By Ranjan Balakumaran
Biased Sheila
The deputy head of Ofcom – the BBC’s regulator – Baroness Noakes, has been done for anti-Labour tweeting in the past.
[contentcards url=”https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/30/ofcom-deputy-chair-to-halt-anti-labour-tweets-after-being-called-tory-stooge”]
She has consistently voted with the Government for Brexit in the Lords and is therefore too biased to regulate the BBC.
She shouldn’t be allowed to back the Government in the Lords as well as in our living rooms.
Separate questions about her role overseeing the re-appropriation of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of small and medium sized businesses’s assets at the Royal Bank of Scotland also cast doubt on whether she possesses the probity and good judgment required of a media regulator.
Tweets
Here she is, only last week, retweeting the most controversial of characters, Darren Grimes of Vote Leave.
This young man took hundreds of thousands of pounds from Vote Leave to launder money and the youth vote for the corrupt Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the Brexit Vote.
As a gay man and ardent Brexiteer, this is bollocks. Our equality, non-discrimination and family rights were hard fought for over many years by parliamentarians in the UK. The idea we’ll become intolerant of minorities without the EU is nonsense on stilts. https://t.co/tXnqGWHyQ6
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) April 22, 2018
RBS Fraud
Noakes is a Non Executive Director at the Royal Bank of Scotland where she chairs the the Board Risk Committee and sits on the Group Audit Committee and the GRG oversight Committee!
For those who are new to the scandal plagued RBS GRG unit, this has been described as an “abattoir” for small businesses and that it may be the “biggest theft ever”.
The bank, state-owned at the time, stole millions from innocent small business customers in what became known as the dash for cash:
[contentcards url=”https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/dash-for-cash?utm_term=.tr7pR3rJwq#.ppYQno3ZOv”]
This cases are just the tip of the iceberg as so much remains covered up.
This from February:
That’s right, this woman is deeply involved in one of the biggest banking scandals of all time.
Noakes was once described as the country’s top accountant and has lots of experience in PFI both for the government, the audit firms as well as in the private sector.
But sadly, it looks as thought our BBC has been entrusted to a card-carrying Tory Brexit propagandist.
Freedom of Information
John Mann sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Bank of England about former Deputy Governor Paul Tucker’s role in getting Barclays to readjust their LIBOR submissions during the crash in 2008. Mann was on the Treasury Select Committee and so the FOI was treated as urgent and replied to swiftly.
I suggest that a Labour member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee or the Shadow Minister for Culture, Tom Watson, send in an FOI to Ofcom asking to see whether Baroness Noakes membership of the House Lords has ever been considered a potential conflict of interest.
.@tom_watson should FOI @Ofcom re: @1svn‘s conflicts of interests then raise with #ToryRemainers @MattHancock & @DamianCollins. She’s bringing the house of lords, ofcom, bbc and brexit all into disrepute! #ladynoakes
— Ranjan Balakumaran (@financialeyes) April 29, 2018
Certainly all of Noakes’s correspondence on the subject of Brexit during the run up to the referendum and ever since are highly relevant at this time. Perhaps a group of Remainer MPs on the DCMS select committee, including Damian Collins, would like to start asking Ofcom these crucial questions.
Collusive Corruption
Anything less would demonstrate a high degree of collusive corruption.
I asked David Whyte if the UK is a corrupt country in the run up to last year’s election:
