In 2013, at the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture, Boris Johnson said inequality is essential to fostering "the spirit of envy" & hailed greed as a "valuable spur to economic activity".
The damaged, lying, opportunistic hypocrite also demonised Romanians.
Johnson warned that the accession of Romania to the EU meant that London could do nothing to stop the "entire population of Transylvania" from "pitching their tents in Marble Arch".
Romania's foreign minister expressed his outrage at "xenophobic, populist" politicians in the UK.
The deregulatory free-market ideology that he & his catastrophic & cruel Government subscribe to seem to relish deepening inequality, & in his speech he warned that the growing competition Britain faced in a globalised economy meant that inequality would deepen.
He said: "No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates, & I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth."
It's refreshing to hear @Conservatives state that competition inevitably accentuates inequality. It's what they all believe & accept, so it's interesting to hear him talk about "levelling up" - as though the harshness of free-market capitalism could always have been minimised.
Johnson called for the rich to be hailed for their contribution to paying for public services. "an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people?"
"It seems to me that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich... & futile to stamp out inequality".
On Europe, he said it was "time we sorted out the working time directive & time we generally persuaded the Eurocrats to stop trying to tell us what to do".
Johnson said Thatcher would recognise "that England has been so far short-changed by devolution" & give the cities "more powers to raise locally the taxes they spend locally [and] give the politicians an incentive to go for policies that promote growth".
Johnson added: "We may not have many gunboats any more, but we hardly need them, because we are already fulfilling our destiny as the soft power capital of the world".
This was, of course, before Johnson came to power & annihilated Britain's global reputation & soft power.
Fewer than 3 in 10 of the electorate voted for Boris Johnson's Tories in 2019.
Would you buy a cat food if 7 out of 10 cats thought it was shit?
Johnson has already been a catastrophe for Britain, & tragically, he's not done yet.
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.
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?
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%).
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%).
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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/…
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.
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.