WHO IS FUNDING THE (NOT SO) INDEPENDENT GROUP? IS IT TIME TO FOLLOW THE MONEY?

Chuka some money Umunna's way.

Since it emerged just a few days ago, the so-called "Independent Group" of MPs has been behaving in an extremely suspicious manner. 

Even though their chief demand is that the British people must vote again on the question of staying in or leaving the European Union, all of the MPs are refusing to give their own constituents a second vote on whether they want them to continue as MPs by resigning and fighting by-elections. 

There are also growing demands from the public to know exactly who is funding the new group of 11 breakaway MPs (8 from the Labour Party and 3 from the Conservatives). 

Because the group has not officially registered as a political party, it does not yet have to reveal who is backing it financially. How convenient!

One Labour MP, Ruth George, even had to apologise after speculating aloud that the group was being partly funded by Israel. As yet we do not know if this is the case or not.

As reported by the Guardian:

A Labour MP has apologised for suggesting Israel could be secretly funding Luciana Berger and other MPs who quit the party on Monday citing unhappiness with Labour’s approach to tackling complaints of antisemitism.

Ruth George, the MP for High Peak, withdrew the comment and said she had no intention of invoking a conspiracy theory, when she responded to someone asking whether it was appropriate to say the seven departing MPs were “Israelis”.

The MP had written on Facebook: “Support from the State of Israel, which supports both Conservative and Labour ‘Friends of Israel’, of which Luciana [Berger] was chair, is possible and I would not condemn those who suggest it, especially when the group’s financial backers are not being revealed.

“It’s important for democracy to know the financial backers for any political group or policy.”

There is still little hard evidence about who is backing the group financially. What we do know is that one of the MPs Gavin Shuker has set up a limited company called Gemini A Ltd., in order to manage the group's finances. 

One clue is to look at who was funding the MPs before they broke with their respective parties. The Guardian has some interesting info on this:

In 2017 [Chuka] Umunna [one of the MPs] reported three donations totalling £45,000 from the property developer David Garrard, the former chairman of Lloyds TSB Victor Blank, and Paul Myners, who served as financial services secretary to Gordon Brown and was subsequently appointed to the House of Lords.

Myners is also a former chairman of Guardian Media Group, which owns the Guardian...

Angela Smith, another Independent Group MP, has been criticised for taking hospitality from water industry interests while also campaigning against nationalisation of the sector.

Smith is chair of the all-party parliamentary group on water, which is funded by the private water industry. Last year she wrote a comment piece for the Guardian warning against “ideological siren calls for nationalisation” of the industry. She is a former shadow water minister.

David Gerrard and Victor Blank are both Jewish, so could reasonably be suspected of being overly sympathetic to Israel and a Neocon foreign policy, but Paul Myners is not. 

Berger on the run from the Labour Party and her own voters.

Luciana Berger, another prominent member in the group, has received large donations in the past from Lord Grantchester, a Labour Lord and billionaire with a fortune estimated at 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion), an investment company called Red Capital, and Gurnek Bains, a Sikh businessman.

The one thing that is clear from all this is that the group is not being financed by the ordinary British voters, whose interests it is clearly working against.

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