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@docrussjackson
Jan 7, 2023 • 20 tweets • 11 min read • Read on X
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#THREAD on GB "News", mainly courtesy of @PrivateEyeNews.

The polarising, increasingly unhinged, & dangerously irresponsible multimillionaire hedge-funder funded GB "News" has become a rich breeding ground for harmful conspiracy theories, effectively becoming the UK's Fox News.
The channel was only founded in 2021 amid much-regretted promises from then frontman Andrew Neill that it would not become a "British Fox News" but has slid deep into #misinformation, #disinformation, & pure #propaganda, often about the COVID pandemic.
In one recent show, presenter Patrick Christys praised a largely discredited new book which claims Covid was genetically engineered and leaked on purpose, with help from US chief national scientific adviser Anthony Fauci and cover-ups by UK scientists.
The book, by one Andrew Huff, has been treated sceptically by other media outlets, but Christys and guest Dominique Samuels claimed it proved that so- called Covid conspiracists were "completely vindicated" on a host of issues.

ecohealthalliance.org/2022/12/ecohea…
Dan Wootton interviewed 'online personality' Andrew Tate, who was allowed to refer to an "imaginary pandemic" and deny that hospitals had been overrun without any challenge. (Tate has been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group.)
Off-air & away from @Ofcom regulation, presenters share absurd conspiracies. Samuels tweeted praise for conspiracy theory documentary Died Suddenly, which falsely alleges the Covid vaccine was created by the global elite to kill people & depopulate earth.
Meanwhile, on his personal podcast, GB "News" presenter Mark Steyn said the slowing of the birth rate of "#Aryans", who built "western civilisation", had been accelerated by Covid vaccines. He openly celebrated the fact that @Ofcom does not regulate his personal show.
In 2018, Sky News Australia sparked outcry after it broadcast an interview with a far-right nationalist extremist who has expressed his admiration for #Hitler: then Sky News Australia CEO Angelos Frangopoulos said “It was an error of judgment". Frangopoulos is now CEO of #GBNews.
Another purveyor of wacky Covid opinions is Nick Dixon, a host of GB News's paper review & presenter of the Daily Sceptic podcast, which grew out of a Lockdown Sceptics website founded by Toby Young.

Online, Dixon praises unvaccinated people, calling them "pure bloods".
It's not only the pandemic where those given voice & prominence by GB "News" veer towards the unhinged.

Calvin Robinson, who dresses in an old-fashioned clergy uniform despite the CofE having declined to ordain him, shared an unfounded theory about Ukraine war.
Robinson makes the unfounded claim that Ukraine war money is actually a money-laundering operation for US aid to be donated to the Democratic party via the use of cryptocurrency.
And during recent immigration debates, Calvin Robinson, who is black, repeatedly praised the views of Enoch "Rivers of Blood" Powell, tweeting that "Powell provided an important contribution to the conversation" and changing his background image to a picture of the politician.
Indeed, Robinson - now a regular on Fox "News" where he self-identifies as "Anglican Deacon", "Father" Calvin Robinson - is quite happy to use his @Twitter account as an unpleasant extension of his GB "News" role.

He's also 'Strategy Adviser' to Lawrence Fox's Reclaim Party.
On a recent episode of his Sunday GB "News" programme Common Sense Crusade, Michael Coren, a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada, defended "buffer zones" around abortion clinics to stop anti-abortion activists upsetting people using the services.

newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022…
Coren was promised by producers there would be "civility & friendly disagreement" both on & off air.
However, entirely predictably, host Calvin Robinson took to Twitter to accuse Coren of "twisting scripture" and being "pro- abortion and anti-prayer".
Calvin Robinson told his followers that what Coren had said was "wicked... Judgement awaits". Coren predictably received a slew of what he described as "angry, venomous and abusive" messages as a result.

Robinson also a senior fellow at Policy Exchange.

On-air #misinformation from GB "News" is also
having real world influence.

A recent spate of reports falsely representing that a traffic-calming measure in Oxfordshire was a "climate lockdown" went viral and resulted in abuse & death threats being directed at council staff.
Broadcast regulator @Ofcom does regulate a little: there are two active investigations against GB "News", both against Steyn.

Last spring he wrongly said that having additional Covid vaccines was killing people & slammed a "media silence" on the issue.

pressgazette.co.uk/news/ofcom-gb-…
In October Steyn's guest, the seldom accurate Naomi Wolf, claimed women were being harmed by Covid vaccines.

But @Ofcom is complaints-based, & as most viewers in the GB "News" echo chamber are unlikely to complain, much of its output goes unmonitored.

Even when we do complain to @Ofcom about GB "News", it rarely seems to have any effect.

However, the more of us complain, the more likely they are to stop shamelessly normalising far-right speakers, far-right conspiracy theories, & far-right rhetoric. 🙏

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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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