"We will continue to provide safe & legal routes for people to come to this country who are seeking persecution" - Tory MP Tom Pursglove on #BBC2.
Brextremist Pursglove has been MP for Corby since 2015, & at the time of his election, he was the youngest Conservative MP.
Pursglove was one of the founders of 'Grassroots Out', an organisation which advocated Brexit, led by politicians from a range of political parties, including fellow Conservative MP Peter Bone & Labour MP Kate Hoey.
In February 2016 it was announced that Pursglove & fellow Tory MP Peter Bone would speak at the UKIP Spring Conference.
While rare for members of rival parties to appear at such events, they argued any role they had there would be as representatives of the Grassroots Out group.
In April 2016, Pursglove was criticised for taking payments of £21,750 from the Grassroots Out campaign, of which he was chief executive, which some fellow campaigners argued should have been donated to further campaigning.
He argued his work would "keep costs to a minimum, allowing us to spend the maximum amount on campaigning", rather than hiring outside expertise.
In May 2016, he said given the choice he'd prefer to see Brexit than the @Conservatives secure another majority at the next election.
Pursglove has advocated abolishing the Department of Energy & Climate Change, expressed scepticism about human influence on climate change, voted to reduce regulation on fracking, & was criticised by environmentalists for his constituency party taking donations from energy firms.
Pursglove has questioned public spending on reducing carbon emissions in the UK, & between 2013 & 2016, he was director, with Chris Heaton-Harris, of Together Against Wind, a lobbying company that helped move Govt policy against favouring the installation of onshore wind power.
Pursglove received donations with a value of £15,000 from Offshore Group Newcastle, which makes platforms for oil, gas & wind energy companies.
He also received a donation (value of £6,666) from Alexander Temerko, a Russian businessman with interests in oil, gas & wind energy.
Russian former arms tycoon Alexander Temerko, who has spoken warmly about his “friend” Boris Johnson, has given over £1.2 million to the Tories over the past nine years & reportedly admitted being involved in a Eurosceptic plot to oust May as Tory leader.
In July 2019, Temerko was quoted by Reuters as applauding Brexit, endorsing Boris Johnson's bid to lead Britain out of the EU, lauding senior Russian security officials & proudly recalling his past work with the Yeltsin-era Russian Defence Ministry. 😬
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.