The #PREVENT Review was announced in 2019. Like the controversial Race Report, the Social Mobility Commission, & so much else, it's an ideological stitch up, headed by ex-director of the hard-right anti-Muslim Henry Jackson Society, William Shawcross.
A draft of the "independent" #PREVENT review, led by William Shawcross, made the dangerously irresponsible claim that 'The Govt’s counter-terrorism programme has been too focused on right-wing extremism & should now crack down on Islamist extremism'.
In 1992, Old Etonian William Shawcross wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch, & in 2011 was appointed a member of the board of directors of the grotesque trans-Atlantic UK-based neoliberal/free-market 'think tank', the Henry Jackson Society.
In 2003, Shawcross published 'Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe & the War in Iraq', a defence of the war that praised Tony Blair's 'consistent courage' in pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as the 'right thing to do'.
There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction.
By 2010, Shawcross had become a critic of New Labour & a fan of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory: 'Labour boasts that 3 million new jobs have been created, but most went to immigrants.. leaked Labour documents suggest this was a deliberate policy "to dilute Britishness".'
Using dangerously divisive extremist rhetoric reminiscent of the far-right, Shawcross continued by saying that 'Labour's bullying "multicultural" ideology has been a catastrophe' & concluded by claiming only the @Conservatives could rescue us from such humiliations!
When the @Conservatives entered government the following month, Shawcross' daughter, Eleanor Shawcross acquired a key liaison role between the Treasury & the City of London. Later she donated £20K to Sunak's leadership campaign, & is now head of Rishi Sunak's No10’s policy unit.
Several years earlier, in an opinion piece for The Jerusalem Post, Shawcross had claimed that the West is 'threatened by a vast fifth column - that there are thousands of European-born people, in Britain... who wish to destroy us, & whom he referred to as Islamo-fascists.
The Cabinet Office announced on 29 August 2012 that Shawcross was the government's controversial & preferred candidate for chair of the Charity Commission, a post he held until 2018.
Then in September 2021, Shawcross became the Government's commissioner for public appointments.
Shawcross led an investigation into the process that saw Boris Johnson's friend Martin Thomas appointed as chair of the Charity Commission, who withdrew from his appointment after allegations he had behaved inappropriately while running Women for Women International.
Questioned by MPs about his investigation, Shawcross said the government is “not to blame” for the failed attempt to appoint Thomas.
He later apologised for the statement, after being accused of prejudicing his own ongoing inquiry into how the appointment was conducted!
And now we find William Shawcross - the father of Rishi Sunak's policy chief - has just been appointed to investigate Boris Johnson’s “loan” link with Rishi Sunak's old boss (who "gave" the @Conservatives £400,000) Richard Sharp, the man Boris Johnson appointed to Chair the @BBC!
George Osborne attended Ellie's 25th birthday party, & increasingly far-right shit-stirrer Douglas Murray is an old friend.
While working as a management consultant, she was seconded to work for Boris Johnson during his 2008 mayoral election campaign.
Later in 2008, Ellie Shawcross was appointed as an advisor to then Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.
Shawcross married Brextremist Simon Wolfson in June 2012, who she met while he was working on Conservative economic policies with George Osborne.
Brextremist Simon Wolfson - Baron Wolfson of Aspley Guise - is currently chief executive of the clothing retailer Next plc, as well as a Conservative life peer who donated to David Cameron's Tory leadership campaign in the 2005.
Wolfson was named by the billionaire-owned Telegraph as the 37th-most important Tory in 2007, & signed an open letter calling on then Chancellor, George Osborne, to press ahead with the coalition government's #austerity plan to reduce the public finance deficit in one term!
In December 2016, Wolfson was appointed to the Chair of the #TuftonStreet's Eurosceptic Open Europe think-tank, which was widely accused of stoking anti-EU sentiment in the UK media, & which later merged with the dodgy Policy Exchange.
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.