Wings Over Scotland

The National carried a strange article yesterday, apropos of seemingly nothing, about a Brussels-based political thinktank supposedly linked to the right-wing Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban. The piece actually originated on superwoke “fact-checking” site The Ferret a couple of days earlier, and professed to expose how the thinktank was “stoking Scotland’s culture war”.

Alert readers will already have pricked up their ears at this point, because “culture war” is a radical-left dogwhistle term used to obscure, belittle and dismiss groups (largely though not exclusively comprising left-wing feminists) fighting for the safeguarding of children and the protection of women’s and LGB rights.

And sure enough, nothing’s different this time.

The piece starts off by voicing “concerns” from unnamed people that the thinktank – which we’d estimate a solid 99.99% of Scots have never heard of – is exerting some sort of presumably malign “influence on Scottish discourse”, and in particular the multi-pronged “Omnicause” that obsesses the radical left and mainly centres itself around “Net Zero”, liberal immigration policies, Palestine and so-called “trans rights”.

Traditionally an exposé of this nature would start off with a powerful, attention-grabbing claim, and then seek to justify it with a dossier of compelling evidence. But this effort gets off to a very weak start.

“In line with” is a phrase of mealy-mouthed weasel-worded innuendo which attempts to discredit valid viewpoints by associating them with bad people.

The piece then continues with a string of allegations from unidentified sources. The Hungarian government is “accused” (by who?) of peddling “misinformation” (about what?), subjected to “critiques” (which critiques? Where can we read them to find out if they’re valid or not?) and attacked by “critics” (which ones?) while a “theory” makes claims about the administration, apparently doing so all by itself with no human source. The words “chilling effect” are quoted, but we’re not told who they’re a quote from.

Readers are told that the thinktank has published reports linking immigration to crime, as if this were self-evidently untrue and racist and didn’t need to be addressed – a position that looks rather unfortunate during the current grooming-gangs scandal.

But in fact a considerable body of evidence exists from official government statistics in various countries suggesting that immigrants do commit a highly disproportionate amount of crime, such as these from Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden respectively.

Now, we’re not Nordic crime experts and we don’t know what those graphs do or don’t prove, but anyone rubbishing the claim that immigration is linked to crime needs at a minimum to examine and explain those stats rather than just wave them away.

The 3000-word piece continues in the same vein at some length, with lots of vague claims and implications of guilt by association and proximity, attacking groups like the Scottish Union for Education without ever actually identifying anything more alarming or sinister than SUE having views The Ferret disagrees with.

The idea, for example, that the highly controversial LGBT Youth Scotland has imported transgender ideology into the ethos and curriculum of Scottish schools (and in particular primary schools, where a charity for 13-to-25-year-olds quite plainly has no legitimate business) is in no way even credibly contestable. It has manifestly done so, as documented in some considerable detail over recent years by this site, by Daniel Sanderson for the Telegraph and by Marion Scott for the Sunday Post, among others.

People may have views on whether that’s a good or a bad thing, but whether it happened at all is simply not up for debate, and attempting to demonise anyone who merely points the fact out by linking them with extremist foreign governments is little more than an attempt at intimidation and smearing.

The Ferret may, for its own ideological reasons, not like attention and scrutiny being focused on the matter, but them’s the breaks. Anyone trying to conceal what’s going on in schools from parents ought on first principles to be regarded with the deepest suspicion, and it’s a matter of record that The Ferret has a shameful history of trying to downplay scandal in the field of child safeguarding and elsewhere.

Most of the time, it does so merely by angrily and indignantly asserting that things are untrue without actually providing any evidence to disprove them.

(The ILGA, incidentally, continues to insist that it never sought to lower the age of consent for adolescents to 10, despite publishing a document that explicitly made that exact demand, as exposed by Wings in the story above. But it has subsequently scrubbed all trace of the document from its website and never revisited the “Feminist Declaration” in the subsequent four years, nor ever explained how it came to publish a demand it seemingly never believed in.)

But we digress, because we don’t really care about MCC Brussels or Viktor Orban. Scotland has enough problems of its own without poking our noses into Hungary’s.

But in so far as The Ferret’s piece alleges anything remotely untoward (let alone PROVING anything untoward) over its vast and basically content-free length, it’s that the funding of the Brussels thinktank might be slightly opaque. And that’s a very audacious attack to make if your own funding is as shady as The Ferret’s.

Registered as a “co-operative society”, The Ferret had a turnover of just under a third of a million pounds in according to its 2023 accounts, but there’s very little information about where that money came from OR where it went. If you click on the link about which organisations support it financially, you get a passworded login page.

We do, however, know that it received a $100,000 grant in 2018 from Pierre Omidyar, a multi-billionaire French-Iranian-American businessman who was one of the founders of eBay and PayPal and who donates to the Democratic Party in the USA but is also the effective owner of a radical “progressive” investigation site called The Intercept, described by Politico magazine as “the Breitbart of the left”.

(The re-election of Donald Trump would appear to answer the question in that quote.)

The Ferret also received a 50,000 Euro grant from Google to combat “misinformation”, which is a bit like being paid by Greggs to fight obesity, and $260,000 from Luminate, which describes itself as “a global philanthropic organisation focused on empowering people and institutions to work together to build just and fair societies” but whose vice-president was formerly an Open Governance Strategist at plucky anti-establishment organisation the, er, World Bank.

Interestingly, the story about the Luminate grant notes that the money was to be used in part to employ a full-time editor and other “new hires”. But while The Ferret had nine directors and 2,297 subscribing members in 2023 (down from 2,480 the previous year), it had zero employees.

We’re not told if any of its writers – whose names do not appear on the site’s “fact-checking” articles, which are all bylined to “Ferret Journalists” – are paid, either as a salary or on a freelance piecework basis. According to the accounts the vast bulk of its outgoings are incurred on the rather vague “subcontractor costs”.

If all the organisation’s funds are contributed by its subscribers, that’d mean they were paying around £140 a year each, which is a lot for a few short articles a week. (Wings’ average subscriber contributes around £30 a year.)

It’s not clear what members get “free online training” in. All “surpluses” left over after its unknown outgoings are “reinvested into the business” in unspecified ways.

(Although in 2023 just £698 was spent on “staff training and welfare”.)

So we don’t know who funds it (although it does sometimes work with the mainstream Scottish press, which it’s presumably paid for), we don’t know who writes it, we don’t know where the money goes, and it’s accountable to basically nobody. If you complain about it, the complaint will be assessed by The Ferret’s own “Reader Directors”, who seem to be paying members and “sponsored supporters”, whatever THAT might mean.

It’s also notionally answerable to IMPRESS, an independent media “regulatory” body whose membership is a Who’s Who of “who’s that?” including the Merthyr Tydfil Times and the Shildon And District Town Crier, and which in terms of inquisitional rigour makes the infamously lily-livered IPSO look like the Gestapo with toothache.

Finally, the site is a “verified signatory” to the “International Fact-Checking Network”, an entity created by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and which lists among its backers the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook/Meta and the US State Department, in addition to Luminate.

The IFCN handled much of Meta’s controversial “fact-checking”, which Mark Zuckerberg announced this week will shortly be abolished in favour of Twitter-style community notes because it had become, ironically, too biased and censorious.

(Wings articles, interestingly, are regularly blocked and removed on Facebook, with no coherent reasons given and no possibility of appeal.)

The Ferret’s compliance with IFCN rules was most recently verified by someone called Ben Luria, who Ferret subscribers might be mildly surprised to learn was a captain in the Israeli Defence Force and the vice-head of its US-Israel Strategic Planning Desk.

The Ferret lost £4,030 last year, in contrast to a £63,409 profit the year before. Perhaps it ought to go sniffing around some of the deeply questionable organisations who lavishly fund OpenDemocracy, another “journalism” operation with a presence in Scotland and a somewhat hypocritically prurient attitude towards other people’s financing and transparency.

If the directionless, content-free smear piece in yesterday’s National is anything to go by, it’s no surprise that it needs to take cash anywhere it can get it. But readers are entitled to wonder where exactly that might be before they listen to any of the site’s partisan propaganda output about anything.