Tag: Michael Hintze

A rightwing thinktank has been offering potential US donors access to government ministers and civil servants as it raises cash for research to support the free-trade deals demanded by hardline Brexiters, according to an investigation. The director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was secretly recorded telling an undercover reporter that funders could get to know ministers on first-name terms and that his organisation was in “the Brexit influencing game”. In July it launched a £50,000 prize for ideas about harnessing the free market to solve the UK’s housing crisis. The recordings include discussions between Littlewood and the reporter in which the IEA director sets out the potential benefits of funding work by the thinktank. These foods are currently banned in the UK: Chlorine-washed chicken (banned in the EU). Hormone-treated beef (banned in the EU). Food colourants (banned in the UK, regulated in the EU). She said he only ever had meetings “on merit”, adding: “We would not want any ambiguity whatsoever to exist on this point.” Littlewood claimed the IEA also arranged for Link, and the director of an Oklahoma business thinktank, to go to the Department for International Trade, Fox’s department, where they met a senior civil servant. Davis, Baker and Lord Callanan, a Brexit minister, all recorded meetings with the IEA in the first three months of this year. The IEA has argued that Greenpeace should not have charitable status because it serves “no public purpose” and has accused it of opposing GM rice “that could prevent the deaths of more than 2 million children a year”.