Some Guy Behind A Desk

Here at Bounded, we take research pretty seriously and our policy research team has really been putting in the hours. In fact, we are offering our expertise to all media outlets as The Association of British School Leavers.

Seriously.

Any newspaper running a story on the subject of, for example, University fees, or voting preferences amongst young voters, or drug use, or Post-Compulsory Examination & Accreditation Standards, can now ask Sordel and - as a representative of The Association of British School Leavers - I am authorised to give a view on that in the name of the Association, for attribution.

Sordel has been inspired to do this by the Taxpayers' Alliance which, as you will be aware, regularly comments on public policy and which, since it has a name, must be a thing. Personally, I always assumed that it was a bit like Mumsnet ... which, for all I know about Mumsnet, it might be. It is, after all, Britain's Non-Partisan Grassroots Campaign for Lower Taxes and Better Government. They say so themselves.

They're on Question Time and everything, so it must be true. (Note to BBC producers: The Association of British School Leavers is able to furnish spokespersons for broadcast events.)

Yet, for a grass-roots campaign, The Taxpayers' Alliance does not have especially "grass roots" origins. A rather elderly article from The Guardian informs me that they are or were actually funded by a small number of affluent businessmen. Nothing wrong with that, of course: millionaires are taxpayers too, after all, nearly as much as the rest of us.

The representatives of the Taxpayers' Alliance are also, quite probably, taxpayers. (Sordel did, at some point in the distant past, leave school.) But they aren't exactly canonical examples of your concerned taxpayer. For the most part they are right-leaning policy wonks & bloggers, much as one would expect of an organisation with a professed hostility to increased public sector expenditure.

If you want, you can join the grassroots side of their campaign, although on their site the section on Our Branches is "Coming Soon". (We at The Association of British School Leavers hope to get details of our University Liaison Programme up even sooner. Watch this space.) Careful how you use that site, though, because if you happen to leave your name there, then you just joined their campaign.

There is absolutely nothing sinister about any of this, except for the fact that our response to a story might be very different if the newspaper decoded its source slightly more than it does.

It's not The Taxpayers' Alliance, speaking for millions. It's not The Association of British School Leavers. It's just some guy behind a desk.

This Just In: People Lie On The Internet

Let's just clear this up straight away: Sordel is not [repeat: not] a gay half-American girl called Amina Abdullah who lives in Damascus.

And neither is Tom McMaster, who posed as a Syrian political blogger for as long as people were credulous enough to believe him. Score: one for the Blogosponge; zero for anyone still sitting at home waiting for their ten million dollars to arrive from Nigeria.

McMaster is, so says Yahoo, "a Middle East activist, while his wife is studying at Scotland's St Andrews University for a doctorate in Syrian economic development". This may, however, be wrong, if their fact-checking is as dismal as that of Pink News, who were among the media outlets entirely taken in by what is now evidently to be considered a "hoax" rather than a piece of imaginitive fiction.

Oh, and if you think that the only people deluded by this were the Lesbian and Gay virtual community, here is Time: "Inspiring the Syrian protest movement is an honest and reflective voice of the revolution: a half-American citizen journalist who, in illustrating her country's plight, risks death herself."

Every day Sordel is surprised to hear tales of young girls persuaded to strip off in front of a webcam by sexual predators using tools of deception no more sophisticated than a fake Facebook account and six lines of leetspeak. Yet seemingly that girl's parents have been downstairs at the same moment in earnest discussion about the fate of Amina and how to check for the market value of those shares in the Brooklyn Bridge that they bought.

The really worrying thing about this (other than the fact that Sordel could evidently have been mounting a successful Ponzi scheme for the last few months rather than wasting time writing these vignettes) is that the media are so desperate for tales of repression that they will accept them from any source, however disreputable.

Fittingly, a book is about to be published about the truth behind Robinson Crusoe, which was also published as plain fact despite being (as we would now infer) a cruel hoax sneering in the face of maritime safety and the plight of shipwreck victims.

Don't look now, First Tier Media, your flies are undone.