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@docrussjackson
Sep 5, 2022 • 29 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X
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#THREAD on grotesque dinosaur Christopher Chope, who blocked a bill to make up-skirting a criminal offence, & another making it easier to protect girls from FGM, & who has been nominated to join the privileges committee & probe into #Partygate.

Who is this fossilised dickhead?
Chope was chairman of the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward group, recently relaunched by climate-skeptic Steve Baker.

During the 2009 expenses scandal, it emerged that Chope claimed £136,992 in parliamentary expenses in 2007–8. This included claiming £881 to repair a sofa.
In October 2011, Chope questioned the time allotted to a debate on MPs' pensions. The debate came before a debate into the Hillsborough disaster inquiry & it was reported that Chope had threatened to delay the inquiry, leading to widespread criticism.

liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool…
Posh twat Chope was criticised following remarks made in 2013, when he referred to House of Commons dining room staff as "servants": "The service was absolutely fantastic because there was three-to-one service: three servants for each person sitting down."
news.sky.com/story/tory-mp-…
Chope was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 New Year Honours for political & public service.

On 10 February 2009, free-marketeer Chope co-sponsored an Employment Opportunities Bill to the House of Commons, which would have enabled workers to opt out of the minimum wage.😬
Entirely predictably, anti-reality anti-Net Zero dinosaur Chope is highly sceptical of climate change, & attended a meeting of climate change sceptics in the Palace of Westminster in October 2010, along with fellow imbecilic dinosaur, John Redwood.

theguardian.com/environment/bl…
Again entirely predictably, Chope helped to lead backbench support for the motion calling for a referendum to leave the EU, & was also heavily involved in the use of private member's bills to achieve this aim.

bbc.co.uk/blogs/markdarc…
Hateful Eurosceptic extremist crank Chope has consistently supported Britain's withdrawal from the European Union.

Prior to the 2016 referendum, he announced his support for Brexit. He of course supported the dodgy 'Leave Means Leave' pressure group.

web.archive.org/web/2017102415…
Obviously, reactionary living fossil Chope voted against the legislation for same-sex marriage in 2013, & in 2014 Chope voted against requiring all companies with more than 250 employees to declare the gap in pay between the average male and average female salaries.
In June 2013, grotesque antiquated regressive bigot Chope was one of four MPs who camped outside Parliament in a move to facilitate parliamentary debate on an 'Alternative Queen's Speech' – an attempt to show what a future (far-right #neofascist) Conservative Govt might deliver.
In July 2017, Chope & Peter Bone tabled 73 bills between them, including privatise the @BBC & @Channel4, of which 47 were placed by Chope. To be at the front of the queue to table the bills, the pair had camped in the Palace of Westminster for three days.
bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/15441893.…
In March 2019, Chope was one of 21 MPs who voted against LGBT inclusive sex & relationship education in English schools, preferring instead to disregard the needs of non-straight children. All but two of the antiquated out-of-touch MPs were Tories or DUP.

attitude.co.uk/article/these-…
Chope is a member of a group of backbench Tory cranks who regularly object to private members bills.

This conduct, along with his involvement in cutting the public housing budget during his time in government, has earned Chope the nickname "Chopper".
Chope does not tend to object to bills aligning with his own political views. "In case anyone is tempted to believe he has a principled objection to private members' bills, please note that once again he did not object to those put forward by his friends."
huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tory-mp-…
In 2013, Chope objected to the second reading of the Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill in the House of Commons, so the government decided to act under the royal prerogative of mercy. On 24 December 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a free pardon.

independent.co.uk/news/people/ne…
In November 2014, untrainable dumb animal Chope blocked a bill that would have banned the use of wild animals in circus performances, on the pathetically flimsy basis that a bill on EU membership should have been called before the bill.

bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/11602645.…
Also in 2014, Chope, rumoured to be a landlord, with Philip Davies, filibustered a bill intended to make revenge evictions an offence, claiming the bill would have weakened landlords' ability to recover possessions, deterring them from letting properties.
bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/11635068.…
In October 2015, Chope, Davies and Conservative MP David Nuttall filibustered & blocked a proposed law to introduce free hospital parking for carers by speaking in the House of Commons for 93 minutes in order to use up the time allocated for the debate.

theguardian.com/society/2015/o…
This thread started with Chope blocking the passage of a private member's bill that would have made up-skirting a specific offence - which drew immediate criticism from Labour, other, & fellow Tory MPs, & the then prime minister, Theresa May, who expressed her disappointment.
Following his suspicious, unforgivable, misogynistic & pathetically infantile objection, the government ignored the twat & reaffirmed its commitment to introduce legislation to outlaw up-skirting. The bill passed subject to royal assent in January 2019.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-468846…
In protest at his actions, staff at the House of Commons placed a bunting of women's underwear outside his office entrance. A similar bunting was also placed outside his constituency office.

Protestors also confronted Chope at his constituency surgery.

bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/16307492.…
On the same day as the up-skirting bill, Chope & Davies forced a delay to the final debate on a bill which would have improved the oversight of the use of force in mental health units.

He also blocked a bill which would have given extra legal protection to police dogs & horses.
In July 2018, Chope blocked a motion calling for the House of Commons chamber to be used for a Women MPs of the World Conference in November, when MPs were not sitting. The conference was due to the mark the centenary of women's suffrage in the UK.

independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…
Alongside fellow swivel-eyed loon Desmond Swayne, Chope tabled an amendment to the motion which would require the conference to invite only parliamentarians & hold a debate while using the chamber. The government resubmitted the motion with the support of several departments.
In November 2018, Chope objected to a bill which would have amended the Children Act 1989 in order to increase the protective power of courts over girls at risk of female genital mutilation. Dickhead Chope said the bill was an act of "virtue signalling".

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Lord Berkeley of Knighton, who had introduced the FGM bill to the House of Lords, called for Chope to be deselected. On 8 February 2019, Chope again blocked the bill. However on 15 March 2019 - despite this old git's best efforts - the bill received its Royal Assent & became law.
On 15 November 2021, it was reported Chope had caused fury among @Conservatives Parliamentary Party when he objected to a motion from the Select Committee on Standards that would have passed the report regarding the #LobbyingScandal around the rules breached by Owen Paterson.
The Tory Parliamentary Party was hoping the vote would draw a line underneath the episode and allow the government to move on from accusations of sleaze, but Chope's intervention simply allowed the criticism to continue.
One Govt minister expressed anonymously that "He has been for many year a Jurassic embarrassment – tonight he crossed a line. The man should retire & the executive are livid".

Christopher Chope is an anachronism: he belongs in a Victorian freakshow, not the privileges committee.

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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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