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@docrussjackson
Jul 1, 2021 • 23 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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Our #NHS is in danger.

#THREAD

On the 19th June, 2015, ex-Deutsche Bank MD Sajid Javid was the keynote speaker at the opaquely funded free-market think tank IEA’s 60th Anniversary.

He spoke about how "free markets" & sound economics help "everyone".

iea.org.uk/multimedia/vid…
The IEA subscribes to a neoliberal worldview & advocates positions based on this ideology, including climate change denial, & total privatisation - in effect abolition - of OUR #NHS.

The dodgy IEA is secretly funded by Big tobacco, & IEA officers have offered "Cash for Access".
Let's have a look at what Javid said to the bankers, hedge-funders & free-market fundamentalists gathered at the IEA, a think tank funded by Libertarian billionaires & disaster capitalists keen to exploit Britain's last remaining publicly funded institutions, especially OUR #NHS.
Sajid started with obsequious flattery:

"For 60 years now you’ve been thinking the unthinkable, winning hearts & minds & influencing governments from Westminster to Washington to Warsaw & everywhere in between."

Because the IEA isn't a think tank, it's a lobbying organisation.
"A young Sir Antony Fisher was set on a career in politics. But Friedrich Hayek told him that if he really wanted to change the world he should forget about becoming an MP, & start a think-tank instead! I don’t know if that means I’m in the wrong job!"

Javid IS in the wrong job.
Sir Antony Fisher invented The Institute for Economic Affairs - the first modern think tank - back in the 1950s.

It is the template for practically all the think tanks today.

Fisher himself went on to found another 150 think tanks around the world, including the Atlas Network.
Fisher worked with Major Oliver Smedley, fighting a lonely battle against the state planning that was trying to reconstruct Britain after the war - including OUR #NHS - because they were convinced that it was going to lead to 'a totalitarian state' & the 'end of democracy'. 🤪
Hayek suggested to Fisher that the #IEA should masquerade as a "scholarly institute", while behind that - like many free market think tanks - it would really function as an ideologically motivated PR organisation.

Major Smedley was clear about the IEA's mission, saying it was:
Javid went on: "But I do know that we should all be very grateful for Hayek’s intervention. Because the think-tank Sir Antony established, would go on to play a huge and important role in political & economic history."

The IEA's real mission is to change the climate of opinion.
Javid expressed his ❤️ for deregulated free-market fundamentalism & for neoliberal/Libertarian head cases Hayek, Friedman, & Minford:

"It both reflected & deeply influenced my views, helping to develop the economic & political philosophy that guides me to this day."
"I have never been in any doubt that free enterprise is the best way to bring prosperity to as many people as possible. That the free market can solve not just economic problems, but social ones too."

Do you understand why we should all be extremely worried about our #NHS yet?
"A strong economy will never be delivered by attacking big business, or by endlessly raising taxes, or wrapping innovators up in RED TAPE. That’s why my Enterprise Bill will free businesses from another £10 billion of needless regulation. That’s why we’ll keep on cutting taxes!"
Javid starts foaming: "During the COLD WAR, the physical bulwark against COMMUNISM was provided by the formidable military might of the NATO alliance. But throughout that time the ideological bulwark, the theoretical & philosophical defence, was BRIGADED by the likes of the IEA!"
"WHILE OUR TROOPS & BOMBS & PLANES PROTECTED THE WEST FROM THE RED ARMY, IN THE BATTLE OF IDEAS OUR GENERALS WERE SIR ANTONY, LORD HARRIS (ex-Bruges Group Chair & director of Murdoch's Times) & ARTHUR SELDON (invited Friedman to the IEA, influencing Enoch Powell & Thatcher)".
The utterly delusional Sajid Javid is now frothing: "THE FREE MARKET IS THE MOST EFFICIENT, MOST ENDURING, MOST EFFECTIVE SYSTEM EVER DEVISED BY MANKIND!"

It's leading to catastrophic climate change & grotesque wealth accumulation - $30 TRILLION is horded offshore by IEA-lovers.
"President Reagan was talking about democracy when he said that that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. But HIS idea – that freedom is not passed on but must be fought for, protected & defended – applies equally to free market!"

YOU WHAT?
"We neglect it at our peril & if we fail to support it, it could still crumble in the face of countless tiny attacks. As George W Bush put it in slightly more succinct terms during the global financial crisis: “this sucker could go down”."

In 2004, Javid was MD of Deutsche bank.
"If the price of FREEDOM is eternal vigilance, then we will always need the likes of the IEA to be THE WATCHMEN FOR CAPITALISM. We will always need the heirs of Fisher, Harris & Seldon to make the case for free enterprise, to be its last line of defence & first line of ATTACK!"
And if you *still* think OUR #NHS is safe in the hands of Sajid Javid (who just a few weeks ago was earning a fortune from dodgy banking giant JP Morgan) & our corrupt cabal of lying free-market fundamentalist charlatans, you're a bloody idiot, & you don't deserve OUR #NHS. 👍
If Sajid Javid was honest:
#SaveOurNHS
Part of a #THREAD by @TweetForTheMany, spelling it out:

We've known exactly what's happening for well over a decade.

bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurt…

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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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