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The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), the London-based hard-right conference network co-founded by Jordan Peterson and linked to Sir Paul Marshall – the owner of GB News – is actively seeking to import the anti-Muslim politics of hard-right Australian politics into Britain. Simultaneously, it is seeking to reshape Australian politics in the image of Britain’s leading insurgent national populist party, Reform UK, with significant success.
ARC sits Reform UK’s only MP on its board and counts one of the party’s biggest donors among its funders. Nigel Farage was a speaker at its third conference, which closed at London’s Olympia on 25 June 2026, appearing on stage in conversation with ARC co-founder Philippa Stroud.
That same network has platformed former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who over his career has demanded that the West declare its superiority over Islam; was accused by UN officials of “racism” for claiming the Government should not “endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices” of remote Indigenous residents; and attempted to repeal Australia’s part of Racial Discrimination Act for being “un-Australian”.
Abbott, with ministerial colleague Alexander Downer, previously advised the Tories on replicating Australia’s asylum seeker policies and strategies of demonisation.
He sits on ARC’s advisory board and advises Advance Australia, the campaign group that claims credit for defeating the Indigenous Voice referendum. He is a director of Fox Corporation; and, this year, he was elected president of the collapsing Liberal Party in Australia.
Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart funds both Advance and One Nation, the previously fringe party led by Pauline Hanson that now leads Australia’s first-preference polling.
Newly published donor records show the ARC conference backed by fossil fuel executives, coal magnates and donors to US President Donald Trump. Seven Australians sit on ARC’s advisory board, including two former prime ministers – and a February proposal to steer the Liberal Party through its succession crisis was built around three of them.
Out of the sweltering June heat, right-wing actors from a range of nations networked to extend what has been described as a “messianic MAGA alliance”. Aiming to create a “new narrative” to “save the West”, the conference brought together fossil fuel corporations and think tank representatives, including those promoting “anti-gender” policy. Politicians representing Reform UK and European far right parties mix with those who claim to be conservative.
Reform UK donors including Lord Anthony Bamford and crypto billionaire Ben Delo contributed funds to the event, joining hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall. Delo – who donated £4 million to Reform UK earlier this year – has been added to the body’s Advisory Board since June 2026. Several of the donors have close ties to the Trump administration, many representing the coal and oil sectors in both the US and Canada.
ARC has had Australian involvement from the outset with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson around the table when it was founded. Australia, in particular, has a high-profile presence on the Advisory Board. Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott sit alongside Andrew Hastie, the Shadow Defence Minister, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Northern Territory senator, both identified with the party’s “national right” faction and both seen as future leadership contenders. The remaining two Australians are the former Senator Amanda Stoker and Robin Batterham, a former Chief Scientist of Australia.
By contrast, there are two Canadian politicians, one Austrian and four American officeholders, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The British contingent is three peers – Labour’s Maurice Glasman and two Conservatives, co-founder Philippa Stroud and Helena Morrissey – plus Reform UK MP, Danny Kruger, in the Commons.
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Who Funds ARC?
The ARC is a culture war conference organisation overlapping with the National Conservatism (NatCon) circuit, with some key personnel and organisational connections. The two organisations position themselves as the intellectual faction of the ethnonationalist and socially conservative movement that dominates the transnational Right.
ARC is an offshoot of the think tanks of Tufton Street, which the Guardian columnist George Monbiot has labelled “junktanks”. They function as comms operations for extreme free market policy positions and controversial industry sectors, packaged as fact-based policy research. Tufton Street’s front groups are both official partners of, or closely linked to, the Atlas Network based in Washington DC. Their role is to create an apparently independent chorus of voices for policy goals sought by wealthy elite donors.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was co-founded by the Legatum Group. The Atlas Network – a global network of hundreds of extreme free market lobby organisations – has claimed that body as an official partner.
Legatum’s website declared that ARC was an “international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take personal responsibility, working together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities and nations”. Its ambit is to promote “free enterprise”, “inexpensive, reliable” energy and “realistically pliable” environmental stewardship.
The original “think tank” of the Atlas model was the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in London in 1955 by Antony Fisher. The IEA shaped Margaret Thatcher, who founded a partner think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, in 1974, and the model was replicated in Washington by Heritage, which set out more than 1,000 pages of policy for Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Atlas Network’s now-secret list of partners reveals close to 500 entities in more than 100 countries.
A related body, the US Council for National Policy, links the anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBTQIA bodies Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, both represented at ARC; a third, Focus on the Family, was listed as an ARC donor.
Baroness Philippa Stroud, ARC co-founder, is one of several “think tank” alumni placed into politics through the House of Lords by friendly Tory leaders: Liz Truss elevated 32 people to peerages during her month in office.
Anti Islam network activists Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are also both on the ARC Advisory Board.
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The Money and the Local Machine
Gina Rinehart, West Australian mining magnate, has been a long-term donor to the Liberal Party but has expressed her frustration at its brief recent resistance to becoming the local MAGA party. She appeared to transfer her support to Queensland senator Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. She has been flying Hanson in her private plane around Australia, on a Thai holiday and to her home in Florida near Mar-a-Lago. Hanson spoke at an “elite” CPAC event at Trump’s resort. Rinehart and her company donated a plane and A$1 million to One Nation in April.
The original Australian “free market” think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), was co-founded in 1943 by Rupert Murdoch’s father. The IPA has been abandoned by its corporate sponsors, after its climate-denial and culture wars became embarrassing. The Murdochs continue to support the IPA, if only by providing media platforms. The only known donor in the current era is Rinehart. The billionaire is dedicated both to