I'd never heard of Boris Johnson's senior advisor & one of Carrie Symond's "favourite people" 'chatty rat' Henry Newman, but I've been looking at Andrew Neil's connections to the Orbán regime, &, well, 'it's a small world'...
#THREAD on the Hungarian & British hard right elite.
In 2018, Andrew Neil chaired the #Project28 opinion poll based research event for Viktor Orban's 'Think Tank' the Századvég Foundation - basically the propaganda wing of Fidesz party, set up to spread xenophobia, islamophobia & antisemitism across the EU.
london.mfa.gov.hu/eng/news/szaza…
Andrew Neil Chaired the event, but let's take a look at the other speakers.
First up, keynote speaker & Fidesz party MEP József Szájer, who discussed the #Project28 'findings', basically that the EU population had lost their confidence in their ability to influence leaders.
To build confidence again between the citizens & the elite, Szájer claimed, ideas connected to 'national identity' & 'national sovereignty' must take central role again in decision making processes.
Not a surprising suggestion for a far Right party.
Does it sound familiar yet?
As an MEP, in 2010 Szájer Chaired the drafting committee & wrote the new Constitution of Hungary.
Changes included banning abortion & emphasising the definition of marriage as being between man & woman, in an apparent repudiation of calls for the recognition of same-sex marriage.
Szájer resigned in November 2020 after being caught by Belgian police fleeing a 25-man orgy above a gay bar, in violation of local coronavirus regulations. He exited via a window & downspout. An ecstasy pill was found in his backpack. A memorial plaque was appended to the gutter.
In the #Project28 panel discussion was hard-right Old Etonian Douglass Murray, founder of the hard-right free-market Centre for Social Cohesion, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, & associate editor of the The Spectator.
In 2016 Murray told us Trump would be fine.
Murray's views & ideology have often been linked to the far-right, he's been accused of promoting far-right conspiracy theories, of being Islamophobic, & linked to the so-called "Intellectual Dark Web", a loosely affiliated group critical of social justice & identity politics.
Murray is a full time fueler of the culture war: his life is spent attacking & demonizing anyone who has the audacity to suggest structural/institutional racism might be real, or more could be done about sexism, or that grotesque wealth inequality might not be good for societies.
Anyway, who else was there? Another Old Etonian crank, David Goodhart, representing hard-right free-market think-tank, Policy Exchange.
Disturbingly, he's one of four new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) board commissioners appointed in November 2020. 😳
Goodhart says "sharing & solidarity can conflict with diversity", immigration threatens ideals about a welfare state, & dismissed the #Windrush scandal was "an error of over-zealous control" which "must not lead to a radical watering-down of the so-called 'hostile environment'".
Which brings us to one of Carrie Symonds "favourite people", Henry Newman, who also gave a talk about the EU "elite" at the #Project28 event. A former protege of Michael Gove who worked on Cummings’ Vote Leave campaign, Newman is now a senior adviser to Boris Johnson.
So what?
So Andrew Neil, Douglas Murray, Henry Newman & David Goodhart attended the event at the Hungarian embassy, hosted by the @spectator, to discuss "research" conducted by the Századvég Foundation designed to help the Orbán regime.
I fear the UK elite Right may be 'doing an Orbán'.
How?
Economist & ex-Director at Századvég, Tamás Mellár, called the Századvég Foundation a “money-laundering factory.”
The think tank helped Hungarian #EchoTV - a TV channel favored among Hungarian neofascists & designed to shift attitudes to the Right.
budapestbeacon.com/szazadveg-nets…
Orbán's far-right party used think tanks & a TV channel to create a populist nationalist far right narrative.
In the UK, Tufton Street's free-market think tanks have pioneered a @YouTube channel, which pukes out "anti-woke" populist nationalist rhetoric.
I suspect Andrew Neil's new TV channel will explicitly try to facilitate a disturbing shift in British society, taking Britain even further to the right, & even further into an antidemocratic Libertarian deregulated free market capitalist #dystopia.
I believe in free speech, & everyone should obviously do their own research & draw their own conclusions about the real objectives of the polarizing culture war relentlessly pushed by Libertarian billionaires & hard-right Brextremists.
Good people have been sounding the alarm for years.
#Democracy is hanging by a thread...
opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-…
According to @socioeurope, Viktor Orbán has cultivated of "a new form of authoritarian & hyper-nationalist neoliberalism", which Plitical Sociolgist Dorit Geva refers to as 'ordonationalist'.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
This special issue of 'Theory, Culture & Society' explores the question of ‘post-neoliberalism’, reflecting on the nationalist disruption & discrediting of the market ideal & considering what alternative visions of liberty & sovereignty might replace it.
theoryculturesociety.org/blog/special-i…
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