On Friday, anti-democratic right-wing populist nationalist authoritarian PM with a long history of racist comments Boris Johnson, is meeting with Putin ally Viktor Orbán.
Under Orbán's leadership, Hungary has experienced democratic backsliding & a lurch towards authoritarianism.
Orbán's populism, social-national conservatism, soft Euroscepticism & advocacy of what he describes as an "illiberal state" have attracted significant European & international attention & criticism from domestic & foreign leaders, including Angela Merkel, but praise from Johnson.
Orbán has gradually undermined the rule of law, established tight control over the country’s independent institutions, adopted a new constitution & fundamentally changing electoral laws & the system of campaign financing.
Johnson's 👏 Govt 👏 is 👏 doing👏 the 👏same.#NotADrill
Orbán's Govt has captured the public media & taken control over much private media through an extensive network of Govt-friendly oligarchs.
Orbán's regime is close to Andrew Neil too, the @BBC is now led by Tory stooges, & Ofcom may be run by Paul Dacre.
These developments grant Fidesz-KDNP extraordinary advantage over the opposition: Hungary today can no longer be regarded as a democracy but belongs to the growing group of hybrid regimes, sitting in the “gray zone” between democracies & pure autocracies.
In 2017, Boris Johnson met Steve Bannon in the US, & Bannon met with Jacob Rees-Mogg in London.
In 2018, Bannon met with Michael Gove, & Bannon was filmed saying “I’ve been talking to him (Boris Johnson) all weekend about this speech. We went back and forth over the text.”
Also in 2018, Bannon advised Viktor Orban.
The links between far-right provocateur Bannon, Libertarian US billionaire-funded US & Tufton St free-market think tanks & the Spiked mob, the far-right Orbán regime & the UK Govt, are well-established & profoundly disturbing.
WAKE UP!
Some people argue Boris Johnson's "friend" Viktor Orban can't be an antisemite - as well as a xenophobic racist - because he's mates with Netanyahu.
Life was demonstrably worse in the 1979 than it is today.
Zymunt Bauman calls this yearning for an imagined past, ‘retrotopia’, in which the ‘Volk’ (the ‘simple folk’, who Reform UK claim to represent) are constructed as homogenous, Christian, white, & ‘indigenous’.
Life was demonstrably inferior in the 1970s compared to today for almost everyone in England.
Life expectancy in the UK in 1980 was 71 for men and 77 for women. By 2019, life expectancy at birth in England had increased to 79 years for men & 83.5 for women.
1. Economic Hardship
In 1979, the UK economy was struggling with high inflation, unemployment, and a budget deficit. This eroded purchasing power, making essentials like food, clothing, and housing more expensive relative to wages. "Stagflation" was a significant problem.
'Anti-elite man of the people' Nigel Farage, educated at one of the most expensive private schools on earth, is now the highest paid MP in the UK. His basic annual MP salary is £91,346 plus expenses.
The UK National Living Wage for people aged 21+ is just £12.21/hour.
Let's take a look at some of Nigel Farage's additional earnings that he's legally obliged to declare in the MPs Register of interests - and which contains a few surprises - starting with GB "News".
Between 16th July 2024 and 15th January 2025, Farage decalred earnings of £264,790 for his work as a presenter on Reform UK Ltd's 24/7 propaganda channel, GB "News", co-owned by Islamophobic billionaire hedge-funder, Paul Marshall.
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
The EDL is an Islamophobic protest movement aimed at preserving UK identity and culture in the face of a perceived Islamization of the UK and Europe.
So is Reform UK.
The EDL reinforce the notion of the “nationalist subject” - a fallacious conception of citizenship - that wrongly assumes members of the majoritarian culture are possessed of certain core values, beliefs, and traits that embody the true essence of the nation.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...
In the preface to her newly reissued book, 'Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan - 30th Anniversary Edition', historian @NancyMacLean5 reflects on the resurgence of white power nationalism and political violence in contemporary America.
MaClean is known for her prescient best-selling 2017 book about the post–WWII conservative thinkers and policymakers who shaped the hyper-neoliberal #Project2025, 'Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America',
Evidence of why her prize-winning book has aged well and why @OxUniPress decided to republish it is obvious: numerous instructors continue to assign it, countless historians cite it, and the best Klan scholars have given it well-deserved praise.