To say there’s a smell surrounding the EU referendum is an understatement; it’s not just the bad smell coming from Tufton St, there’s an overpowering stench emanating from the very heart of Number 10.

The news, over the last six months, that multiple independent inquiries have exposed the extralegal activities of those who delivered the 2016 referendum result, has been met by a sound of silence that would put Simon & Garfunkel to shame.

The deafening silence from the government is slightly more understandable than that from the opposition. Brexit is little more than a device, a vehicle that affords their unelected, mandateless administration the opportunity to play ‘Russian’ roulette with our economy, our rights, our freedoms and our protections to deliver their illiberal objective; developing an off the shores of Europe, low tax, small state, deregulated economy, that proves once and for all, if proof were ever needed….

Brexit is

Of the Right

By the Right

For the Right

The silence from the Her Majesty’s Official Opposition is mystifying, in fact, despite their leadership’s counterintuitive leanings towards a utopian ‘Corbynite Brexit,’ their Trappist monk act is being viewed with absolute incredulity given the ‘open goal’ opportunity this rapidly developing political scandal of the century presents.

The multiple inquiries led by The Information Commissioners Office and The Electoral Commission into Leave.EU and Vote Leave, Darren Grimes, BeLeave and Veterans for Britain, and The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s investigation into ‘Fake News’ – not forgetting the sterling work carried out by the ETHI Standing Committee in the Canadian Parliament – have found direct evidence of serious illegal activity by both Vote Leave and Leave.EU during the 2016 referendum campaign. Thankfully, unlike in the UK, Canada aren’t exactly what you’d call tolerant of ‘political sensitivities’…..

Refusing to acknowledge that this serious illegal activity did not affect the outcome of the 2016 referendum is akin to believing a team who loses an FA Cup Final to a team fielding 12 men is acceptable. It clearly isn’t; yet this is where our political classes have brought us to in 2018 – it’s okay to lie and cheat, it’s okay to break the law, even if you’re caught!

The aforementioned Leave organisations have received the maximum fines permissible and both have been reported to the police over their suspected criminal activity, although the timeline of the police investigation is confusing as ‘political sensitivities’ were being cited when recent enquiries were made as to their ‘progress’ on their investigation.

It’s not unreasonable, given the ever mounting evidence of the undermining of both the referendum result and the fabric of democracy in the UK, to suggest that greater investigation, either via a Royal Commission or a major Public Inquiry, is now required in order to restore the public’s faith to both our democratic process and law and order.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Remain campaign has not been found guilty of this type of serious breach of the law and are not under investigation by either the Electoral Commission or the police.

The fines levied against the Leave campaigns do not address the immediate problem of sixty-six million people having their rights, freedoms and protections potentially wrongfully taken away from them by a government containing many of those who aided and abetted this enabling crime that was perpetrated by those who have been closely associated with the Conservative party for many years……

The more you look, the more you find, and the worse it gets. Bob Zimmer, chair of the Canadian ETHI committee astutely summed it all up whilst questioning AIQ…..

In agreement with Bob, it would be fair to say, something definitely doesn’t smell right about not only the 2016 EU Referendum, but also the three identifiable strands of the Brexit scam. Money, people and technology.

Who provided the finance and why?

It’s often said you need to follow the money, and it’s vitally important to follow the money which enabled those whose goal it was to turn the UK away from its most successful and peaceful association with its closest neighbours and allies, an association which had transformed the UK from the sick man of Europe in the early 1970’s to the leading economic engine in the G7 and the fifth largest economy on the planet by 2016.

Money was certainly indirectly provided by American illiberal neoconservatives who, having funded and gifted finance to a camouflaged nest of cloned ‘Think Tanks’ over many years, sat back and waited for a return on their investment as their apparatchiks diligently worked a compliant and largely open armed media and targeted those all too willing politicians whose natural home was either deep into right-wing territory, or the craven, willing to hop aboard any bus, no matter what was written on the side, in order to further their political aspirations.

It’s alleged that money was also funnelled to the Brexit campaigns by Putin’s Russia. Indeed, in 2017 a Brexitshambles source revealed detailed information, on background, that clearly identified a person of interest linking cryptocurrency payments and Russian money to both the Trump and Brexit campaigns; the catalyst required for the revelation of this person being the Mueller inquiry into Russian interference of the 2016 Presidential election.

The common focus of the Russian state and the American far-right is the EU. There’s little difficulty finding a motive behind Russia’s wish to see the EU destabilised.

Russia, given the impact WWII had on them, are understandably suspicious of any wealthy European supranational union that puts the interests of its member states and citizens before those of Russia’s national/natural paranoia and their aggressive military projectionism.

Due to its annexation of Crimea and their military excursions into other parts of Ukraine, the EU has sanctioned Russia economically; sanctions which have had a dire impact on its already struggling economy. Russia also has a multitude of disputes with EU countries bordering the Federation and took grave offence over the EU’s support of President Obama embarrassing Putin by throwing Russia out of the then G8.

The American far-right’s problems with the EU are both ideological and economic. The EU, as the largest trading bloc on the planet, competes with the US and resists the economic bullying President Trump is attempting to exercise at the moment. The US neocons know only too well that separately the EU nation states are weaker, whilst together they’re stronger; so they’re happily playing a massive game of Jenga, taking one, possibly more out in the hope the whole thing comes crashing down. Makes you think who the enemies of our people really are doesn’t it?

But the real driver for the American far-right is its ideology, a belief in small state, low tax, deregulated economies in which all functions of the welfare state are controlled by corporate entities who have little regard to the environmental and human rights enshrined in EU treaties for the benefit and protection of the citizens of their member states.

You can forget about a health service that for seventy years has been there for the needs of everyone; a health service that is free at the point of delivery and that is based on clinical need, not the ability to pay via an insurance policy provided by a company whose shareholders are Brexit funders, Tory ministers and Belizean tax avoiders.

Removing an important economy from the bloc affords the US a win/win. To the victor belong the spoils, and the likes of Liam Fox and Theresa May have already suggested the largest free healthcare system in the world will become available to US corporations, as will a deregulated market of sixty-six million people, with the additional bonus for the US neocons that the bloc will become destabilised through the loss of a major player allowing for the possibility of even greater trade gains for them in a market of over 500 million people – be in no doubt, it’s a work in progress; or regress depending on your point of view.

Take your choice, Russians or Americans, two cheeks of the same arse.

Who were the people involved?

It doesn’t take a genius to uncover the main players involved in Vote Leave or Leave.EU, most were visible before, during and a long time after their campaigns concluded as they basked in their ‘pyrrhic victory’.

High profile right-wing politicians such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Steve Baker, Daniel Hannan and Nigel Farage have been almost permanent fixtures in news feeds over the past couple of years, they were joined by lesser known operatives such as Matthew Elliott, Dominic Cummings, Andy Wigmore and Arron Banks.

Scrape the surface a little and you begin to discover names such as Mark Gettleson, Thomas Borwick, Darren Grimes, Richard Tice, Gerry Gunster, Liz Bilney and Isobel Oakeshott.

Now you’re into the dark corners, here you’ll find a seemingly unending raft of inter-connected individuals including Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, Alexander Nix, Aleksandr Kogan, Thore Graepel, David Stillwell, Michal Kosinski. Richard Cook, Jeff Silvester, Zach Massingham, Sir Geoffrey Pattie, Nigel Oakes, Mark Turnbull and Steve Tatham.

These people were in a war long before those running the Remain campaign even knew they were in a fight; they didn’t so much take a gun to a knife fight, they took a whole artillery battery and together they outfought, outthought, outmanoeuvred and, despite Electoral Commission records proving the contrary, collectively outspent the Remain campaign.

The mistake Remain made was believing nobody in their right mind would vote to lose what the EU provided, they thought voters would genuinely understand that the host of benefits far outweighed the negatives and they wouldn’t fall for the conflation and misdirection; how wrong they were.

The fatal mistake the Leave campaigns made was believing they wouldn’t get caught.

For Vote Leave, Steve Baker MP outlined a scheme that enabled them to circumvent the Electoral Commission’s spending rules, boasting, “Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.”

Matthew Elliott organised their naive but willing partners whilst Dominic Cummings executed a relentless campaign designed to confuse and mislead low information voters, 8m of whom, designated persuadables, were subjected to a barrage of information via their Canadian contractors AIQ.

Mark Gettleson introduced Cummings to AIQ, whilst Thomas Borwick, familiar with the work of both AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, having developed software for military contractor SCL, became Vote Leave’s Chief Technology Officer.

Cummings WAS a key player in deciding the direction Vote Leave took with regard to the use of data analytics, he IS a key player in the investigation into exactly what went on during the referendum, but, like others, from initially being unable to stop talking about how clever they’d been, he’s now silent, yet his refusal to attend the DCMS committee hearing spoke volumes.

While Cummings crafted the direction of their campaign behind the scenes, Tory ‘big beasts’ such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox, Iain Duncan Smith, Andrea Leadsom, Chris Grayling, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel, became the public face of the Vote Leave campaign.

Over at Leave.EU, Arron Banks unexplainably provided an eye-watering £12m of services to Leave.EU and other associated anti-EU campaigns through a highly opaque structure of companies involving poorly performing insurance businesses and ‘diamond mines.’

Leave.EU essentially ran a campaign that was little more than a circus in comparison to the official Vote Leave; a series of infantile stunts with Nigel Farage front and centre at rallies and poster unfurlings, whilst American strategist Gerry Gunster ran their psychological campaign based on a ‘facts don’t work, you have to connect with people emotionally’ approach.

But this illusion of sophistication was shattered by the reality they were simply running a campaign which conflated EU membership with xenophobia and full blown racist fear and loathing, adequately illustrated by this video they posted to their Twitter and Facebook accounts in April 2016.

Described by Arron Banks as the worst PR guy in London, Andy Wigmore was Director of Communications at Leave.EU during its campaign, but his greatest contributions appear post-referendum when, along with Banks, they waxed lyrical for months over how Cambridge Analytica and Artificial Intelligence “won them the referendum,” only to change their tune once the inquiries began.

Their original stance morphed into many explanations, from using Cambridge Analytica, through to employing their own data scientists and developing their own AI.

Wigmore evolved the story further when he later told the Times:

“Cambridge Analytica provided initial help and guidance to the LeaveEU campaign, which then went on to develop its own artificial intelligence analysis methodology. The AI machine learning was developed in Bristol by 20 mathematicians and actuaries with input from Cambridge Analytica at the very beginning and then executed by Goddard Gunster.”

These highly embellished stories have today morphed into one where Banks now completely denies AI was ever employed whilst Wigmore mocks the effectiveness of the technology they, along with Vote Leave, were so keen to praise and on which untold millions was spent. Untold because, as seen below, from the Electoral Commission report on the subject, it has been unable to ascertain the true level of overspend by Leave.EU:

“The Commission also considers that the unlawful over-spend may well have been considerably higher than that. Services the group received from the US campaign strategy firm Goddard Gunster were not included in the spending return, despite a proportion of them having been used during Leave.EU’s referendum campaign.”

Perhaps the most telling, and most important, denial is this one by Arron Banks. In this clip from their infamous interview with the DCMS, Banks not only denies ever using AI during the referendum campaign, but suggests that Vote Leave using AI was also erroneous. The second part of the clip is Banks’ appearance at ‘The Master Investor Show‘ run by his business partner Jim Mellon, the investor in the Russian diamond company, Alrosa, an investment which the New York Times reported was offered to Banks who declined before Mellon took up their offer through a company he founded called Charlemagne Capital.

In the video Banks contradicts what he told the DCMS by claiming not only did Leave.EU use AI but, as a spinoff, his insurance company began using it. Rather interestingly he also claims to have a highly accurate forecast of the referendum result, interesting because it’s alleged that Nigel Farage, by first conceding defeat just after the vote closed on the night of the referendum, helped the hedge fund managers who made millions out of the Brexit result; people like Crispin Odey who not only funded the Brexit campaign to the tune of almost £1m, he made an absolute fortune by a dawn, which, according to Crispin, had gold in its mouth….over £200m of gold to be precise, ironically losing half of the value of his fund in the proceeding months as he bet against the UK economy – Crispin suffering from being a little premature perhaps?

The Technology

It may come as a surprise to some, but save for defamation of a candidate, the Electoral Commission’s stated position is that it’s not illegal to lie in elections or referendums, hence the massive ‘£350m a week to the EU’ lie on the side of that bus.

The rationale of the regulatory body is both simple and understandable, participating party’s statements and advertisements are seen by everyone, they encourage discourse amongst the electorate who can then decide which claims to believe and which party to support.

Not perfect by any means, but it’s a system that worked, past tense; it worked right up until technology left it literally light years behind overnight, making it about as useful as a David Davis impact assessment.

Whilst data analytics use in political campaigns is nothing new, 2016 saw a massive swing in utilising data for the micro-targeting of voters through social media platforms viewed on smartphones, tablets and computers.

In theory this has to be a good thing; more people obtaining more information in order to take better informed decisions on the issues at stake; what could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately for the UK, the 2016 referendum took place against a backdrop of an inadequate referendum act, inadequate electoral rules and inadequate oversight, meaning that what should have been the most serious democractic exercise in generations was turned into little more than a wild west show due to the Leave campaigns belief that they could lie, cheat and break the law with apparent impunity.

The belief of the Electoral Commission, that healthy public discourse brings about democratic decision making, was shattered when the Leave campaigns started ‘whispering in peoples ears’ via micro-targeted ads.

By way of explanation, imagine two neighbours, both with genuine concerns for the NHS. The first neighbour, a Labour supporter, receives a social media message explaining that voting to Leave the EU will give the NHS a massive financial boost from all the money the country will save by not sending £350m a week to the EU, whilst the other neighbour, a UKIP voting xenophobe, is told that voting Leave will be good for the NHS because it will no longer be under pressure from all the immigrants and health tourists flooding the country.

Two people, poles apart in their politics, but united through their concerns over the NHS, are being coerced into Voting Leave by ads that inaccurately conflate the NHS with the EU.

Of course the reality is voting Leave for these or any other reason won’t help the NHS whatsoever, because we don’t send anything like that amount to the EU and neither is it under pressure due to immigration levels, in fact it’s immigrants and their skills that keep the NHS running.

That the vote to Leave will cause irreparable damage to this institution is a fact, but the Leave campaigns weren’t worried about facts, their sole aim, in using micro-targeted messaging, was to obtain as many votes by any means possible, and it wasn’t just a couple of variants of a message, it was thousands of variants on hundreds of subjects which were seen not thousands or even millions of times, they were seen billions of times by a select group of the electorate who had been identified as persuadable.

The effectiveness of this technology, or even advertising in general, can be debated ad infinitum, the fact is this; Leave campaigns invested heavily in micro-targeted online advertising because THEY believed it worked, they believed it worked so much that they were prepared to break the law to maximise the perceived benefit of breaking those spending regulations.

Understanding the story behind the ‘Great Brexit Scam’ is like attempting to play two games of three dimensional chess simultaneously. It’s infinitely more complex than the Watergate scandal, which, never forget, wasn’t simply about a burglary, it was about a political cover-up that brought down a President.

In piecing together the chronology of this electoral crime we have a golden rule, coincidences rarely occur, multiple coincidences never occur, so on hearing them you’re drawn to them like a hedgie to a currency crash.

Leaving the none denial denials from Leave.EU over Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica LLC aside for the moment, one first of all wonders how the two main Leave campaigns were approached by an American company, albeit one with extensive British links, and a Canadian company who, despite attempts to convince otherwise, were both intricately and intimately linked to one another. What are the chances of this given all the digital companies offering this type of service? And with plenty of digital ad agencies in the UK what was the USP of Cambridge Analytica/SCL/AIQ? Apart from them being outside UK jurisdiction.

Then there’s the similarity in behaviour of all those involved; all were keen to tell the world how they used data science and AI to deliver Brexit, then, once the questions began and the explanations failed to stack up, denial and silence.

Leave.EU have dismissed all allegations, Vote Leave’s Cummings, went from inflicting his verbal and blogging diarrhoea on the general population, to absolute silence and closing down his social media. Cambridge Analytica from initially boasting of their involvement went one better, they closed down the whole company, and then there’s AIQ, Jeff Silvester and Zach Massingham, living proof that in every chain there’s a weak link.

We believe that finding the key to explaining the riddle of Brexit begins with AIQ. They’ve been questioned by the DCMS committee and the ETHI committee in the Canadian Parliament as well as the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioners Office.

AIQ claim to have used Facebook’s own targeting tools to place ads for Vote Leave. By way of confirmation TechCrunch reported:

“The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to use Facebook’s ad targeting tools.”

TechCrunch explained further:

“The targeting of the ads was carried out on Facebook’s platform by AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica/SCL — aka the political consultancy at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse storm, including by Facebook itself, which earlier this year told the UK parliament it had found billing and administration connections between the two.”

We don’t believe this is what happened, and here’s why.

In September of this year the ICO issued a surprise GDPR notice against AIQ, here’s the actual enforcement notice.

AIQ had contracts with Vote Leave, BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the DUP.

The notice contains information that personal data from UK individuals is still held in the code repository, paragraph six is particularly revealing:

“As part of AIQ’s contract with those political organisations, AIQ HAVE BEEN PROVIDED with personal data including names and email addresses of UK individuals. This personal data was then used to target individuals with political advertising messages on Social Media.”

We know that AIQ have never presented themselves as data miners, so who supplied them with this voter information?

Vote Leave personnel just happen to include the honorific Thomas Borwick, Matthew Elliott, who was a former director of WESS Digital Ltd and Mark Gettleson, a friend of Chris Wylie who introduced Vote Leave to AIQ.

All three have connections with people and companies involved in the data industry but by far the most prominent is Vote Leave’s Chief Technology Officer Borwick.

Apart from running Voter Consultancy Ltd, a company which can and has legally obtained UK electoral rolls, and is one of thirty companies under initial investigation by the ICO, Borwick is also intimately familiar with the work of SCL and Cambridge Analytica.

Someone, somewhere must have processed the raw electoral data and one name in the frame, another company under investigation by the ICO, is ASI Data Science.

Based in London, ASI is an organisation that offers a prestigious fellowship for PhD graduates, post-doctoral researchers and experienced software engineers. The fellowship is designed to assist them in their transition into a career in data science. A quick examination of their alumni reveals its 150-strong fellowship is littered with PhD’s in disciplines such as mathematics, astrophysics, particle physics, molecular biology and economics from the world’s most esteemed universities including Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Imperial, UCL and Heidelberg to name but a few.

Essentially, ASI is Top Gun for PhD’s wanting to enter the data science industry. ASI claim that 10% of the UK’s PhD’s in science, technology, engineering and mathematics apply for their fellowship which is heavily oversubscribed.

Dominic Cummings has always said that rather than hire an off-the-shelf political consultancy, he found experts in disciplines like astrophysics, who were confident with statistics and sophisticated computer modelling and could come at the problem from a different angle. That problem was they had to build everything from scratch without having the money to buy standard commercial databases. He said “We found ways to scrape equivalents off the web saving hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

Cummings’ claim that ‘data was scraped off the web’ would be a skill easily accomplished by people at ASI, everyone there would be highly familiar with Python, probably the most commonly used language in data science, which contains a library called ‘Beautiful Soup’ a tool specifically used for this task.

ASI and its fellowship programme are clearly an excellent resource for companies operating in the world of data science, which explains why SCL had an association with at least nine of their alumni, many of whom were until recently working for one or several of the companies that were once in the SCL Group prior to liquidation.

For those unfamiliar with the SCL group, which includes Cambridge Analytica, here’s a useful chart from American journalists Wendy Siegelman and Ann Marlowe.

For companies hoping to recruit the best of the best ASI is a cost effective programme; you pay a fee, much less than using an agency, and you have candidates working on a live project during which you can evaluate their worth.

Here’s Jack Hansom, a PhD experimental physicist, presenting at the demo day during his 2015 ASI fellowship after which he immediately went to work for Cambridge Analytica LLC as a Data Engineer until 2017.

*This video was uploaded by Paul Olivier DeHaye of PersonalData.IO who resisted a take-down request on the basis of fair use in light of journalistic interest.

In Vote Leave’s electoral return, you won’t find any mention of ASI Data Science, but you will find five invoices from Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd for ‘advertising and market research’. Two were for insignificant amounts totaling just over £281, but the remaining three, according to the Electoral Commission website, were for £71,737.

Obtaining the actual invoices reveals more detail. Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd is the registered name of ASI Data Science whose name is on these invoices, the three invoices concerned were not for advertising but for data and polling analysis services and finally the amounts on the invoices do not correspond with those submitted. The total amount declared to the Electoral commission, including those for £281, amounts to £72,081. The actual amount on the invoices was £114,881, a difference of £42,800 which could be a multiplier applied to the invoices for ads but shouldn’t apply if it was poll data used in the actual referendum.

There’s a more in-depth study of ASI here.

Returning to Leave.EU, it really is a dog’s breakfast, as you’ve already observed, no two stories they tell are the same and the more you look the worse it gets.

Twenty months ago, long before all the real shit began hitting the fan, Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer interviewed Leave.EU’s Andy Wigmore. It’s well worth taking the trip back down memory lane, it’s rather telling how much Andy then appeared to know about what Cambridge Analytica / SCL did and compare what he said with what Dominic Cummings also said post referendum.

Wigmore told Cadwalladr – “Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles.

“Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

Wigmore went on to clarify that they hadn’t employed Cambridge Analytica, no money changed hands, they were happy to help because Nigel (Farage) is a good friend of the Mercers and Robert Mercer introduced Cambridge Analytica to Leave.EU He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what Leave.EU were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, they were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There’s always an element of truth in every fairytale. Substitute Steve Bannon for Robert Mercer, Mercer would run a mile from Farage, he’s a quant, Farage is a …. and weave in Gerry Gunster, who, you’ll remember, the Electoral Commission simply don’t know the value of ‘services’ he supplied to Leave.EU, just as the don’t know where over £10m of the £11m that Banks claims he raised was spent, put those together and you’ll be closer to what went on. And then there’s this…

Whatever he’s thanking him for it’s not the work of Breitbart London or Steve Bannon’s fluffer Raheem Kassam, this is a deliberate and mocking act.

What you can say with certainty is that there are far too many coincidences, far too many unanswered questions and far too many people thinking, for some unknown reason, that it’s perfectly acceptable to break the law in a referendum because nothing is going to happen to them.

And over two years after the referendum, they’re right! Nothing is happening, nothing is happening to the 99% of the people involved in the most serious electoral scam in UK history because the party they either now or previously associated with is the party in power leading the country over a cliff when they could simply announce, due to the mounting evidence, that the biggest public inquiry EVER is being launched due to disturbing evidence that the 2016 referendum result is demonstrably unsafe.

The final reports from the ICO and DCMS investigations are due out soon, they’re unlikely to reverse the findings of their interim reports, it’s probable that even greater evidence of lawbreaking will be brought to light – will the authorities act then? Don’t hold your breath!