Sim-O

I still haven’t had a proper reply to my email to Selly Oaks Hospital regarding the BNP donating the funds from the sale of their ‘Bring Our Troops Home’ stickers. I sent my original letter on 4th December and have only had one reply. That reply was…

I have replied to you

I originally thought Ms Fiona Alexander, the hospitals Director of Communications, had replied and I had accidentally deleted deleted it or was sent but didn’t get to me for some reason. Now I think it was childish joke.

Thanks Fiona, for taking me oh, so seriously. That made you look sooo clever.

Moving on, because, I’m bigger than that, I’m not the snarky idiot, it appears a *real* journalist got a reply. No, really I don’t mind. Selly Oaks has refused the donation…

a spokesman for Selly Oak Hospital, which houses the army’s Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, said: “The British National Party is selling merchandise with the promise of donating the proceeds to the Selly Oak Hospital burns unit.
“Neither the University Hospitals of Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust nor its official charity, UHB Charities, have been contacted by the BNP about this venture, and the Trust does not accept money from any political party,”

So. That’s a partial answer to the couple of questions in my email. That’ll do.

The BNP, typically, haven’t changed their article, or stuck up a new one, to let people know that the hospital won’t accept their donation, and are presumably still selling them under that guise (although I could be wrong).

The spin machine elsewhere has started to work. One of their top supporting blogs, Green Arrow, has a few words to say about it…

it seems strange that an hospital that is supposed to care for people would prefer them to suffer than accept money from a political party because they do not approve of its policies.

See what they did there? The hospital refused the donation not because the BNP are a political party but because the hospital doesn’t like it’s policies. The hospital though, doesn’t accept donations from any political party irrespective of policies.

I’m just surprised Selly Oaks hasn’t been called a communist organisation that’s part of the leftie conspiracy to replace the white man with in his own home.

Phorm have got a bit of an image problem. That is one thing that everyone can agree on. So what do they do about it? They hire a Patrick Robertson…

Hmm. This couldn’t be the same Patrick Robertson who first came to prominence in 1995 as the technologically-challenged spin doctor of arms dealing perjurer Jonathan Aitken MP, could it? That Patrick Robertson had a little trouble operating his fax machine, and his collywobbles about his boss’ political prospects found their way into the papers.

Could be…

And this couldn’t be the same Patrick Robertson who went on to run the PR operation for right wing billionaire Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, could it? The party contested the 1997 general election on a single issue platform of crazed warnings of an imminent “federal European super-state”.

Possibly…

And this couldn’t be the same “PR guru” Patrick Robertson who orchestrated the £200,000 campaign by Tory grandees against the extradition of ex-Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, could it?

In 1998 a Spanish judge asked Britain to send Pinochet over for a chat about the thousands of dissidents who were “disappeared” under his bloody rule. This didn’t go down well with Thatcher-era Tories, who viewed him as a fellow free marketeer, and were grateful for his support of the war in the Falklands, which saved their collective skin in the 1983 general election.

Among those prominent Pinochet-defenders? Give us a wave, Phorm chairman Norman Lamont

Well…

Unbelievably, yes it can.