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@docrussjackson
Apr 28, 2021 • 20 tweets • 11 min read • Read on X
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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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More from @docrussjackson

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Dec 12
🧵

Reform UK’s slick, stage-managed launch of a Christian Fellowship in St Michael’s Church is not some harmless Christmas-season publicity stunt. It is a clear and brazen step towards the Trumpification of UK politics, where religion is weaponised as a tool for cultural warfare and political mobilisation.

This is not organic Christian revival. It’s strategic political engineering.

Behind this development sit figures who have spent years trying to inject a US-style fusion of right-wing politics and religious identity into British political culture:

• Paul Marshall

A billionaire media financier with a clear ideological project: to build a hard-right cultural and religious counter-establishment. Through GB “News”, The |Spectator and UnHerd and other platforms he has amplified narratives about “woke attacks” on tradition, identity, and Christianity. The Islamophobic tweets he liked are disgusting. His network provides the media oxygen for precisely the kind of politicised Christianity on display at the Reform launch.

• James Orr

A Cambridge academic and prominent Anglican conservative intellectual, closely connected to the “post-liberal” movement and hard-right US conservative and Hungarian organisations. Orr openly promotes the idea of restoring Britain’s “Christian identity” through politics — a framing that sits uncomfortably close to the Christian-nationalist rhetoric of the US right. His advisory role to senior Reform figures is a clear sign of the ideological hardening underway.

• Danny Kruger

Long known for advocating a more “muscular” Christian politics, Kruger has repeatedly argued that the UK should explicitly root its laws and social policy in “Judeo-Christian values” - a dog whistle I explain in the next tweet.

This is the British echo of US culture-war evangelicalism: turning religion into a political badge, not a spiritual or moral tradition. His involvement in shaping Reform’s policy direction cements the party’s shift toward faith-infused populism.

• Calvin Robinson

Though no longer in the Church of England, disgraced former GBN presenter and political extremist Robinson remains one of the most prominent voices pushing an aggressive “anti-woke, anti-liberal” form of Christianity in the media — including endorsing narratives that paint inclusive or progressive churches as heretical. His alignment with Reform’s messaging shows how the party is deliberately courting polemical, grievance-driven Christian activism.

Together, these figures represent a new coalition: a British attempt to import the US religious-right model, with all its corrosive social consequences.

Using St Michael’s Cornhill — a church rooted in the conservative evangelical network — as the backdrop for this political spectacle is shocking in a UK context.

This is not merely a “religious event attended by politicians.” It was a political rally held in a church, wrapped in Anglican aesthetics.

The Church of England has historically avoided such political entanglement precisely because it knows how dangerous it is to let a religious institution become a vessel for partisan identity politics.

Britain is not America — but Reform UK wants to change that

What we are seeing is the deliberate construction of a political identity rooted in far-right themes lurching toward a contemporary form of Christofascism:

grievance Christianity
nostalgia for a mythic “Christian Britain”
hostility to minorities and multiculturalism
anti-LGBTQ+ theology rebranded as “family values”
anti-immigrant populism framed as moral duty
and a narrative of cultural siege identical to the US evangelical right

It is the Trump playbook, translated into British idiom.

This is disturbing, because once a political movement fuses religious identity with national identity, democratic debate changes: Opponents are no longer wrong — they are heretical. Policies are no longer argued — they are sanctified. Compromise becomes betrayal. And politics becomes a zero-sum culture war.

Britain has largely avoided this polarising poison. Reform UK is now trying to inject it directly into the bloodstream of national politics.

Reform UK’s “Christian Fellowship” is not about faith. It is the public unveiling of a British Christian-nationalist project — backed by wealthy ideologues, amplified by culture-war media, and borrowing heavily from the most divisive elements of the US right.

It is a serious warning sign of where Reform UK intends to take the country: toward a politics defined by religious grievance, cultural division, and the erosion of the pluralistic norms that have protected Britain from the worst excesses of American political extremism.
Concerning Paul Marshall:
Concerning James Orr:
Read 10 tweets
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Dec 9
🧵

How have populist UK politicians and Britain’s right-wing press and broadcasters got away with repeating — day after day, year after year — the brazenly false and wildly misleading claim that we live in a “high-welfare, high-tax” country? Image
Why the “High-Welfare, High-Tax” Myth Persists.

The claim that Britain is a “high-welfare, high-tax” country is a shameless lie—brazenly false—as OECD and OBR data consistently show: the UK's tax take is ~36% of GDP (mid-table globally, and well under the EU average of 40.5%). Image
The UK's total tax take of 36% is far under France's 45% or Denmark's 46%. Welfare benefits spending (including state pensions) is a modest ~11% of GDP—among the lowest in the OECD, well below the EU average of 17.5%, and just under half that of France (20.5%) and Italy (20%). Image
Read 31 tweets
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Dec 8
🧵

Not only has Nigel Farage shamelessly normalized far right discourse, but Reform UK have welcomed a new generation of young, radicalised, Andrew Tate fanboys who think it's acceptable to spread divisive bigoted lies and disinformation, and to make crass bigoted 'jokes'. Image
Joseph Boam is a radicalised 22-year-old Tate fanboy who started out as a Tory, running as a district councillor, then switching to Reform UK in 2024 and becoming a councillor in May 2025 representing the Whitwick division on Leicestershire County Council for the Reform UK party. Image
A former KFC worker, who has worked with his dad on sheds and property renovation, despite his total lack of any relevant experience or knowledge of the area, he was appointed Council deputy leader and cabinet member for adult social care—which ispatently absurd. Image
Read 14 tweets
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Dec 5
🧵

‘The Psychology of the New Far Right: Privilege, Fear, and Media Power in the Rise of Authoritarianism.’

Fear, belonging, and power are being manipulated into a frightening new age of populist outrage and algorithmic media, argues Dr Russell Jackson.

bylinesupplement.com/p/the-psycholo…
I've reproduced the article in 🧵 form, below, because its a subscriber only article from @BylineTimes.

You can subscribe here, and I would encourage you to - Bylines tells the stories and undertakes investigations many national news media fear to.

subscribe.bylinetimes.com
Across the West, figures such as Trump, JD Vance, Farage, Johnson, Tice, Kruger, and Lowe helped normalise far-right populist rhetoric within mainstream politics. Their appeal is anti-elite—yet they themselves embody the privilege they claim to challenge.

populismstudies.org
Read 91 tweets
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Nov 21
🧵

In May, Reform UK became the UK’s first party to accept crypto donations; experts warned of major money-laundering and foreign interference risks.

The NCA says Tether—backed by Reform’s £13.7M donor Christopher Harborne—has been used by Russia to fund its war in Ukraine. Image
A multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto—digital tokens hiding users’ identities—has enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state”.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
In 2023, the hedge fund co-founded by GB "News" owner Paul Marshall, who employs 60% of anti-Net Zero Reform UK's MPs, had £1.8 BILLION invested in fossil fuel firms.

Harborne (who has Thai citizenship under the name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit) also makes money from fossil fuels.

Read 17 tweets
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Nov 19
🧵

I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.

Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.

The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.
Read 38 tweets

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