The Grift is Strong with TalkTV & GB News regular & conspiracy nut, Lois Perry, director & sole shareholder of CAR26, & a representative of Laurence Fox's Reclaim UK.
She's tweeted climate change is a “scam” & “there is no climate emergency”.
Perry is a former PR who worked with her husband Richard Hill, who has an, er, a 'colourful' background. In 2013 it was revealed that Nigella Lawson was the "victim of vicious smear campaign by former Charles Saatchi publicist Richard Hillgrove".
And on 3rd March 2017, "convicted tax fraudster & PR professional Richard Hillgrove was declared bankrupt after failing to pay a £24,500 personal tax bill." A previous conviction came after Hillgrove PR failed to pay nearly £90,000 in VAT & PAYE payments between 2011 & 2012.
Here's a thread from last year which explores in a little more detail the crossover bewtween Perry & Laurnce Fox.
In 2020, Lois Perry made a name for herself as yet another outrage clickbait merchant when as a guest presenter on #JeremyVine she accused Meghan Markle of 'domestic abuse', suggesting that Prince Harry is a victim of domestic abuse.
She's also tweeted that net zero is “net stupid” & that “2.7 million people in Europe can’t afford to turn the heating on in their homes” because of “Climate Death Cultists”.
Perry has more than alluded to the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory.
Perry suggested that Oxford’s traffic reduction scheme was related to communist China, saying:
“It’s quite well documented that the Chinese communist party makes huge donations to top universities... Jeremy Hunt’s married to somebody who gets a cheque every week from the CCP.”
In an August 2022 TalkTV interview she said: “I do not believe that man-made climate change is a thing, I really don’t. As I say, we’ve had medieval warming periods, we’ve had the Roman warming period in this country. We’ve had Hippopotamuses in the Thames.”
OpenDemocracy noted that CAR26 is strongly linked to Blue Sky Strategy, run by individuals involved in the pro-Brexit campaign, including Rebecca Ryan, director of the “Defund the BBC” campaign.
Perry is also a panellist & guest presenter on #JeremyVine, & in December 2021 made the fearmongering & divisive claim in the Mirror that "face masks instil fear & division".
The Mirror neglected to mention she's a representative of Fox's COVID-denying Reclaim Party or Car26.
Perry was spotted on Glasgow Streets with unhinged anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn during #COP26, & a poll showing public support for a referendum on the UK’s net zero goal which was on the front page of the Telegraph on October 21st, was paid for by Perry's CAR26. It's a small world!
When asked on TalkTV about the leadership race between Truss & Sunak, Perry said: “I like Liz Truss, I think she’s great. She’s pro-fracking, she’s a low-tax politician, she’s pro-business. She seems to be sounding like the most normal person”, adding: “Rishi is a woke”.
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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.