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@docrussjackson
May 29, 2023 • 20 tweets • 9 min read • Read on X
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Unlike Andrew Neil, I haven't got the luxury of being Chairman of an establishment magazine which represents its billionaire-owner's interests.

Nonetheless, we need to talk about Andrew Neil's climate change stance & history of working for overseas-based billionaires. Image
Here's Andrew Neil in 2013, asking: "Is the whole global warming schtick over?"

Global warming is, as kids know, the long-term heating of Earth’s climate due to human activity, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Image
And here's a testy & revealing exchange following Neil's bizarre question, between journalist Andrew Neil & climate expert Bob Ward, who has served as policy & communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change & the Environment at the LSE since 2008. Image
Here's Numpty Neil repeatedly embarrassing himself in 2014 & 2015, making the oh-so-funny banal joke that every moronic pub bore makes: 'It's snowing - so much for that global warming nonsense!' Ho ho ho. ImageImage
Some of the highly selective 'evidence' Neil cited in 2013/14, including from well known climate sceptic John Christy, is used to imply global warming is a myth.

In 2019 Christy gave a presentation to the #TuftonSt-based climate science denial group, Global Warming Policy Forum. Image
In September 2020, lured by Dubai-based billionaire's & multimillionaire's money, Neil announced his exit from the BBC to become chairman of the toxic ideologically extreme shit-show known as GB News.

I'm sure he felt much more relaxed about writing tweets like this: Image
Within the first week, presenters on the Dubai-based investment firm funded GB News had already interviewed two commentators associated with the UK’s main climate science denial group, #TuftonStreet's Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

desmog.com/2021/06/21/ana…
In his high profile interview with Rishi Sunak, Andrew Neil repeatedly asked the then Chancellor about the “eye-watering” costs of meeting the UK’s net-zero target. In a sign of things to come, Neil must have 'forgotten' to mention or ask about the costs of not reaching net-zero. Image
GB News is of course funded by Dubai-based investment firm Legatum, founded by billionaire Christopher Chandler, who in 2002, along with his brother, were the fourth largest investors in Russian state-controlled gas company Gazprom.

What are the chances?

This 2020 exchange with that equally popular TV presenter, Philip Schofield, showcases all reactionaries' formulaic rhetorical manoeuvre.

Having spent decades mocking climate science, Neil feigns surprise when asked if he's a climate change denier - it was "bizarre" he says. 🧐 Image
In the follow-up tweet he does what every single conspiracy theorist & ideological extremist does - he plays the victim, & falsely accuses the 'MSM' of 'closing down debate', when these fuckers puke out their unhinged toxic bullshit ALL DAY EVERY DAY ON MULTIPLE MSM PLATFORMS. Image
Neil was once the proud face of GB "News", but after leaving he describes its Dubai-based funders as a “quite ideological” “Ukip tribute band”. No shit. 10 of GB News’s 31 hosts made on-air statements in 2022 rejecting/challenging the scientific consensus.
theguardian.com/media/2023/may…
Shortly after “quite ideological” Andrew Neil left GB "News", he said journalists are “basically the PR department of Greenpeace” when it comes to reporting on the climate crisis, & accused the likes of #ExtinctionRebellion of “nonsense scaremongering”.

theguardian.com/media/2021/nov…
In October 2021, a month after announcing he wouldn't be returning to “quite ideological” GB News, Neil was tweeting another “quite ideological” right-wing media platform, Guido Fawkes, who just happened to characterise @SkyNews's climate reporting as "DOOMSDAY" reporting. Image
Last year, rather than celebrating the mixed but welcome news that *some* parts of the Great Barrier Reef had the highest amount of coral cover since monitoring began 36 years ago, the #Spectator predictably attacked the "climate doomsters". ImageImage
Anyway, draw your own conclusions about a man who lives in France, who has worked closely with authoritarian regimes, & has spent much of his life mocking climate science & climate activists while representing the interests of foreign/non-dom billionaires.
And of course, the article Andrew Neil refers to at the top of the thread is by Koch-funded Spiked's Chief Crank & shit-stirrer, Brendan O'Neil.

A truly lovely chap. 😬

ImageImage
#Spiked has always debated the scientific consensus on global warming. In 2013, Rob Lyons of Claire Fox’s Academy of Ideas, told Spiked’s readers that the climate crisis was ‘a myth’ because, there ‘is 50% more ice in the Arctic than last year’.
Years later, like Andrew Neil, Spiked tacitly admitted climate change may be a problem, amending its stance from denial to downplaying outcomes. It recently published an article celebrating the benefits of global warming, while advocating use of more fossil fuels, shale gas coal. Image
Scratch the surface & there's just a relatively small number of well-connected people, who work for a network of linked & influential organisations, & who spend their lives pumping out toxic shit into people's minds in exchange for billionaires' money.

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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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