Grass roots and Astroturfs

Amid the COVID insanity of 2020, you’ll remember, was the additional collective insanity of Black Lives Matter, exporting mass-action over here from a single unfortunate incident in the US, resulting in demolished statues, near-riots, and all the great and good of church, state and media coming out in solidarity. When the Marxist/anarchist roots of the organisation came to light, those insitutions bewailed how the movement had been “taken over” by activists, failing to notice that activists had started the movement to enlist the uncritical masses, and how closely its campaigns coincided with US elections.

Anyway, I did a blog back then (please do glance at it) which drew attention to some odd shenanigans involving the British branch of the outfit, a one (or possibly two) man show operated by a white venture-capitalist from a flat in Wallingford. It could simply have been a small-time scam to rake in a few suckers’ funds, except that it had a remarkable ability to generate some news headlines that, apparently, made the whole movement look as virtuous as President Zelensky, rather than simply generating funds for a fly-by-night company.

So in some ways BLM Ltd looked like a parasite on the real thing – in which case I wondered why the fraud squad or BLM’s own central body were not working to denounce and shut it down; or it could have been a genuine BLM front, in which case one might have expected some close scrutiny from the intelligence services or the Special Branch (if that still exists), seeing how subversive of the public order BLM protests turned out to be.

One solution to the conundrum seemed to be the possibility that BLM, BLM Ltd, and the intelligence services were all mutually happy with the arrangement. That was a suspicion not overturned by the way that our Establishment seemed so eager to take the knee at every opportunity and castigate those who didn’t, and to smile benignly at the destruction of statues of people with often rather circuitous connections to slavery.


Anyway, things quietened down, and you may now be aware of the news from the USA of how the many millions of dollars raised for BLM appear to have resulted in very few projects for poor black people, lots of donations to Democratic politicians, and a number of expensive mansions for the organisation’s leaders.

Whatever the connections, or otherwise, of our BLM Ltd to the parent group in America, it therefore occurred to me to see how the former have been handling their finances in support of such a worthy cause, since I was so unreasonably suspicious of their bona fides back in 2020. A quick search at Companies House tells you all you need to know.


Nothing useful has been declared by the company about its funds since the company started. So it was a scam, or perhaps an Astroturf organised by – who, exactly? The lack of accounting is par for the career of this particular director… and incidentally for a similar UK company formed by someone else at the time of the previous BLM protests a few years ago. Fraudulent companies seem to get away with their activities all the time in Britain, but I was suspicious of this one from the start, because of its suspicious public activity, and I got the tip from others rather than my own investigative brilliance, and at least one journo contacted me later to say he was investigating it too.

So it still remains unanswered why it has been allowed to go for so long apparently uninvestigated by our institutions of law and order. Too busy investigating Downing Street parties, maybe? On the other hand, the press photo that originally drew my attention to this matter was taken by a suspiciously handy Reuters photographer, and I have now learned that Reuters is, in fact, deeply infiltrated by British Intelligence to generate propaganda for whatever our Establishment’s ambitions are.

So maybe it’s MI5, rather than David Wilks-Carmichael, that has made off with all the public’s donations to Black Lives Matter.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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