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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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Sep 13
🧵

OK, I'll bite.

The word Fascism isn't 'meaningless'.

To spell out why, we need to unpack both the underlying implication of Andrew Doyle's argument and the reasons why it fails to adequately account for contemporary political dangers. Image
Andrew Doyle asserts that the term "fascism" is misused to the point of recklessness, echoing George Orwell’s 1944 observation that the word had been rendered meaningless. Doyle’s concern is not uncommon—but imho, it’s ultimately misplaced, especially in today’s context.
While it’s true that “fascism” is sometimes deployed rhetorically or hyperbolically (eg by Trump), Doyle’s framing dangerously downplays the genuine resurgence of fascist-adjacent movements across the Western world and undermines the analytical clarity necessary to confront them. Image
Read 23 tweets
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Sep 8
🧵

Boris Johnson appears to have had a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Thiel - perhaps the most fanatical of the libertarian Oligarchs and co-founder of the controversial US data firm Palantir, the year before it was given a role at the heart of the UK’s pandemic response. Image
A month after entering No 10, Johnson and his senior adviser Dominic Cummings had a meeting with Thiel, leaked files suggest.

Johnson is now likely to face questions about whether the non-disclosure amounts to a breach of the ministerial code.

theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/s…
The hour-long afternoon meeting on 28 August 2019 was marked “private” in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings.

Read 12 tweets
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Aug 31
🧵

Elon Musk has been amplifying far-right accounts again, including Tommy Robinson, Rupert Lowe, and numerous anonynmous known #disinformation superspreader accounts like 'End Wokeness'.

Let's examine the context for yesterday's march in Richard Tice's constituency, #Skegness. Image
After decades of neglect, Skegness (pop 20K), stands out on key socio-economic markers on national averages: residents are older; whiter; lower full-time employment; higher rates of few/no qualifications; and concentrated deprivation - it's far-more deprived than most of England. Image
History repeatedly teaches us that burdening already struggling communities is a recipe for disaster.

These communities have been crying out for help for DECADES, but successive UK Govts have largely ignored their pleas, and continued to increase inequality, which harms us all. Image
Read 60 tweets
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Aug 28
🧵 @Rylan Asylum seekers coming here aren’t technically "illegal." International law (the 1951 Refugee Convention) allows people to seek asylum in any country regardless of how they arrive or how many countries they pass through, as long as they're fleeing persecution or danger.
Allow me to explain why asylum seekers aren’t “illegal”, and how misinformation and nasty demonising and scapegoating rhetoric by certain politicians and media, including news media, has made some British people less welcoming of asylum seeekers.

@Rylan
People fleeing war, torture, or persecution have the legal right to seek asylum.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, which the UK helped write, says anyone escaping danger can apply for asylum in another country no matter how they arrive: claiming asylum isn't a crime.

@Rylan
Read 23 tweets
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Aug 27
Farage's illiberal, immoral, & unworkable authoritarian plan involves ripping up human rights laws forged after WWII, which protect British people, & wasting £billions of UK taxpayers' money, giving some of it to corrupt misogynistic totalitarian regimes.
theguardian.com/politics/2025/…Image
Image
Leaving the #ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and disapplying international conventions

The UK would be an outlier among European democracies, in the company of only Russia and Belarus, if it were to leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Opting out of treaties such as the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against torture and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention would also be likely to do serious harm to the UK’s international reputation.

It could also undermine current return deals, including with France, and other cooperation agreements on people-smuggling with European nations such as Germany.

The Society of Labour Lawyers said the plan would “in all likelihood preclude further cooperation and law enforcement in dealing with small boats coming from the continent and so increase, rather than reduce, the numbers reaching our shores”. 

Farage said he would legislate to remove the “Hardial Singh” safeguards – a reference to a legal precedent that sets limits on the Home Office’s immigration detention powers – to allow indefinite detention for immigration purposes. This would be highly vulnerable to legal challenge.

Many of the rights protected by the ECHR and the Human Rights Act are rooted in British case law, so judges would still be able to prevent deportations, even without international conventions.

x.com/docrussjackson…
Reform UK’s grotesque far-right mass deportation plan is not just economically and socially illiterate (Britain an ageing population and low birth rate) rely on striking “returns agreements” with countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea and Sudan, offering financial incentives to secure these deals, alongside visa restrictions and potential sanctions on countries that refuse.

These are countries where the Home Office’s risk reports warn of widespread torture and persecution.

It would risk the scenario of making payments to countries such as Iran, whose regime the UK government has accused of plotting terror attacks on British soil.

The Liberal Democrats called the payments “a Taliban tax”, saying the plan would entail sending billions “to an oppressive regime that British soldiers fought and died to defeat”. They said: “Not a penny of taxpayers’ money should go to a group so closely linked to terrorist organisations proscribed by the UK.”
Read 13 tweets
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Aug 25
🧵

The internet never forgets.

A thread of tweets posted by Lucy Connolly.

A reminder of the one, viewed 310,000 times, for which she was jailed, which urged people to burn down asylum seeker hotels after the #Southport attack - which had nothing to do with asylum seekers. Image
While all these tweets of Connolly's were made before her incendiary post, they don't say which year they were posted.

They can be accessed here, via The Wayback Machine, which has archived more than 916 billion web pages.

Draw your own conclusions.

web.archive.org/web/2024080616…
Connolly's tweet (top right) was in response to the tweet on the left, which criticised Laurence Fox for posting an upskirt photograph of Narinder Kaur.

The next one (right centre) was Connolly asking Kaur if she had 'flashed her gash'.

The third discusses a teenage experience. Image
Read 16 tweets

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