The Curious Links of Led by Donkeys

CHARLOTTE GILL

Last week, you may remember I wrote about the curious links of the Assisted Dying Bill (the article is here in case you missed it).

Today I wanted to delve into the curious links of Led by Donkeys. This is the activist group that has engaged in numerous high-profile stunts across Britain. In August it was responsible for a banner at a Liz Truss event, which showed a picture of a lettuce and the words “I crashed the economy”. It is also responsible for a billboard in Clacton broadcasting Nigel Farage’s income, among numerous other campaigns – often involving outdoor media.

Although the Guardian originally presented Led by Donkeys as four blokes who met up and spontaneously decided to form an anti-Brexit group, the truth is a bit more complicated.

In 2019 Guido Fawkes was first to reveal that Led by Donkeys’ members are all former or past Greenpeace employees:

This fact is often forgotten, if the public are aware at all, when people are trying to make sense of the group’s activities, even though one of its videos (about the ‘Right to Peaceful Protest‘, voiced by Chris Packham) mentions Greenpeace.

The event Packham mentions, when “six Greenpeace protesters scaled the chimney”, happened in 2008, when six Greenpeace climate change activists scaled a 200-metre chimney at Kingsnorth power station. They were eventually “cleared of causing £30,000 of criminal damage”.

Two of the activists involved (pictured below) were Will Rose and Ben Stewart…

…who are two of Led by Donkeys:

James Sadri (above left) is another member of Led by Donkeys and was “Head of Mobilisation” at Greenpeace, as well as having been previously employed by the BBC and UN.

In 2021, Sadri was Co-Director of a Covid vaccine confidence project titled Team Halo, whose partners included the U.K. Health and Security Agency, among other sections of Government, as well as the World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and European Commission:

Below you can see Sadri taking part in “Vaccine Virtual Days” with representatives from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the WHO and UNICEF:

Team Halo’s role was to promote the vaccines Boris Johnson sorted out for the U.K. (all the while Led by Donkeys was tweeting about how awful Johnson is):

On X, the now-inactive Team Halo says it’s “Part of UN Verified”. The word “verified” is interesting as, when he was co-Director of Team Halo, Sadri praised Marianna Spring, of BBC Verify, for her “excellent piece looking at the effects of anti-vaxx disinformation”.

Remember how I mentioned that Sadri has previously worked for the UN? And how Team Halo partnered with it, the European Commission and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? These organisations also fund the BBC. Small world!

Team Halo received coverage on BBC Newsbeat, where vaccine experts discussed “how they are working to combat vaccine disinformation”:

There are other rabbit holes, too.

For instance, Sadri is mentioned in a report by More in Common, the organisation designed to “understand the forces driving us apart, to find common ground and help to bring people together to tackle our shared challenges”:

It’s striking that a member of Led by Donkeys – such a divisive group – was consulted on “Common Ground and Division in 2020s Britain”.

At the very least, none of what I’ve found (and there are even more rabbit holes!) squares with the Guardian’s claim that a chat at the pub led these four men to activism…

Charlotte Gill regularly publishes about the use of taxpayers’ money to fund Left-wing causes and Left-wing researchers in Woke Waste, her Substack. You can subscribe here.

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This article (The Curious Links of Led by Donkeys) was created and published by Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Charlotte Gill

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