British-American Project

British-American Project
Founder(s)	Nick Butler
Interest of	• Julia Hobsbawm • Michael Smeeth

The British-American Project (BAP) is a transatlantic fellowship of over 1,200 leaders and opinion formers from a broad spectrum of occupations, backgrounds and political views. The purpose of the network is to groom a cadre of reliably pro-American British politicians, especially on the left side in politics, or as the 1985 conference put it, “to create, at a time of growing international strains and stresses, a closer rapport between Britain and the United States among people likely to become influential decision-makers during the next two decades” [1]

BAP operates on a not-for-profit basis, funded through its membership and support from corporate partners. It was originally named the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, and was founded in 1985 [2]. From 2006, it became a Private Limited Company.

Annual conference

The BAP meets annually for a four-day conference on a topic of current concern to both countries. Each year, roughly 24 new participants are selected from either side of the Atlantic, on the basis of service to their communities and professional achievement, and sponsored to attend the conference as Delegates. At the end of each conference, Delegates are elected Fellows of the Project. Fellows from past years attend the annual conferences at their own expense, with many returning in successive years.

Many BAP alumni are directly involved with US and UK military and defense establishments.

Members used to joke of CIA-funding

A Guardian article from 2004 described the purpose of the group:

Here, BAP is portrayed as a Trojan horse for American foreign policy, recruiting Britons of liberal or left-of-centre inclinations and political talent and connections when they are young, indoctrinating them with propaganda about the virtues of American capitalism and America's role in the world, and then watching them approvingly as they steer British politics in an ever more pro-Washington direction. According to this analysis, the project's greatest success has been New Labour.[3]

The leftwing journalist John Pilger, who has been uncovering American manipulation of other countries' politics for decades, has described BAP as a "casual freemasonry" and "by far the most influential transatlantic network of politicians, journalists and academics".

The historian Frances Stonor Saunders, who has written extensively about the American use of earlier, similar networks to influence western opinion during the cold war, sees close parallels with BAP: "All that's changed is that BAP are much more sophisticated." Member Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said: ""The amount of drink, the way you were treated, the dinners with everyone who was anyone..... It was money that I'd never seen at any conference before. We [the participants] used to joke, 'This is obviously funded by the CIA.'"

BAP-member Martin Vander Weyer admitted: "The British membership is quite a concentrated elite," he admits. "There was a stage where ... a lot of the people who emerged as part of the New Labour leadership group happened - and I say happened, because it is partly chance - to be members of BAP ...

British members

Given the number of members, this is an incomplete list. Nevertheless, because of the Project's secrecy, this is the most complete compilation existing in public. UK members of the British-American Project include (2004):

• Peter Mandelson EU trade commissioner

• Jonathan Powell Tony Blair's chief of staff

• Jeremy Paxman broadcast journalist and author

• Mo Mowlam former Labour Northern Ireland secretary

• Adair Turner head of pensions commission

• Trevor Phillips former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission

• James Naughtie broadcast journalist and author

• Matthew Taylor Downing Street head of policy

• Chris Smith former Labour culture secretary

• Elizabeth Symons (Baroness Symons) Foreign Office minister

• George Robertson (Lord Robertson) former Nato secretary-general

• Douglas Alexander Foreign Office and trade minister

• Geoff Mulgan former head of Downing Street's policy and strategy unit

• Patricia Scotland (Baroness Scotland) Home Office minister

• Julia Hobsbawm public relations consultant

• Steve Hilton Conservative special adviser

• Benjamin Zephaniah poet and activist

• Colonel Bob Stewart former commander of British forces in Bosnia

• David Willetts Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary

• Alan Sked founder of UKIP

• Stephen Dorrell former Conservative health secretary

• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown columnist and broadcaster

• Charles Moore former editor of the Daily Telegraph

• Nick Butler BP group vice-president, strategy and policy development

• David Lipsey (Lord Lipsey) Labour peer and author

• Anatol Lieven historian

• George R Packard (United States) international relations academic

• Sir Charles Villiers businessman

• Nick Butler

• Martin Vander Weyer

• Adair Turner

• David Trimble

• Nihal Arthanayake

• Jordan Shields

• Kathleen Houlihan Motzenbecker

• Daniel Incandela

• Kathleen King
• Elizabeth Kanter
• Christopher Lincoln-Jones Defence Consultant. Chiron Information & Analysis
• Edith Gorman-Lush
• Rowan Mackinnon
• Joanna Jepson
• Julia Hoggett
• Suzanne Hay
• Lisa Henderson
• Jane Hill Journalist
• Stephen Hinton Managing Director, Thorn Hinton Limited.
• Stephen Mannix
• Richard O'Connor
• Forence Nosegbe
• Olivia Pinkney
• Nicola Pitts
• Sally Lines
• Raphael Mokades
• Karen Louise Mitchell
• Lucy Marcus
• Christian May
• Alan Mendoza
• Derek Mills
• Steven Haines
• Debbie Gupta
• John Baines
• Robert Beckley
• Dominic Dyer
• Sara Gefland
• Duncan Glassey
• Alison Griffiths
• Caroline Dalmeny
• Stephen Colegrave
• John Bew
• Clemecy Burton-Hill
• Lara Carmona
• Clare Montagu
• Elisabeth Stainton
• Craig Wilkinson
• Gillian McCallum
• Lotte Jeffs
• Bela Arora
• Sam Barcroft
• Haani Ul Hasnain
• Jo Saucek
• Andrea Westall
• Paul Parr
• Flora Nedelcu
• Garry Everitt
• Jasdeep Kaur Bhogal
• Bindi Karia
• David Ezra Ruebain Solicitor
• Robert Terry Senior Policy Adviser

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Jane Hill	“The annual [ British-American Project ] conference is an experience like no other – stimulating, challenging, always fun.”	Jane Hill	2005
Marjorie Thompson	“Another Labour figure who has had an experience with the BAP is Emma Dent Coad who was the party’s first ever MP for Kensington, serving from 2017-19, and is now leader of the Labour Group on the borough’s council.  She told Declassified that a friend who was a senior official in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) tried to recruit her to the BAP in the 1980s. Coad later found out this person “worked with the CIA”.  At the time, the US government had, according to an official memo leaked to the Washington Post, initiated a "propaganda exercise in Britain, aimed at neutralising the efforts of CND". “In the late 80s, I was a journalist working in design and architecture and very busy at the time, travelling around a lot and writing for various magazines,” Coad told us. “At the time, a local friend who was senior in CND started talking to me about this project that she was involved in." "She basically said that if I was able to go to Washington and give a talk about the work I was doing, I’d have a lovely dinner, it would all be paid for, and then I’d be part of this international group who were just trying to improve life," Coad added. “Then I would be part of that group forever and I’d be invited to things periodically, and it would give me a really good profile." Coad thought about it and discussed it with her then husband. "But I just felt there was something a bit smelly about it frankly,” she says. “It didn’t ring true, something so generous just for me being there, so I politely declined."  “Later I found out what the British-American Project was all about," she adds. “Then I found out a couple of years later that this friend – who had by then moved out of the area and I’d lost contact with her – worked with the CIA, and I was absolutely appalled." Coad says she was good friends with the husband of the alleged CIA operative, and that he told her she was working for the agency as soon as he found out.  "There was something not quite right. I was just a jobbing journalist really, in a faintly glamorous environment, why would I be of interest to this international group?" But Coad can understand why she was a target. "I’ve always been a socialist, I always had those values from school,” she says. “I was political at college, at university, I had roles in the unions, I’d always been political. So clearly she knew that." She adds: “I started writing a book on Spanish design architecture, so I was busy, and I think my stock was rising at the time. The recruiter was very prominent in CND, which I supported.” After Coad was told about the CIA connection "it began to drop into place," she says. Coad then looked up the recruiter who had moved on from CND to PR firm Saatchi & Saatchi, which has funded the BAP.  “I thought, ‘that’s interesting, a bit of a leap from what they were doing before’. I thought it was very strange that they would go from CND to working for a right-wing advertising agency, so it rang true, and I believed it.””	Emma Dent Coad Matt Kennard Marjorie Thompson

 

Known members

37 of the 271 of the members already have pages here:

Member	Description
Rushanara Ali	UK Labour MP on the executive committee of the British-American Project.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown	British establishment Muslim journalist.
John Bellinger	A spook/lawyer representing the more patient and more PR-friendly approach to Empire
Janet Bloomfield	Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1990s; member of the British-American Project
John Brademas	US politician
Nick Butler	Academic founder of the British-American Project
Peter Carrington	UK Deep politician. Bilderberg chairman. President of the Pilgrims Society. Secretary General of NATO. Chairman of the UK Conservative Party. Busy guy.
Shami Chakrabarti	Interestingly connected UK lawyer who was a long time director of Liberty, a UK civil liberties advocacy organisation.
Mark Durkan	WEF NI politician who voted to support mandatory Covid certification
Colleen Graffy	US spook and propagandist
Jane Hill	One of the main presenters for BBC News. Director of the British-American Project 2006-2009.
Steve Hilton	British political adviser, member of the Notting Hill Set
Julia Hoggett
Frederick Kempe	Spook and deep state actor
Sadiq Khan
Linda LeSourd Lader	The wife of Philip Lader, the corporate networker and former US ambassador to the UK. Advised President Clinton on personal issues pertaining to religion.
Philip Lader	US Ambassador to the UK 1997-2001
Anatol Lieven	Chair of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at deep state King's College London
Cristopher Lincoln-Jones
Michael Maclay	Former British diplomat and journalist with lots of spooky connections. Early member of the British American Project, recruited by Robert Maxwell and Lord Weidenfeld to their projects, director at Hakluyt, advisor to Carl Bildt...
Peter Mandelson	Supranational deep state operative. Bilderberg, TLC, Ditchley etc.
Lucy Marcus	British business journalist who has written for Project Syndicate, BBC and Reuters
Vidal Martinez
Alan Mendoza	Executive Director of The Henry Jackson Society
George Mitchell	Le Cercle
Diana Villiers Negroponte
Jeremy Paxman	Broadcaster for the BBC. He has been involved with the British-American Project.
George Robertson	Bilderberger, ex Secretary General of NATO with unknown deep political connections.
Patricia Scotland
Nigel Sheinwald
Bob Stewart
Marjorie Thompson	Chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament with next job in Margaret Thatcher's favorite PR-agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Suspected of working with the CIA. British-American Project.
David Trimble
Adair Turner	Front man for George Soros-initiatives.
Charles Villiers	UK businessman, Chair of British Steel Corporation from 1976 till 1980.
David Willetts
Paul Wolfowitz	An "architect" of the invasion of Iraq, World Bank President

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Is this the Epicentre of Corbyn’s Antisemitism Story?	Article	8 April 2019	TruePublica	We are being immersed in a disgraceful environment of political propaganda, disinformation and downright lies cooked up by those with vested interests and promoted by the billionaire offshore owners of the press and fellow travellers such as Ruth Smeeth and contriving organisations such as the British-American Project

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17 January 2020 Terje 

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References

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