canard pretends private enterprise creates national wealth, while governments spend and squander it. After 2010, the Conservatives claimed public employment “crowded out” private initiative, so they cut more than a million public sector jobs. Yet wealth creation depends on a strong state, not only for protection of property by the law, but for decent roads and railways, regulators ensuring fair markets, for the health and education of private enterprise staff, and for the same clean air we all breathe. The business world has a mistaken cultural reflex that pleads for low tax and less government, yet everything that makes commerce flourish relies on a strong state.

Public servants soldier on with swelling caseloads but less pay, keeping going, often heroically dedicated. Fixed to a 1% rise, by 2020 they will be earning no more than they were in 2004, according to the Resolution Foundation. Of course, not all are heroes: vigilant management has to ensure the public face of the state is kind, effective and innovative. Polls show great popular affection for public servants whom people know – their child’s teacher, their doctor, their local police. Yet they have imbibed the political poison that thinks the state is probably bad value, inefficient and extravagant. A few fat-cat chief executive stories die hard. Is that where their taxes go?

This is a hymn of praise to what should be blindingly obvious – the triumph of our collective endeavours. Years of chiselling away at the foundations of trust in good government mean it needs saying again and again: what we do together through paying our taxes and concerning ourselves with our common good is worth more than any private gain through market transactions.

Margaret Thatcher said you will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will; her political heirs believe it still. But they are profoundly wrong in fact and in principle. What we buy together is worth infinitely more than anything we can buy in a shop. In a renewed state lies strength and identity – and a reclaimed sense of lost nationhood.

Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All by Polly Toynbee and David Walker is published by Faber, £9.99.

Why do Dalits support BJP?

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

AS a Dalit student from Maharashtra who became a Buddhist, my friend Chandan Kamble was curiously sceptical of Marxism. My Marxist friends on the leftist campus were equally sceptical of Chandan with his Afro hair and his perpetually smiling, piercing gaze.

He was sinfully prankish and was never bereft of a wild observation about anyone, perfect strangers included. He was at his acerbic best when within earshot of a dyed-in-the-wool communist. “In capitalism, man exploits man. In communism, it’s the other way around.” The kindergarten lines were deliberately parcelled and farmed out depending on the moment, and Chandan was a practitioner of precision timing, like a jester in a serious play.

The words may not be his, but they gained currency on the campus because of his love for political banter. At the same time, he got excellent grades from the MPhil tutor in international studies. “A politician is someone who knows which side his bread is buttered.” The banal words are suddenly making sense.

I have no idea where Chandan has disappeared. We were in the same hostel at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A common JNU friend in Princeton said he last saw him years ago in a US university campus, possibly Harvard. Why am I suddenly thinking of the missing Mahar friend whose cryptic homilies on politics and Marxism, in particular, I indulged but disagreed with? A possible answer lies in the question itself.

Why did the Marxists shun Dalits as Dalits? They worked hard to get the Dalit students priority in admission and so forth. Yet there was a pronounced aloofness at an intellectual level, a palpable snobbery. Or was it because B.R. Ambedkar had poured vitriol on Indian Marxists in his great work on the revival of the Dalit cause? If that was so, why didn’t any comrade woo the lowest in the caste heap to his or her side, ignoring or critiquing Ambedkar if they had a valid argument?

What puzzles me equally is the shocking ability of the BJP to woo Dalits — in Gujarat, in Uttar Pradesh and so forth. It is perhaps this worry that has sent me cartwheeling into the past. Here is a perfectly casteist party, one that Ambedkar would have loathed. He had described Hinduism in no uncertain terms as a “chamber of horrors”. And Ambedkar’s followers are today marching mindlessly, one should add, self-destructively into the Hindutva fold.

Of course, there is Chanakya’s wily wisdom at play. Divide and rule, Emperor Chandragupta’s Brahmin counsellor had decreed, way before the advent of colonialism of any stripe. It worked in Uttar Pradesh last month. Jatav versus non-Jatav Dalits; Yadav versus non-Yadavs among the other backward castes; something similar with Muslims is afoot. That’s BJP. What about the Marxists?

Indian Marxists, like their comrades elsewhere, are a threatened species. The BJP is out to swallow their two remaining hubs — one in the tiny tribal state of Tripura and the other, of course, Kerala, the redoubtable communist bastion. One should have thought that the BJP was a cause for serious worry. But the Marxists seem to have different priorities. They look keener to bring down the Mamata Banerjee government in Bengal, possibly in cahoots with the Congress. The BJP would be only too happy to let them do its dirty work.

The thought is horrifying for the sheer lack of sensitivity. The Marxists took a lead in fighting Indira Gandhi’s emergency, and they were a source of strength to the movement that ended in the Janata Party experiment. The experiment included the BJP then called the Jan Sangh. And the first thing that the Janata Party government did was to ban school textbooks on history that were authored by Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Bipan Chandra.

The ground was laid in 1978 for the assault on Wendy Doniger’s study of Hinduism and A.K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramanayas — a brilliant research of the diverse Rama legends. The Marxists didn’t give up here, as they again came together with the BJP to shore up an anti-Congress V.P. Singh government in 1989.

For better or worse, they then came up with the formula of supporting non-BJP, non-Congress parties and alliances. There are three that fit the bill. They are Mamata Banerjee in Bengal, the Lalu-Nitish coalition in Bihar and the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi. All three are targeted by the BJP. The Congress too has joined the expedition in two, barring Bihar, where it is a junior partner in the state government. The Marxists set up candidates against all three.

The problem is that these three are the ones they count among the 59 per cent that didn’t vote for the BJP. The three are also those that stopped the BJP juggernaut. All three are accused of corruption by the BJP, a ruse that is seen as a first step towards their dismissal.

Any sane observer of the unfolding Indian scenario would have thought that it was time all opposition parties came together as they once came up against Mrs Gandhi. What is happening instead is that one by one the non-Congress and non-BJP governments, including the Left Front, are coming in the cross hairs of the Modi establishment. It’s almost like Germany in the 1930s to give an overused but relevant example. There the communists and the social democrats were taken out one by one.

Chandan Kamble is perhaps watching today’s denouement with concern. He had a habit of mixing up metaphors. “We are all sailing in the same soup,” he would say. Will the Marxists be able to untangle the jumbled aphorisms?

It is worrying that the main Marxist groups — and not to forget the Congress — seem to believe that the threat posed to India’s democracy by the BJP is comparable with Mamata Banerjee’s rule in Bengal and Arvind Kejriwal’s in Delhi. Could Chandan Kamble be right?

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

by Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian

“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.” 
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016

“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government? Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017

In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t have many rules.”

Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire. It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”

On that day in June 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea. “She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she suggested he meet this firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.”

Who’s her father?

“Eric Schmidt.”

Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google?

“Yes. And she suggested Alexander should meet this company called Palantir.”

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word. The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of eBay and PayPal, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.

In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up to make an introduction to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

 The money man: Robert Mercer, Trump supporter and owner of Cambridge Analytica. Photograph: Rex

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocompletesuggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign. That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating. I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.

The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU was ‘impermissable’”.

What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.

How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February. And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning. Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence. But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualised political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office. They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”

I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.

Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word “disinformation”.

I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be “roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories. Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and Nato.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us. David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.

 

Steve Bannon, former vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, now a key adviser to Donald Trump. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place. Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”. And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files. It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”

Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

But does it actually work? One of the criticisms that has been levelled at my and others’ articles is that Cambridge Analytica’s “special sauce” has been oversold. Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy?

“It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election. Robert Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots – controlled trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not going to splash $15m on bullshit.”

Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established. This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins. To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”

A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago. The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time. And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.

David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were with Trinidad’s national security council.”

The security work was to be the prize for the political work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.

“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.

These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for “military and homeland security work”.

In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state?

A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. One memo references Cambridge Analytica trying to place an article with a journalist in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “RM re-channeled and connected with Jamie McCauley from Robert Thomson News Corp office,” it says.

It makes me think again about the story involving Sophie Schmidt, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship. But witnesses and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took place in 2013. The possibility of a working relationship was at least discussed.

Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. But at the time, I’m told, Palantir decided it was too much of a reputational risk for a more formal arrangement. There was no upside to it. Palantir is a company that is trusted to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as many other countries.

Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Trump campaign has said that Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was then at Cambridge Analytica.

A leading QC who spends a lot of time in the investigatory powers tribunal said that the problem with this technology was that it all depended on whose hands it was in.

“On the one hand, it’s being done by companies and governments who say ‘you can trust us, we are good and democratic and bake cakes at the weekend’. But then the same expertise can also be sold on to whichever repressive regime.”

In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.

 

Donald Trump with Peter Thiel, one of his key Silicon Valley supporters. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ. Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model that Mercer was buying into. And it brought together all the players: the Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington.

When my article linking Mercer and Leave.EU was published in February, no one was more upset about it than former Tory adviser Dominic Cummings, the campaign strategist for Vote Leave. He launched an irate Twitter tirade. The piece was “full of errors & itself spreads disinformation” “CA had ~0% role in Brexit referendum”.

A week later the Observer revealed AggregateIQ’s possible link to Cambridge Analytica. Cummings’s Twitter feed went quiet. He didn’t return my messages or my emails.

Questions had already been swirling about whether there had been any coordination between the Leave campaigns. In the week before the referendum, Vote Leave donated money to two other Leave groups – £625,000 to BeLeave, run by fashion student Darren Grimes, and £100,000 to Veterans for Britain, who both then spent this money with AggregateIQ.

The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.

On his blog, Dominic Cummings has written thousands of words about the referendum campaign. What is missing is any details about his data scientists. He “hired physicists” is all he’ll say. In the books on Brexit, other members of the team talk about “Dom’s astrophysicists”, who he kept “a tightly guarded secret”. They built models, using data “scraped” off Facebook.

Finally, after weeks of messages, he sent me an email. We were agreed on one thing, it turned out. He wrote: “The law/regulatory agencies are such a joke the reality is that anybody who wanted to cheat the law could do it easily without people realising.” But, he says, “by encouraging people to focus on non-stories like Mercer’s nonexistent role in the referendum you are obscuring these important issues”.

And to finally answer the question about how Vote Leave found this obscure Canadian company on the other side of the planet, he wrote: “Someone found AIQ [AggregateIQ] on the internet and interviewed them on the phone then told me – let’s go with these guys. They were clearly more competent than any others we’d spoken to in London.”

The most unfortunate aspect of this – for Dominic Cummings – is that this isn’t credible. It’s the work of moments to put a date filter on Google search and discover that in late 2015 or early 2016, there are no Google hits for “Aggregate IQ”. There is no press coverage. No random mentions. It doesn’t even throw up its website. I have caught Dominic Cummings in what appears to be an alternative fact.

But what is an actual fact is that Gettleson and Borwick, both previously consultants for SCL and Cambridge Analytica, were both core members of the Vote Leave team. They’re both in the official Vote Leave documents lodged with the Electoral Commission, though they coyly describe their previous work for SCL/Cambridge Analytica as “micro-targeting in Antigua and Trinidad” and “direct communications for several PACs, Senate and Governor campaigns”.

And Borwick wasn’t just any member of the team. He was Vote Leave’s chief technology officer.

This story may involve a complex web of connections, but it all comes back to Cambridge Analytica. It all comes back to Mercer. Because the connections must have been evident. “AggregateIQ may not have belonged to the Mercers but they exist within his world,” David told me. “Almost all of their contracts came from Cambridge Analytica or Mercer. They wouldn’t exist without them. During the whole time the referendum was going on, they were working every day on the [Ted] Cruz campaign with Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ built and ran Cambridge Analytica’s database platforms.”

Illustration: James Melaugh

Cummings won’t say who did his modelling. But invoices lodged with the Electoral Commission show payments to a company called Advanced Skills Institute. It takes me weeks to spot the significance of this because the company is usually referred to as ASI Data Science, a company that has a revolving cast of data scientists who have gone on to work with Cambridge Analytica and vice versa. There are videos of ASI data scientists presenting Cambridge Analytica personality models and pages for events the two companies have jointly hosted. ASI told the Observer it had no formal relationship with Cambridge Analytica.

Here’s the crucial fact: during the US primary elections, Aggregate IQ signed away its intellectual property (IP). It didn’t own its IP: Robert Mercer did. For AggregateIQ to work with another campaign in Britain, the firm would have to have had the express permission of Mercer. Asked if it would make any comment on financial or business links between “Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and Vote Leave”, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”

This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered )underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000. This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century.

Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years. Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.

Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.

“He believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And Britain was key to that. He thought that where Britain led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important to him.”

On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as “persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days.

I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.

“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer. Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights. They approached us.”

It seems clear to me that David Banks didn’t know there might have been anything untoward about this. He’s a patriotic man who believes in British sovereignty and British values and British laws. I don’t think knew about any overlap with these other campaigns. I can only think that he was played.

And that we, the British people, were played. In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters. The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at. Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.

For the last month, I’ve been writing about the links between the British right, the Trump administration and the European right. And these links lead to Russia from multiple directions. Between Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica.

A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities.

Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.

Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America.

Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states. “Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a battle of policy between two parties.”

This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent. This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.

Key names


SCL Group
British company with 25 years experience in military “psychological operations” and “election management”.

Cambridge Analytica
Data analytics company formed in 2014. Robert Mercer owns 90%. SCL owns 10%. Carried out major digital targeting campaigns for Donald Trump campaign, Ted Cruz’s nomination campaign and multiple other US Republican campaigns – mostly funded by Mercer. Gave Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU “help” during referendum.

Robert Mercer
US billionaire hedge fund owner who was Trump’s biggest donor. Owns Cambridge Analytica and the IP [intellectual property] ofAggregateIQ. Friend of Farage. Close associate of Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon
Trump’s chief strategist. Vice-president of Cambridge Analytica during referendum period. Friend of Farage.

Alexander Nix
Director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group.

Christopher Wylie
Canadian who first brought data expertise and microtargeting to Cambridge Analytica; recruited AggregateIQ.

AggregateIQ
Data analytics company based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Worked for Mercer-funded Pacs that supported the Trump campaign. Robert Mercer owns AggregateIQ’s IP. Paid £3.9m by Vote Leave to “micro-target” voters on social media during referendum campaign. Outside British jurisdiction.

Veterans for Britain
Given £100,000 by Vote Leave. Spent it with AggregateIQ.

BeLeave
Youth Leave campaign set up by 23-year-old student. Given £625,000 by Vote Leave & £50,000 by another donor. Spent it with AggregateIQ.

DUP
Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Spent £32,750 with AggregrateIQ.

Thomas Borwick
Vote Leave’s chief technology officer. Previously worked with SCL/Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.

ASI Data Science
Data science specialists. Links with Cambridge Analytica, including staff moving between the two and holding joint events. Paid £114,000 by Vote Leave. Vote Leave declared £71,000 to Electoral Commission.

Donald Trump
US president. Campaign funded by Mercer and run by Bannon. Data services supplied by Cambridge Analytica and AggregrateIQ.

Nigel Farage
Former Ukip leader. Leader of Leave.EU. Friend of Trump, Mercer and Bannon.

Arron Banks
Bristol businessman. Co-founder of Leave.EU. Owns data company and insurance firm. Single biggest donor to Leave – £7.5m.