Took them long enough to notice...

Most of us on the right of the blogging world are aware of the activities of a group called 'Common Purpose' whose stated aim of preparing people to take responsibility when called for seems to be at odds with their training up of what seems to be a hidden clique of authoritarian power brokers within the political establishment of the UK. With 'members' in all walks and branches of the UK establishment from police chiefs to senior civil servants, journalists and local government executives, their tangled web runs throughout all walks of our lives without a lot of people knowing. That their influence comes from the left is known, though not all who have passed through their hands are of the left, but their authoritarian nature is known along with parts of their agenda from various bloggers and internet sites who take an interest in such things...
Still, it seems as if the MSM might just have caught a whiff of what's actually going on, rather than what they think is going on.
Mail.
Sir David Bell's certainly a very busy bee. A greying, dishevelled figure in an ill-fitting suit, he appears to have been by far the most assiduous of the six 'assessors' appointed by the government to advise Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry.
Bell is an ideological bedmate of the aforesaid Julia Middleton — another very busy bee who has been described as the best-connected woman you've never heard of.
Public-spirited you may say. Except that an investigation by the Daily Mail raises serious questions about the suitability of Bell as an assessor and the impact this may have had on the objectivity and neutrality of the Inquiry itself.

• Bell is a trustee and a former chairman of a leadership training organisation called Common Purpose, whose thousands of 'graduates' have been described as the 'Left's answer to the old boys' network.' (though not all share the same political views). Their identities are well protected.
• Founded by Ms Middleton and registered as a charity, Common Purpose boasts a 'considerable reach' throughout senior positions in public life. Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money have been spent on sending public servants on its courses.
• Three of the six Leveson assessors have Common Purpose connections, either through direct participation or through senior colleagues within the organisations they lead or have led.
• Bell and Middleton set up the Media Standards Trust, a lobby group which presented a huge amount of evidence to the Inquiry. The Media Standards Trust, whose chairman was Bell, gave its 'prestigious' Orwell Prize for political writing to a journalist who turned out to have made up parts of his 'award-winning' articles.
• The Media Standards Trust established Hacked Off, the virulently anti-popular-press campaign group which has boasted of its role in significantly increasing the Inquiry's terms of reference. The Media Standards Trust shared the same headquarters address as Common Purpose. It then shared an address with Hacked Off, whose funding it controlled.
• Many of those who provided the most hostile anti-press evidence to Leveson are linked to senior figures at the Media Standards Trust and Hacked Off.
• The Media Standards Trust has strong links with Ofcom, the statutory media regulator which, despite its denials, some suspect has ambitions to regulate Britain's free press. Ofcom's ex-chairman Lord Currie is a Leveson assessor.
• Much of the financing of the Media Standards Trust comes from a charity of which Bell is a trustee — a practice that, while legal, would seem to many to be inappropriate.
• Despite being formed by the Media Standards Trust, which is campaigning for 'transparency and accountability in the news', Hacked Off refuses to make explicit the sources of its own funding.
• And, of course, Bell is a trustee of the now notorious Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has wreaked such damage on the BBC.

Thing is I've known about and suspected the true intent of Common Purpose for years. I was alerted to it by various bloggers including John Ward in Medway who has been gathering data on them for years. Though I suspect that those reading the article in the Mail are pretty much unaware of the invasive rot that Common Purpose has lodged in the public services and the body politic, some seem to believe that the Mail is trying to shift blame after the Leveson Inquiry which as far as I know hasn't reached any form of conclusion yet.
Yet the facts as the Mail has published them speak for themselves, it rather looks like Common Purpose intends to put a stranglehold on press reporting to remove their activities even further from the public view.
We are in danger of slipping incrementally into an authoritarian state with merely the trappings of a democracy around us. Organisations like Common Purpose have their own agenda and it isn't one in which personal freedoms including speech, religion and thought have any place.
The more exposure these dangerous people get the better, but I do fear some in the UK simply refuse to believe the evidence.