Whenever I speak with Canadians or Europeans about what has gone wrong with the United States, there is always a mixture of sadness and hope — hope that America will come to its senses. When I try to explain why that hope is forlorn, there is usually a "well, what about if…" in response. Most people cannot see how the individual pieces of the puzzle lock together into a single, irreversible picture.

The best-case scenario is that every once in a while, the country will get an ineffectual centrist government before spending another decade doing its best impression of Hungary. The more likely trajectory – and, in my view, the emerging one – resembles Putin's Russia.

The danger to other democratic countries, and particularly the UK, is real. Reform UK bears all the hallmarks of a right-wing populist party resembling Fidesz, the Republican Party, or United Russia. Its policies on immigrants and transgender people are eliminationist and inflammatory. Its “Britain First” foreign policy amounts to thinly veiled pro-Russia positions indistinguishable from those of Donald Trump or Viktor Orban.

Canada has looked at what remains of the United States and decided it wants no part of it. The UK, by contrast, appears to be watching the same collapse and concluding that Reform UK will somehow produce better results than its counterparts in the US.

Each of the interlocking structural failures that have locked the US into this trajectory is examined below – and each reinforces the others.

Americans Hate and Fear Each Other

The most critical and intractable problem is that, fundamentally, partisans on both sides want to see the other obliterated. Trump won the popular vote with 49.8% in 2024. Voters knew full well who and what he was. His supporters begged him to “hurt the people he’s supposed to be hurting”. Each side believes the other to be evil. If the election were held again today, he would still command at least 40% of the vote.

The competing visions for the country are completely incompatible. Europeans and Canadians may forget that the US fought one of the bloodiest civil wars imaginable over whether chattel slavery should be legal everywhere, after the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court. There is still a fight over whether the champions of slavery and oppression should be honoured.

Any democratic system would be hard-pressed to survive in such an environment. One as structurally weak and flawed as that of the US has almost no chance. The dynamic is similar to – if not worse than – the one that prevailed in the 1850s, when the issue of slavery turned politics into armed camps, quite literally.

There is No Room for Political Compromise

There are only two viable political parties in the US because of its particular first-past-the-post election system (more on this below). One is a vaguely centre-left coalition. The other is a far-right collective that is built around the social grievances of voters without university degrees in rural areas and the interests of oligarchs. Because of the two-party system, and how voters on each side see the other, almost any politician who crosses party lines is likely to be destroyed in the party’s internal selection contests by their own members. In the case of Republicans, they are beholden to the President, who will punish any in the party who cross him.

The days when President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill could hash out a bipartisan agreement over drinks in the Oval Office are long gone. There has been almost nothing but winner-take-all partisan warfare since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995. Politicians can see the problems in the system as clearly as the political scientists who point them out. They will not commit political suicide by doing anything that might disadvantage their own party. Neither side will ever agree to do the things necessary to fix American democracy.

Related reading: Why Americans Need to Get Much Angrier About Donald Trump

The Supreme Court

A great deal has been written about the Supreme Court, but it is an intractable problem. The court has been effectively rigged by the incumbent party to a degree that borders on the absurd. It has ruled that the President enjoys immunity for acts carried out as “official business” – a doctrine that, taken to its logical conclusion, would permit the use of military force against political opponents. Federal agents can arrest and detain anyone they choose if they are brown or speak a foreign language. Political parties can draw electoral boundaries such that elections are no longer meaningful.

Anything is constitutional if the Supreme Court says it is – but only Republicans can wield this power. When Joe Biden was President, the court ruled that he had almost no authority to act, down to restructuring student loan debts owed to the Government. The result is a system in which the court appears to make up the rules as it goes, in order to favour Republicans.

The court is currently split 6–3 in favour of conservatives, and the imbalance will only deepen over the coming years. Because these are lifetime appointments, and the rules for removing justices make it functionally impossible to do so, the US is stuck with a court that serves largely as a rubber stamp for competitive autocracy and oppression.

Related reading: Mark Carney’s Speech Showed America and Britain the Sort of Global Leadership They Have Now Abandoned

Legislative Gridlock

The US cannot effectively move legislation through the federal Government. One party needs to control all three branches of government and then get legislation past the Supreme Court afterwards. A simple majority in the House and Senate is insufficient if the bill involves matters unrelated to spending. Any bill unrelated to spending must secure 60 votes in the Senate (out of 100 seats) due to the filibuster – a procedural rule that allows a minority to block legislation.

Given that both parties hold mutually exclusive visions for the country, and Republicans are perversely incentivised to vote with the President, nearly every vote falls on party lines. Almost nothing can get through the US legislative system, even spending bills. This has led to record-setting government shutdowns over the past year. Even if both sides can see the problem, passing legislation to address it is functionally impossible – particularly if one side sees such legislation as favouring the other politically or ideologically.

The Undemocratic System

The Senate itself is something of an institutional appendix: no other functional democracy has an upper chamber of the legislature with so much power. Over time, other democracies have weakened the upper chamber or done away with it entirely. The US Senate also features deeply disproportionate representation: the smallest state by population (Wyoming) has as many Senators as the largest (California). A vote in Wyoming is worth 67 times as much as a vote in California.

Gerrymandering – the drawing of constituency boundaries to favour one party – and the apportionment of two Senate seats per state compound the problem. Both give disproportionate power to smaller, more rural states that tend to vote for Trump’s movement. For Democrats to split the Senate 50–50, they would have to win the national vote by approximately six percentage points. In states with extensive gerrymandering, winning the popular vote by more than 15 points is insufficient to dislodge the incumbent party.

Further structural problems include first-past-the-post voting, which forces the US into a two-party system. The electoral college – an indirect system in which each state appoints electors who formally choose the President – compounds the dysfunction: it has failed in its original purpose of preventing an unqualified demagogue from coming to power, while making it possible to become President while decisively losing the popular vote.

Related reading: ‘Trump Has Already Rigged the 2028 Presidential Election’: US Defence Insider

The Constitution Prevents Fixing Itself

Many of the systemic problems the US faces could be fixed by amending the constitution. In practice, however, amending it is impossible. To amend the US constitution, two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate must vote in favour of the proposal. Three-quarters of state legislatures must then vote to ratify the amendment.

There is zero chance Republicans would ever vote to eliminate gerrymandering, change Senate apportionment, adopt proportional representation, or abolish the electoral college. There is zero chance either party would control two-thirds of either body of Congress. There is zero chance that three-quarters of the states would agree on an amendment that removed a Republican or Democratic structural advantage – and most of the structural advantages currently favour Republicans.

Many of America’s worst problems are the result of flaws in the US constitution that can only be solved by amending it. Amending the constitution is impossible because the current political dynamic and the constitution’s own amendment threshold make it so. The system cannot fix itself.

Embedded Autocracy and One-Way Ratchets

Even if, by some miracle, Republicans do not successfully capture the 2028 election, a Democratic President will be unable to do much to set things right. Trump is leaving behind a court packed with conservatives. The media is almost completely controlled by his billionaire allies. The federal government civil service has been filled with loyalists screened for their ideology – and removing them would likely be blocked by the courts. The oligarchs remain firmly behind Trump and his movement.

A Democratic President would be unable to accomplish much of anything between a hostile court and a Senate that requires 60 votes to make any sort of substantive change. Many of the vital changes needed require a constitutional amendment, as described above. Republican Presidents, by contrast, will be able to continue to rule by executive fiat, with the courts clearing the way.

The ruling party, religious conservatives, oligarchs, and the courts have established a self-reinforcing power feedback loop that only grows stronger over time. Once established, such a loop is nearly impossible to break. To change the court, you must win elections. To win elections, you must first overcome the structural advantages held by Republicans and the courts. To reduce the influence of the ultra-rich in politics, you must affect all three. The result is a conundrum that no democratic system has solved without violent revolution.

The United States is a Zombie Democracy

The United States is a zombie democracy: it might still look and sound a little like the country its allies remember, but it is a shambling corpse screaming and biting other countries, trying to infect them with fascist autocracy too. Zombies do not come back. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been keenly aware of this and spoken bluntly: Canada needs to move on without the United States while protecting itself against it.

It is not too late for the rest of the world to learn from the US example – to observe the weaknesses in democracy that allowed the United States to fall, and to correct them while they still can. In the case of the UK and Canada, this means eliminating first-past-the-post elections and instituting proportional representation. There are signs that both countries are beginning to fall into the two-party radicalisation trap. It also means protecting the media from becoming a right-wing monoculture that constantly stokes fear and urges hatred of trans people and immigrants.

Canada has looked at what is left of the United States and decided it really does not want to become a zombie democracy. Many in Britain , however, seem to have looked at what is happening in the US, and decided that this is what they want – and that Reform UK will somehow produce better results than its counterparts across the Atlantic.

Brynn Tannehill is a US defence analyst and author of American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy

Writing in the Journal of 9/11 Studies in September last year, David Booth, who is standing for Nigel Farage's party in Croydon, refers to the Covid pandemic as a "staged event" that was designed by "powerful forces" to control the population.

"It is increasingly clear that the so-called Covid-19 pandemic was a staged event, designed to enable profound changes desired by powerful forces at the expense of majority populations around the world" he wrote.

He claims the harm from Covid was actually caused "by the policies" including vaccinations, "not by any observable impacts of the virus." The publication was founded by 9/11 'Truthers' who believe the 2001 terror attacks in New York were an inside job.

Booth, a retired researcher who focused on development and politics, also refers to the spread of Covid-19 as a "pandemic" using scare-quotes throughout the paper.

Booth has been contacted for comment but did not respond. The revelations come the day before the release of the Covid-19 inquiry's report on vaccines, which is expected to be scathing about the role of misinformation on vaccine uptake.

The Paper

The article, titled 'Covid-19 as a Structural Deep Event: Cutting to the Chase on Perpetrators and Motives' overwhelmingly cites blog posts, self-published books and fringe advocacy websites in its bibliography. There are 55 citations for Substack posts in the piece, from non-peer reviewed sources.

In the piece, Booth accuses what he calls the "Global Biodefense Public-Private Partnership" (GPPP), essentially Western military, intelligence and biosecurity establishments, of staging the pandemic, even suggesting it was fabricated through staged imagery, statistical fraud or possibly deliberate "seeding" of pathogens by military actors.

Booth also bases his article on Occam's Razor, discounting rival conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic that require too many assumptions to hold true at the same time.

But his own theory assumes that military and intelligence agencies across dozens of countries coordinated a fake pandemic in real time, tens of thousands of clinicians and scientists were either deceived or complicit, and that mortality data were fabricated or misattributed on a global scale.

In other words, every major medical institution in the world was in on the supposed Pentagon plot, with no 'leaking' by any of the (presumably thousands of) professionals in the know.

David Booth writes: "The likely extent of the Covid-19 fraud continues to be underestimated by the most widely accepted critiques of the mainstream narrative. It does not seem to be true that the virus associated with Covid-19 symptoms spread by itself from a single point of origin…This raises a further set of research issues regarding who did exactly what to give the impression of a perilous pandemic."

"However, it also adds force to the main finding of this review about the perpetrators and their motives, as only forces embedded at some depth in the Western bio-security apparatus could have pulled off the scale of fraud indicated by the data."

On X/Twitter, the account @DavidBoothODI – which uses his Journal of 9/11 Studies profile picture – features extensive anti-vaccination content alongside pro-Reform posts.

He has reposted material claiming that Pfizer mRNA injections contain a cancer-causing agent (SV40), that pharmaceutical companies are "pure, pure evil," and that Covid vaccines are responsible for increased cancer rates. Sources he has amplified include "Wide Awake Media," Andrew Bridgen MP (who has focused on alleged vaccine 'harms'), and an account called @B[ill]GatesIsaPyscho.

Related reading: Reform-Run Kent Council Sells Off Antony Gormley Sculpture After Raising Taxes

Bereaved Families Respond

A spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice told Byline Times the story was "absolutely shocking," adding: "These dangerous and offensive conspiracy theories are an insult to all of us who lost loved ones to Covid-19 and witnessed its deadly impact first-hand. They are dangerous, they put lives at risk, and they have no place in public life.

"Reform should immediately remove Mr Booth as a candidate and make clear, without any ambiguity, that it rejects these views.

"Anyone who promotes dangerous falsehoods about a pandemic that took so many lives should be nowhere near elected office."

Byline Times asked Reform UK if the party was aware of his apparent views on vaccines and the pandemic before selecting him, what vetting procedures Reform UK carries out on prospective council election candidates, and if the party viewed the promotion of Covid-19 conspiracy theories as compatible with representing Reform UK as an elected councillor but have yet to receive a response.

Related reading: EXPOSED: How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK

Reform's Track Record on Vaccines

After the controversial doctor Aseem Malhotra addressed the Reform Party conference last September, and suggested that the Covid vaccine was a 'significant factor in the cancer of members of royal family', the party soon distanced itself from him. Malhotra's speech was the only health-related address on the main stage of the Reform Party conference that year.

Prof Brian Ferguson, Professor of Viral Immunology, University of Cambridge, said at the time that the speech made "many incorrect claims and narratives about mRNA vaccines and medical research, along with sweeping claims about the pharmaceutical industry."

"There are repetitions of often used anti-vaxx tropes that have been extensively disproven…There are numerous high quality studies that prove the covid vaccines, including mRNA vaccines, saved millions of lives. Evidence that mRNA vaccines have done more harm than good just does not exist, and claims that they did do not stand up to scrutiny."

In October, Reform UK received an unwanted award for being the organisation that engaged in the “most prolific promotion of pseudoscience” during 2025.

Each year the UK’s long-running publication for analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal, The Skeptic magazine, names their pseudoscientist of the year, and awards them the 'Rusty Razor' prize.

The Rusty Razor that went to Reform UK in recognition of “their widespread embrace of climate change denialism and antivaccine misinformation.”

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Trump’s slurs against Britain are putting my loyalties severely to the test. The America to which I pledged my allegiance is not the America of today.  I still admire the original “idea” of America. I like living here. I have built a community of friends and family here which I value enormously. But, true peace of mind would require me either to tune out what is actually happening, or pretend Trump’s excesses don’t exist, which is both dishonest and corrosive. 

I am now struggling to work out my identity. I became rather alienated from the UK in the years immediately after Brexit, when I felt my birth country had fallen prey to some weird anti-EU cult, fuelled by false promises and misinformation. Now, I feel the same thing happening to me here. When I write about the US these days, I often can’t decide whether to use the pronoun “we”, identifying myself as an American too,  or “they”, to put some distance between us.   

The dissonance is increasing.  

Related reading: EXPOSED: How Viktor Orbán Bankrolled the Network Around Reform UK

At a recent Sunday lunch gathering which I was hosting, one of my American guests innocently asked me, not what I thought, but how I felt, about Donald Trump’s insults towards the UK. Taking everyone aback, including myself, her choice of words triggered an intense emotional reaction from me. For the next ten minutes I delivered an almost ranting, nonstop monologue in which I expressed my anger, loathing and disdain for Donald Trump - not just concerning his outrageous slurs towards my country of birth, but also his greed, his corruption, his crudeness, his sleaziness, his vanity, his ego, his arrogance, his bigotry, his cruelty, his grotesque abuses of office, his bullying of allies and coddling of dictators, his values-free foreign policy, his cavalier war-mongering, and his wanton destruction of everything which once made America great.  

There was a stunned silence when I finished. 

My emotional outburst came after months in which I had tried to contain the extent of my anger towards Trump in front of my American friends and family, for fear of offending them. To be clear, none of them like Trump either, and most of them are as horrified as I am by his egregious behaviour.  Many of my American friends say they are ashamed and embarrassed by Trump, and tell me that when they travel overseas they make clear to people they meet that they did not vote for him. Some even try to pretend they are Canadian.

But, America is still their country, and most of them still believe better days will come again. Though they share my disgust at Trump, most of them seem surprisingly passive in the face of events. They will certainly not vote for Trump. Some may come out and stump for Democrats nearer the elections. But only a handful of them are actively engaged in acts of protest or resistance. Only one other friend came out with me to join a #NoKings protest. They sigh, and tut-tut, and shake their heads with despair, but they don’t seem to think it is their job to actively push back. 

They are trusting that America’s democratic processes will still work. They are pinning their hopes on the courts reining in Trump’s worst excesses, and the Republicans doing badly in the mid-term elections - even though the Trump administration continues to bulldoze through court rulings against them, and is ever more explicitly looking for ways to rig the elections in its favour. 

If the passivity of too many ordinary American voters is disappointing, this is nothing compared to the manifest failure of America’s elites to stand up to Trump. Too many in the elite circles of the media, academia, the legal profession, or in business, have decided the easiest course is to keep their heads down, or actively collude with the administration, in the hopes of avoiding Trump’s wrath, and instead securing favours, economic benefit, or other advantage over their competitors. 

Where were the adults in the room when Trump threatened civilisational destruction of Iran? Why was this not an immediate clarifying moment for all the Republican members of Congress who have enabled him for far too long? Why was this overt declaration of intent to commit war crimes not a moment of mass resignation from the administration? Why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff not actively denouncing this as incompatible with US military codes and decades of military practice? 

Yes, Trump’s favorability ratings are declining across the board - on his handling of the economy, foreign policy, and even immigration, his signature policy. But, given the chaos he’s unleashed, how is it possible that almost 40% of Americans still have an overall positive view of him?  

Why do so many Americans still seem to think that someone else, from somewhere, will eventually intervene and do something to stop this madness? For how long will they rely on TACO - that Trump will always do a u-turn, if the markets crater? There’s increasing evidence that the markets are beginning to bake in Trump’s madness, and assuming he will back down at moments of crisis, so they are no longer working as effectively as before as a signalling tool to him. 

Related reading: Trump’s Iran War Is Pushing the Post War International Order to Breaking Point

Trump is becoming more extreme, and more erratic, with each passing day. Not content with castigating his NATO allies, raging at former MAGA acolytes who are now criticising him, threatening to bomb Iran into oblivion, and close down the Straits of Hormuz, he is now taking on the Pope, and posting pictures of himself as God. 

What if Trump is so irked by all the TACO crowing by his critics, that one day he decides not to back down from one of his most preposterous declarations?   

 How bad does it have to get, before enough Americans wake up?  

America has always pitched itself as the champion of democracy around the world. For decades, American administrations poured millions of dollars into supporting democracy building in other countries, campaigned on behalf of opposition leaders, civil society organisations and pro-democracy movements in authoritarian countries, and scolded the leaders of countries where human rights and freedoms were not respected. Even though American foreign policy actions have often been inconsistent or imperfect, they have always been dressed up in a veneer of values and principles. Despite the views of some cynics that it was only ever about oil, George Bush’s ill-fated Iraq War was in part genuinely motivated by a desire to spread “freedom” in the Middle East. 

With his threats to commit genocide in Iran, Trump has singlehandedly destroyed America’s moral standing. It’s not good enough to claim, as some of his defenders have, that these comments were just a negotiating ploy, or “Trump being Trump.” It’s simply unacceptable for any responsible world leader to say something like this. 

There is a measure of hope in Viktor Orban’s recent electoral defeat in Hungary. But, the lesson far right populist movements will take from his defeat, including his backers in the US, will be that they will need to go even further and faster to consolidate their power.

I therefore don’t believe it is either “just a joke”, or a coincidence that Trump has been openly declaring that he will pardon everyone who works closely with him. He means it, as a way to authorise even more flagrant criminal behaviour by his associates, to protect him and his cronies from accountability.  

After the lunch where I completely lost my diplomatic cool, a close associate pulled me aside, and suggested I needed to be less emotional, and more analytical, about the state of America. I don’t agree. I think more Americans need to be more angry, more outraged, more fired up and more active than they are at the moment, before it is too late, and there is nothing left to salvage. 

Perhaps American democracy will eventually right itself. It’s withstood severe tests before, including a bitter civil war. But, I say, why leave it to chance? Hope is not a strategy. 

Orr is a trustee of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF), which the Good Law Project has revealed receives most of its funding from Orbán’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) think tank.

The RSLF received more than £512,500 from MCC since 2023 – more than 90% of its total funding, according to Democracy for Sale.

Orr is also UK Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which organises the National Conservatism (NatCon) conferences, events that have consistently held up Orbán’s leadership as a model for British conservatives to follow.

Byline Times previously reported that Orr secured the backing of Palantir founder Peter Thiel in co-founding the Free Speech Union (FSU) with Toby Young.

Thiel – who, as Byline Times has separately reported, maintained a confirmed business partnership with Epstein through a shared venture fund – has spoken at and funded NatCon, as has Orbán, with funding routed through MCC.

The Epstein Connection

The latest release of documents by the US Department of Justice from the Jeffrey Epstein case illuminates the transatlantic infrastructure behind the network Orbán helped to build. The files also shed light on efforts to undermine EU regulation of cryptocurrencies, which Epstein saw as the ideal vehicle for anonymously channelling funds to political allies.

Messages between Epstein and his close associate, the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, show the pair coordinating access to senior European political figures. In a series of exchanges in June 2018, they attempted to arrange a meeting between Bannon and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz:

Unknown sender / likely Jeffrey Epstein or associate: “Kurtz important. As he will host trump and Putin” Sun, 10 Jun 2018, 5:47:29 AM

Jeffrey Epstein: “Tried” Sun, 10 Jun 2018, 12:13:07 PM

Terje Rød-Larsen: “Dear Sebastian, Steve Bannon, who behind the scenes still is one of the most insightful and influential players in Washington (and very close to the President), would like to see you on various issues. He is now working very closely with Victor Orban and other of your colleagues in Europe. I am having dinner with him in Paris on 22 June. He could come to Vienna any time between the 23 and 28 of that month. He is a very astute and extremely well informed analyst and player, though we have significantly different views on some issues! I will strongly recommend that you see him, and am sure you will find it very useful. Warmest Terje” Mon, 11 Jun 2018, 12:18:35 PM

Jeffrey Epstein: “You might add that if he is in Paris. He is welcome to join for dinner. Up to you.” Mon, 11 Jun 2018, 7:02:52 AM

The MCC Network in Britain

There is considerable overlap between the FSU and the Orbán network. MCC Brussels is led by Frank Furedi, described by Politico as Orbán’s “attack dog.” A former contributor to Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Furedi wrote alongside Claire Fox and Mick Hume – editor of its successor publication Spiked Online.

He is closely involved with Fox’s Academy of Ideas and Battle of Ideas. Both Fox and Furedi are members of the Free Speech Union.

At a 2022 CPAC event in Hungary, featuring an all-star line-up of far-right activists – including promoters of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, racists, antisemites, as well as anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ activists – Furedi described how conservative movements should try to “take over institutions”, including schools, arguing there is “no way to win without young people.”

Byline Times has also reported on Matthew Goodwin’s role as an MCC visiting fellow. Goodwin, who stood as Reform UK’s candidate for Gorton and Denton at the election, sits on the FSU advisory board. As the Good Law Project noted in February, visiting fellows at MCC are reportedly paid between €5,000 and €10,000 per month, plus housing, office space and health insurance.

Reform has denied that Goodwin was paid €10,000 a month but has not disclosed the precise figure.

Mick Hume is also listed as an MCC visiting fellow. In November 2025, Toby Young delivered a talk at MCC’s Centre for Journalism.

The RSLF’s advisory board includes FSU directors Douglas Murray and Nigel Biggar, as well as John Hayes, who leads the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs. All three have spoken at NatCon.

Other RSLF trustees include Roger Scruton’s widow, Lady Sophie Scruton; Samuel Hughes, a research fellow at the opaquely funded Centre for Policy Studies; and Michael Gove, editor of the Spectator – now part of Paul Marshall’s media empire, alongside GB News and UnHerd.

Related reading: Matt Goodwin’s Lucrative Hungarian Fellowship Could Be in Line for the Chop Following Orbán’s Defeat

NatCon: Where the Networks Meet

NatCon has served as the primary public forum for this overlapping network. FSU figures who have addressed the conferences include Orr, Young, Furedi, Goodwin, David Starkey, Eric Kaufman and David Goodhart.

Former Conservative MPs who have since defected to Reform – among them Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and Danny Kruger – have also appeared, as have Nigel Farage and Michael Gove.

Other NatCon speakers include John O’Sullivan, president of the Hungarian state-funded Danube Institute, and Rod Dreher, the American conservative writer who attended Vance’s baptism and conducted the first interview with him after his conversion. Both are Danube Institute fellows.

Gladden Pappin, president of Hungary’s state foreign policy body, the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, has also addressed the conferences.

Kruger’s defection to Reform came shortly after he attended a dinner hosted by Orr with J.D. Vance during the US Vice-President’s visit to Britain. Vance, a close friend of Orr, attended a campaign rally in the final days before the election, where he made wild claims about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Related reading: Nigel Farage Advisor Tied to Russian Oil Profits Via Orban-Backed Influence Operation

Gormley's 'Two Stones' was hosted outside the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone until a few days ago.

The work was one of Gormley's first commissions. The renowned artist studied and later taught at the Maidstone School of Art.

Green Kent County Councillor and Leader of Maidstone Borough Council, Stuart Jeffery told Byline Times: "They did it quietly. It disappeared sometime last week, and then we found it missing."

It has been sold back to Antony Gormley, though the sale amount has not been disclosed. The decision by Reform is the the latest in a broader firesale of public art owned by Kent County Council and comes despite Nigel Farage's flagship local authority raising taxes by almost four per cent in January.

'Shameful' Sale

In a statement, Jeffery added: "Reform are happy to fund their spin doctors from public money, and they seem to have no qualms about selling important public art to balance their books. That says volumes about their values.

"Just imagine if the Angel of the North got flogged off? The Two Stones may have a lower profile but they are important art and are really special to Maidstone with Gormley's history here. Reform have no insight into governing or leading communities. This sale is shameful."

Green Maidstone Borough Councillor Stephen Thompson, a cabinet member whose portfolio includes arts, culture, heritage and tourism said he was angry: "Not content with flogging off the county's art collection, they have now robbed us of a major piece of public art at the library."

It is just the latest publicly-owned artwork to be sold by the Reform-run Kent County Council to balance their books. In March, over 100 works of art owned by KCC were put up for auction by the Reform council.

Kent Greens said at the time: "While the total financial value of the art is only around £35,000, the historic and social value of the art, most of which depicts Kent, is far higher."

A spokesperson for the party added: "The art depicts historic scenes from around the county and provides an excellent insight into Kent Life. This art should be treasured and put on display for the public good rather than being sold off to private collectors never to be seen again." The works eventually sold for under £32,000.

Council's Response

A spokesperson from Kent County Council (KCC) told Byline Times: "KCC recognises the cultural significance of Two Stones and Antony Gormley's connection to Maidstone, therefore the decision to sell Antony Gormley's Two Stones back to the artist was taken carefully as part of KCC's ongoing work to manage the significant financial pressures facing Kent. Kent is in a similar position to most other local authorities in having to make difficult financial decisions.

"The private sale enables the council to raise income without increasing costs for residents or reducing frontline services. Returning the works directly to the artist also ensures their ongoing care and preserves the potential for future public exhibition."

The council spokesperson added: "Responsible leadership requires difficult decisions to ensure the council remains financially sustainable while continuing to support culture in ways that are affordable and appropriate. The sculptures were dispatched at the end of March to be reunited with Antony Gormley."

Turner Contemporary Threat

In February, Labour MP for East Thanet Polly Billington reacted with fury to a tweet by Reform UK's Cabinet Member for Economic Development threatening to pull funding from Margate's Turner Contemporary Gallery in an act of 'naked retribution' for holding his council to account.

Polly Billington MP had revealed Freedom of Information (FOI) disclosures showing that Reform UK's claim they had saved Kent taxpayers £39.5 million by cancelling net zero projects was not supported by council documentation.

Instead of admitting the figures were misleading or false, Cllr David Wimble – who is responsible for funding for the gallery as cabinet member – tweeted, "Perhaps we could pull funding for her lovely turner contemporary?... Polly suck it up."

Related reading: Reform UK Energy Prize Winners Had Nominated Party’s Own Branch Chair

Billington responded at the time: "Threatening acts of naked retribution against the people of Thanet because their MP dared to challenge his council's lies is the act of a desperate dictator, not a responsible custodian of our county's treasured cultural institutions.

"The Turner Contemporary is a beloved local institution and a lynchpin of our local economy, and I will never allow Reform UK to trash it as an act of vile spite. Cllr Wimble should immediately withdraw this disgraceful remark and apologise."

Party Collapse

Reform won a majority on Kent County Council in May 2025, but have since seen their majority chipped away, falling from 57 seats to 47 in less than a year through defections, expulsions and defeats. Seven ex-Reform councillors now form a Restore Britain grouping, the party led by far-right former Reform MP Rupert Lowe.

Last Thursday, the Green Party secured a victory in the Cliftonville by-election for Kent County Council, further whittling down Reform's majority on the council. The by-election was triggered after a Reform councillor was imprisoned. Taylor was given a 12-month prison sentence in February after admitting to behaving in a controlling or coercive way.

Green candidate Rob Yates gained the seat from Reform UK, increasing the Green vote share from 12% to 39%. The huge swing was seen by the party as a 'Kent version' of the recent Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election in Greater Manchester, as Reform UK were conclusively beaten into second place while Labour came fourth.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

That same year the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.

Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and political operative, who had run companies on behalf of pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence surveillance giant Palantir and business partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media”. 

To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as “an annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one’s perspective”: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.

The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap”  recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.

To the editors of the NATO journal, these may have appeared as novel strategic prescriptions. In fact, they had already appeared - in a different context entirely.

In 2011, hackers breached the servers of HBGary Federal, a private US intelligence contractor, and leaked internal documents revealing a proposed operation - developed with involvement from Thiel's data company Palantir - to deploy near-identical tactics against trade unions, journalists and left-wing activists on American soil.

This reporter was among those who covered the breach at the time, and who first drew public attention to Palantir's role in it — the beginning of more than a decade tracking the network this piece describes.

The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel's own firm.

Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations - funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.

That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms - among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer — covertly funded, according to participants, by Giesea. The same platforms served as testing grounds for the harassment campaigns, disinformation operations and memetic tactics that Giesea would later present to a NATO-affiliated journal as a respectable strategic toolkit.

Connecting those platforms to Thiel's wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as "Weev". His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established — through Auernheimer's own private statements and a decade of documented network activity — for the first time.

Auernheimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet and organised white supremacist movements. He connected the PayPal and Palantir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped create and harness. And he linked the first generation of online harassment operations to the contemporary influence networks that today increasingly shape mainstream political discourse.

Jeff Giesea, Charles Johnson 

In Discord server logs – a messaging platform used widely by gaming and political communities – as first reported by journalist Luke O’Brien in his 2020 investigation into Thiel’s development of the alt-right, Auernheimer described Giesea as “a major investor providing help to racists”.

Giesea initially denied this. When confronted with evidence of a $5,000 donation to the white supremacist organisation led by Richard Spencer, he replied: “No comment.”

Giesea’s financial support for the neo-Nazi platform Daily Stormer along with other associated projects run by Auernheimer and Johnson has since been confirmed by other participants in those networks.

One identified Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz as another Epstein associate involved in the Giesea project during his producing role on Mike Cernovich’s 2016 documentary Silenced: Our War on Free Speech – a film featuring Auernheimer, Johnson and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Related reading: Thiel Spokesman Denies Former Israeli PM’s Claim Jeffrey Epstein ‘Co-Owned’ Palantir Founder’s Venture Fund – But Confirms Epstein was a Limited Partner

Andrew Auernheimer: Formation and Function

Like Johnson, Weev served as an operational connector, moving between overlapping worlds that were, in other contexts, kept separate – the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet, white supremacist organising, the investment and intelligence networks around Thiel, and the broader influence ecosystems that shaped the 2016 political cycle and its aftermath.

Auernheimer’s elevation was made possible by such things as 4chan, the image-board platform that served as an incubator of memes, organised harassment campaigns known as “raids”, and novel forms of information warfare.

He was also a prolific editor of Encyclopedia Dramatica, a wiki that catalogued 4chan-era internet culture and its developing repertoire of tactics.

Auernheimer gained early notoriety for using an Amazon exploit to flag LGBT materials as inappropriate in what he characterised as a strike against “the hypocracy [sic] of the gay community” – and for founding trolling collectives from which he recruited operatives for more consequential ventures.

After being indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for exploiting a vulnerability in AT&T’s systems to extract exposed data of more than 100,000 customers, which he shared with the outlet Gawker, he became a temporarily useful ersatz hero of civil liberties campaigners.

The Thiel and Epstein Connections

As with much else involving Thiel’s network, Aurenheimer’s role was initially concealed until referenced in leaked correspondence. 

On 17 November 2014, the technologist Vincenzo Iozzo emailed the financier Jeffrey Epstein, alerting him that a novel hedge fund strategy he and Epstein had been developing was already being executed by Auernheimer, reportedly funded by Thiel:

"I've heard rumors that Thiel (who I believe you know) was bankrolling this dude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev to do similar things."

Auernheimer had effectively confirmed his relationship with Thiel six months earlier in what he believed to be a private conversation.

“I have run a hedge fund, I am starting another one, and it is not nearly as regulated,” Weev stated, having separately referenced “a meeting with Peter Thiel’s right hand this week”. 

In the same exchange, he spoke warmly of the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who played a central role in PayPal’s creation alongside Thiel: “I’ve met Pierre, I like Pierre, and he’s a friend of a close friend.”

Related reading: Jeffrey Epstein’s 4chan Plan

The /pol/ Board, GamerGate and the Radicalisation Infrastructure

In November 2011, Boris Nikolic – a biotech investor later named as a trustee in Epstein’s will – wrote to Epstein linking to a Washington Post article on 4chan’s political influence, noting: “The potential for manipulation is huge.” 

The email followed Epstein’s first meeting with Chris Poole, 4chan’s founder. Days later, 4chan launched its /pol/ board – a “Politically Incorrect” forum that would become a central organising space for online far-right radicalisation.

The /pol/ board subsequently served as a primary incubator for GamerGate, the 2014 online harassment campaign directed primarily at women in the games industry. Auernheimer and Yiannopoulos were both instrumentally involved in driving elements of that campaign. 

Auernheimer came from the same 4chan ecosystem that had given rise to Anonymous, but from an ideologically opposite direction: he played no part in its broadly leftist anti-authoritarian campaigns.

Soon after he was released from prison – his chest now adorned with a massive swastika tattoo – in 2014. 

GamerGate and the constituency it mobilised later migrated to 8chan, the image-board founded by Auernheimer’s associate Frederick Brennan, who also contributed to Daily Stormer. 8chan went on to function as a central dissemination space for QAnon as it continued to embed itself in mainstream Republican politics.

By 2016, Auernheimer was writing to an associate that he was “working on facial recognition, specifically about black people”. In 2017, Charles Johnson announced on Facebook that he was “building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads”. 

Clearview AI – the facial recognition company that subsequently expanded the capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – launched in 2018, seed-funded by Thiel, operating under Johnson’s Giesea-funded software framework WeSearchr, and represented in legal matters by Aurenheimer’s longtime lawyer, Tor Ekeland. 

Johnson, Auernheimer, Giesea, Yiannopoulos, Dershowitz and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment.

Ekeland objected to the allegation that Auernheimer used an “exploit” on AT&T, telling Byline Times: “All that happened was his alleged co-conspirator Daniel Spitler wrote a script to access non password protected, publicly facing information - email addresses, on an unsecured server.” 

Related reading: In Putin’s Orbit: The Crypto Politics of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel 

The Scale of the Network

In 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Peter Thiel summarising what he saw as the political opportunity opened by the Brexit vote: “return to tribalism. counter to globalisation. amazing new alliances.” This, he concluded, was “just the beginning.”

What the documented record shows across a decade is a consistent pattern.

Tactics developed in far-right corners of internet culture – harassment campaigns, disinformation operations, sockpuppet networks, memetic influence campaigns – were progressively absorbed into elite political and strategic discourse, sometimes through the same operators who first deployed them.

Far from an anomaly, the NATO StratCom paper Giesea co-authored with Johnson was a culmination of this activity.

As General Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., boasted last year: “The public has no idea how massive our Digital Army is.”

Shell and BP – the two British-based oil ‘supermajors’ – are predicted to see combined extra-profits because of the war of around £5 billion, while US oil companies can expect a $63 billion boost, and other companies throughout the industry will similarly benefit.

This investigation – co-published by Byline Times, the Abolish Westminster newsletter, and The Ecologist – reveals the extent to which Britain and its network of offshore territories are playing a central role in shielding those profits from tax collectors and regulators around the world.

Global Britain: Protecting Tax Abuse Worldwide

The Tax Justice Network ranks Britain itself as the 19th biggest enabler of corporate tax abuse in the world. The worst two jurisdictions, by the same rankings, are the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. Bermuda is fourth, Jersey is eighth, the Isle of Man 12th and Guernsey 13th.

These are all either British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies. In other words, seven of the top 20 facilitators of corporate tax evasion are British jurisdictions. Also in the top 20 are Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, the Bahamas, Cyprus and Malta, all of which have complex historical and not-as-historical-as-you-might-think connections to the UK.

Many other British Overseas Territories – Anguilla, Turks and Caicos, and Gibraltar, for example – are relatively low on the list (32nd, 40th and 48th) only because their overall global role isn’t vast, while they still have their own niche as part of Britain’s network of offshore jurisdictions.

Together this network – including the UK itself – forms by far the world’s most important system of offshore spaces, and is responsible for a third of corporate tax abuse, according to the Tax Justice Network.

Related reading: The Oil Lobby Is Using the Iran War to Revive North Sea Drilling but Official Data Shows It Won’t Cut Bills

Shell Games

When considering the way the oil industry takes advantage of this network, the most obvious example in recent years is Shell. For more than a century, the company was known as Anglo-Dutch. Its full name, Royal Dutch Shell, wasn’t a reference to the House of Windsor, but to the House of Orange – the Netherlands’ royal family.

From 1917, its global headquarters had been in The Hague. But in 2022, it abandoned that history. The Shell Centre, on the south bank of the River Thames, became its International HQ. Now, it’s just Shell plc. And now, legally at least, it’s just ‘Anglo’.

Experts in both the Netherlands and the UK said that tax was a key reason Shell made its move.

Alison Schultz from the Tax Justice Network said: “It just makes perfect sense as a company. If you really want to dodge taxes, it makes sense to locate to the UK. Even coming from the Netherlands – which [also] allows you to pay little tax and to hide things.”

The main driver of Shell’s move, she said, was something called dividend withholding tax, a tax companies are charged directly whenever they pay out dividends. In the Netherlands, the rate of this tax is 15%. In Germany, it’s 26%.

“This is something most countries do,” said Schultz, “but in the UK, it is zero. Usually, this is based on where the HQ is. That’s what made it useful for Shell to move its HQ – now it is based in the UK, the UK is not taking any of these dividends as taxes.”

Vincent Kiezebrink, a researcher at the Dutch think tank SOMO who has looked closely at Shell's affairs, also highlighted dividend withholding tax. Specifically, he says, Shell had stayed in the Netherlands over the previous years because the Dutch government had been planning on scrapping the tax.

This idea was met with a backlash from opposition parties, and was abandoned, leading Shell to relocate to the UK. Indeed, Ben van Beurden, who was Shell’s CEO at the time of the move, told the Cleaning Up podcast in 2025 that this was a major factor in his decision to make the shift.

As well as paying dividends out, Shell is also a major recipient of dividends – from its subsidiaries around the world. “Usually as an HQ – the global ultimate owner – you will receive dividends from some of your subsidiaries,” Schultz said.

Around the world, it’s common for these to be exempt from tax if, say, the HQ owns 100% of the shares in another company. But often a giant like Shell will have smaller toeholds in a lot of companies, and the rules around whether and how these are taxed vary by country. Britain’s rules, Schultz confirmed, are particularly generous to vast conglomerates when compared to those of other countries.

The detail of Britain’s tax regime for companies extracting North Sea oil is also complex, and again ultimately works to protect oil company profits above all else.

A report in 2020 calculated that, in 2016, oil production in the north German region of Schleswig-Holstein was around 2% of the UK’s, “but the region received $57 million from the companies, while the UK paid $322 million to the companies”.

The report calculated that the UK had missed out on £250 billion ($323 billion)in tax revenue over the previous 13 years because of this generosity towards the industry.

While headline tax rates have increased since the price spikes caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the underlying framework is still much more geared towards industry profits than in other countries.

“The UK is a major tax haven,” Schultz concluded.

Big Oil and Offshore Britain

Beyond the UK itself, British territories around the world also play a central role in helping oil companies preserve their soaring profits.

Shell’s latest annual report shows eight different companies listed in Bermuda – Britain’s longest-standing territory outside this archipelago, and its tax contribution report says it has £1.8 billion ($2.33 billion) in capital there.

In addition, The Shell Overseas Contributory Pension Fund, estimated to own assets worth around $5 billion, is registered on the island.  Shell employs only three people there. Similarly, the conglomerate has seven companies registered in the Cayman Islands, also a British Overseas Territory.

This is, however, piddling, compared to the company’s use of the Bahamas. According to its own 2024 tax contribution report, Shell declared revenue of $33 billion in the tiny Caribbean country, which has no known oil or gas reserves. That’s 11% of its global revenue. The company employs just 45 people there.

The Bahamas has been an independent country since 1973, having become a tax haven while still a British colony; it remains part of the British offshore network. It retains important constitutional connections to the UK – including that Charles is its king, and legal appeals are, technically, to the king and, in practice, to the judicial committee of the Privy Council.

Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory. In an interview with this reporter for his forthcoming book Abolish Westminster, Gibraltar’s business minister explained how the peninsula’s various links to the UK are crucial to its ability to attract businesses. It can be exclusively revealed that one key fact he cited – something he said they often advertise to potential investors – is that the highest court of appeal there is also the judicial committee of the Privy Council.

If business deals go wrong, he said, investors are reassured by knowing that their cases will be heard in London, by British judges. In other words, while the Bahamas is an independent country, Shell’s multibillion-dollar presence there is ultimately protected by a British court. And it seems likely that this is an important reason why Shell is there.

BP has three subsidiaries in the British Virgin Islands, and part-shares of nine companies registered in the Cayman Islands.

Related reading: Trump Went to War With Iran to ‘Seize Oil’ as US Shale Enters Major Decline

Foreign Oil Companies in Britain's Tax Havens

While being based in London gives easy access to the lawyers and accountants who are generally most fluent in the complexities of how to use Britain’s panoply of offshore options, non-British oil companies also make use of offshore Britain to protect their profits – along with their capacity to incinerate the planet.

For example, as Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, has sought to raise capital in recent years, it has made extensive use of the Cayman Islands.

The US oil giant Chevron has an address in Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda – Chevron House – at which multiple of its subsidiaries are registered.

Of the world’s top ten offshore oil rig contractors (as ranked by the maritime news site Baird Maritime), three are registered in Bermuda.

Valaris, the offshore drilling company with the world’s biggest fleet of oil rigs, is registered in a building two minutes’ walk from Chevron House.

Seadrill and Borr Drilling are registered in buildings just down the road.

Four of the world’s ten biggest oil tanker companies are also registered in Bermuda. One of them, DHT Holdings, ranked as the sixth biggest by the website marine-digital.com, is headquartered at Clarendon House, the same address as Valaris.

SFL, ranked as the ninth biggest oil tanker company, and Frontline, the sixth biggest, are both registered in another building a five-minute walk away, while the second biggest oil tanker firm, Teekay Corp, also has its registered address nearby.

Stellar, a major captive insurance company owned by Saudi Aramco, is listed at Clarendon House, while Everen Ltd, a specialist insurance company for the oil industry, is another entity with its base in Hamilton.

In total, in a 25-minute walk through central Hamilton, you can take in the legal headquarters of three of the world’s ten biggest oil drilling contractors, four of the ten biggest oil tanker companies, multi-billion-pound hubs of both Chevron and Shell, and the in-house insurance provider of the world’s biggest oil company.

And, on your walk, you would pass the HQs of untold numbers of other firms outside the top ten in each of these elements of the oil industry. Hamilton has a population of about a thousand, making it about the same size as a large village in the UK. There is surely no other village on Earth so profoundly involved in heating the planet.

Many British jurisdictions – including the UK itself and many of its Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies – allow ships to register in their jurisdictions as their home port. They are collectively organised as the Red Ensign Group, which lists the world’s ninth largest shipping fleet.

Particularly significant here is the Isle of Man, which, according to the group’s website, “currently has more than 16 million gross tons of shipping on its register, of which more than 50% are tankers”. On its own, the Isle of Man has the world’s 18th largest trading fleet – ahead of the USA and Russia – with the UK 24th and Bermuda 35th.

Related reading: Kemi Badenoch Campaigns For North Sea Drilling at Company Owned by Oil and Gas Executive Who Donated £250,000 to the Conservatives

The Great British Extraction Alliance

The oil industry shares this offshore infrastructure with other major extractive industries. The coal mining giant Glencore has its headquarters in a low-tax Swiss canton, and the company’s press office says that it is tax resident there. But the Tax Justice Network argues that Glencore’s parent company, Glencore plc, is registered in Jersey.

Investigations have previously shown that the coal mining giant Adani made extensive use of the British Virgin Islands. And the Australian mining conglomerate BHP has companies registered in multiple different British offshore territories, including the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Guernsey, Jersey and the UK itself.

A spokesperson for BHP said that their “tax, royalty and other payments to governments” in the 2025 financial year totalled $10.4 billion, 65% of which was paid in Australia. “Our global adjusted effective tax rate in FY2025 was 37.2%. Once royalties are included, our FY2025 rate increases to 44.6%,” they added, emphasising a “long-standing commitment to transparency”.

Minimising tax bills is likely a significant motive for many of these companies. But these offshore jurisdictions provide other benefits, including lax regulation, and secrecy.

As Schultz and a colleague pointed out in a recent report, the lack of transparency means that banks that publicly claim not to be funding fossil fuel projects can funnel money into projects registered in these jurisdictions, leaving researchers unable to verify any claims that they have cleaned up their investments. This practice has been dubbed “greenlaundering”.

There is no suggestion that any of the companies listed here have broken any laws. With the exception of Glencore and BHP, none of the companies above responded to an invitation to comment.

This investigation is part of a series on big oil and the British state. The full essay is available on abolishwestminster.substack.com. The previous two are “How British undemocracy lets big oil shape our trade policy – and drive the climate crisis;” and “How the British military props up big oil”. Look out for the next two – on the British legal system, and British foreign policy, in the coming weeks.

William Jackson, who is listed as standing for the party in North Harrow in London, repeatedly posted messages to non-white British MPs of Asian origin, demanding that they leave the country, or be deported.

The messages, which were sent in reply to posts on Elon Musk’s X platform, include:

• Multiple posts telling Apsana Begum MP, who was born in London, to “go back to Bangladesh”

• Posts telling Lancashire born Adnan Hussain MP that “we need to bully you back to Pakistan”

• Posts telling Zarah Sultana, who was born in Birmingham, to “go back to Pakistan” and calls for her to be deported

• A post telling the Bedfordshire-born Labour MP Jeevun Sandher that he is not British

• A post telling the Bradford-born Labour MP Imran Hussain that he is also not British.

• Posts suggesting that the British boxer Anthony Joshua and the singer songwriter Dua Lipa are not British.

• A reply to a post appearing to show a black woman committing a crime, with the response "windrush working out well then"

Jackson was selected by the party to stand for election in Harrow, which is one of the most diverse boroughs in the country.

His posts appear to overwhelmingly target British politicians of Asian origin. At the time of the last census, 45% of Harrow's residents listed themselves as being British Asian - with a number of them also being represented among the Conservative party's elected councillors in the borough.

Among the posts responded to by Jackson, include one by the Shadow Lord Chancellor Nick Timothy, which shared an image of a voter communication sent by Tower Hamlets Council in Urdu, to which Jackson replied: "photocopy and give to your 700 cousins that live in a two bedroom flat".

Timothy recently hit the headlines after posting a series of Tweets suggesting that the annual Iftar celebrations in London's Trafalgar Square were an "act of domination" by Muslims.

The Shadow Minister was defended by Badenoch, who said he had been defending "British values".

Responding to Byline Times' investigation, Labour demanded that Badenoch sack her candidate for North Harrow.

“These remarks are vile, racist and utterly disqualifying. Telling British MPs to ‘go back to Pakistan’ is naked racism, full stop," a Labour London spokesperson said.

“Anyone who speaks like this is unfit for public office. The people of North Harrow will be furious that a candidate with these views is seeking to represent them.

“Kemi Badenoch cannot hide behind silence. She must sack this candidate immediately.”

A Conservative spokesperson said Jackson had been suspended.

"These apparent comments are wholly unacceptable, and this individual has been suspended from the Conservative Party pending an investigation.

“Whilst this process is rightfully confidential, the Party has withdrawn support from their campaign with immediate effect.”

Particularly affected is Reform UK's defeated Gorton & Denton candidate, and GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin, who is listed as a visiting fellow for Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC).

MCC is the Hungarian state-funded body which has been branded a "propaganda unit" for the country's ousted right-wing authoritarian leader and his Fidesz party.

Under Orbán, MCC was accused of morphing from a standard educational institution to an international mouthpiece, and his party transferred enormous sums to the organisation – assembling a cross-border network of EU-sceptic and Fidesz-friendly 'fellows'.

"The combined endowment was valued at a whopping $1.7 billion: nearly 1% of Hungary's Gross Domestic Product," Democracy for Sale reported. MCC hosts regular conferences on how to 'save' the West from immigration and liberalism.

Despite the defeat, Goodwin is scheduled to speak on a panel today (13th April) on "how mass migration is shaping the UK" at an MCC venue in Budapest. It may be the last such event for some time if Tisza, which secured a landslide in Sunday's elections, overhauls the institution as planned.

As non-profit campaigners Good Law Project noted in February, visiting fellows at MCC are reportedly paid between €5,000 and €10,000 per month – "plus housing, office space, health insurance" and other expenses. Reform has denied Goodwin was paid €10,000 a month, though did not reveal the precise figure.

MCC is also a major funder of the UK registered charity Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) – named after the late conservative philosopher admired by Orbán and honoured by the state in "Scruton cafe§s" around the country.

It "received more than £512,500 from the Hungarian government since 2023 – over 90% of its total funding" according to Democracy for Sale, with speakers at its events typically aligning closely with Orbán's anti-migrant conservative worldview.

Spectator editor and former minister Michael Gove and Reform UK's policy chief Prof James Orr are trustees of RSLF. The charity's funding may now be called into question, as it is likely to come under close scrutiny by Magyar's new administration.

Tisza's Plans for MCC

The party's manifesto stated: "We will investigate the corruption scandals and clear legal violations of recent years (e.g. long-term concessions, government propaganda spending…transactions of the MCC, support for pseudo-NGOs, Hatvanpuszta estate, castles, and land deals."

It also pledged: "We will recover the state assets granted to the MCC and end the practice of political network-building with public funds."

Tisza's platform committed to "recover stolen public assets" handed to Matthias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), adding that "under the guise of talent promotion [it] builds the political and ideological base of the ruling parties using public money."

"Taxpayers' funds must be spent exclusively on education, research, and genuine merit-based talent development." Doing so would, Tisza pledged, "draw a clear line between education and propaganda."

"The state must not maintain or finance any institution whose operation is determined by party-political objectives, loyalty expectations, or ideological selection. State-funded talent promotion must be open, pluralistic, and professionally accountable."

Related reading: Nigel Farage Advisor Tied to Russian Oil Profits Via Orban-Backed Influence Operation

Goodwin's Speeches

There is no suggestion of illegality on the parts of UK recipients of MCC's largesse. Neither Gove nor Orr are paid as trustees of RSLF, according to the charity's accounts. However, Goodwin's receipt of funding from MCC, an organisation accused of being the international propaganda wing of Orbán's Fidesz party, has been highlighted by Good Law Project as a foreign interference risk.

In December 2025, Goodwin gave a speech to MCC Brussels on "the revolution the elites never saw coming". In it, he lambasted as "deeply concerning" the prospect that Britain's "white British majority will officially become a minority among the under 40s" by 2063.

He also railed against Britain supposedly becoming more Muslim, claiming the Government had allowed in "nearly 200,000 unvetted illegal migrants, mostly from Islamic nations" and that "by the end of this century, 75 years from now, one in three of the under-40s in the United Kingdom will be following Islam." It is almost impossible to project demographic trends for 75 years ahead.

Related reading: Budapest Fights Back and Defies Orban’s Pride Ban With Largest Ever March

Goodwin also told the Orbán-controlled conference: "Power belongs with the people". But by February 2026, he would go on to claim his loss in the Gorton & Denton by-election was caused by "woke progressives, sectarian voting and Islamists," the latter of whom voted for a female Green party candidate standing for a party led by a gay Jewish man. GB News presenter Miriam Cates was also listed as a keynote speaker at the conference.

It is not known how much Goodwin has been paid for his MCC speeches or whether it falls within his existing expectations as a visiting fellow.

In another MCC speech on March 10th this year, this time in Budapest, state-dominated press there reported that Goodwin bemoaned the supposed collapse of Britain and a rise in the number of Muslims.

The speech was titled: "Reclaiming Power from Supranational Elites" and, according to the reports, saw him lash out at Government plans to tackle 'anti-Muslim hostility', alongside the appointment of a government 'Islamophobia tsar', "arguing that such measures risk restricting legitimate political discussion and further limiting freedom of expression." The conference was dubbed "Reclaiming the West," which is a consistent theme of Orbán and his party.

Questions for Goodwin

Byline Times put several questions to Goodwin: What conditions, if any, were attached to this foreign income? How does he square it with a supposed commitment to Britain's 'national sovereignty'? And was money a factor in Mr Goodwin's praise of Hungary as a supposed haven with "no crime…no homeless people…no riots"?

Goodwin and Reform UK were contacted for comment, but did not respond. However, in February, Reform told Good Law Project that Goodwin was a visiting fellow at MCC for a "brief period" and has also served as a senior fellow at Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House.

"It is standard for academics to hold fellowship positions at other institutions around the world," the Reform spokesperson told the authors, adding that the GB News presenter has given "paid talks to organisations around the world".

Related reading: The Orbánisation of British Politics: Farage and Braverman Headline with Hungarian Prime Minister at National Conservatism Conference

Reform reportedly denied that MCC paid Goodwin €10,000 a month and rejected any idea that MCC is "funded by money from Russia".

Other Brits listed as current MCC visiting fellows include Simon Cottee, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent, Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, Senior Research Fellow, University of Buckingham, spiked-online launch editor Mick Hume (who now edits the European Conservative), Michael Severance, Senior Research Fellow for the Acton Institute, Nick Zangwill, Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, and Richard Werner, Professor at the University of Winchester.

Byline Times has asked Tisza if the new administration plans to review any contracts with visiting fellows following the party's victory.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

What wasn't apparent until you came to hand over your precious credit card details was that £1 of the total was for a mandatory entry into a vague lottery, in which you could win a Nigel Farage adjacent lunch at a very unspecific time in the future. There was no opt-out clause, so, in essence, it enforced gambling.

A freedom of information request to Westminster City Council, which returned a few weeks ago, stated that Reform UK never declared the winners or the good cause that is necessary in order to run a Small Societies lottery. So far, so dubious.

Moving forward to 17 March of this year, Nigel Farage announced the latest in a long line of publicity gambits with a competition called 'Nigel Cut My Bills' and an accompanying website that, at the time, caused a bit of a stir among the data privacy community. The competition entry form asked for some curious details once you'd given them your particulars, phone number and, most importantly, email.

Stage two of the entry form presented you with some questions about how you voted in the latest round of elections and in which box you'd place your X in the forthcoming local council contests.

At the time, a spokesperson for the Information Commissioner's Office said:

"All political parties collecting personal information, including information for political campaigning, need to comply with data protection law. People who are concerned about how their information is being used by any political party can raise those concerns with the party, and if they remain dissatisfied, can make a complaint to the ICO. We're in regular contact with political parties about how they use people's data."

Related reading: GB News Hosts Reform UK and Conservative Politicians and Activists Posing as Ordinary Voters

As an aside, after several data validation tests on the website entry form's boxes, it completely failed across the board. Entries were able to be submitted to the competition using completely fabricated email addresses and phone numbers, by entering addresses and contact details from countries in Europe and further afield. Despite attempts with four real email addresses, there wasn't even a confirmation of entry, let alone a validation link to confirm the user was real.

From a web design perspective, it was a seriously lax and shonky piece of coding, but on reflection, it matters very little, if your only goal is data collection.

The competition closed in the last couple of weeks, with not much more of a mention until Thursday evening. All publicity battle stations were stood up, and Nigel Farage and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Jenrick appeared, with a giant cheque, at the door of a bewildered couple somewhere in the north – something of a cross between Ed McMahon and Jeremy Beadle.

A minor feeding frenzy occurred when the Reform UK Wigan branch posted that the competition had been won by two "staunch Wigan Branch Members", Ray and June.

After trawling through hundreds of comments and posts, a reply from the official Facebook page of Reform Wigan led, via Google Maps, to the winner's house in an upmarket corner of Wigan.

Related reading: James Orr and the Messianic Transatlantic MAGA Alliance Trying to ‘Save’ Britain

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, took over at this stage with comments and posts regarding the house, revealing that the winners were a mere street or two away from Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lisa Nandy. A photo surfaced of a couple sitting just in front of Nigel Farage at some sort of rally, and questions began to fly. Was this Ray and June? It was.

After significant amounts of online sleuthing and reverse image searching, several images of Ray and June Dibble at a rally in Fylde, Lancashire, were found. These dated back to May 2019 and showed the couple attending a rally of the then Brexit Party, alongside Farage, Ann Widdecombe and David Bull.

There is an account known as Reform Party UK Exposed that goes to great lengths to expose Reform UK's underhand dealings, and their contribution to this effort should not go unnoticed. They began a side project once the winners' names and location had been revealed and dropped another bombshell piece of the puzzle into this Wigan-centric story.

Raymond and June Dibble are the very same couple who nominated Lee Moffitt to become the Wigan branch chair of Reform UK.

There appears to be coincidence stacked on coincidence around this story. If you look at the video posted by Nigel Farage during the publicity shots, the camera pans around at a point, and the man in frame is … Lee Moffitt.

One more coincidence to add to the stack concerns the giant cheque presented by Jenrick; it was written up with a very specific figure – £1,758 to be precise.

In the terms and conditions of the competition – which Reform UK's Wigan branch had taken to calling 'Nigel Pay My Bills', and in which Reform went to great lengths to point out that it was definitely not a lottery – the prize offered was up to £3,500, to cover energy bills for the household, or the exact amount of the previous 12 months … to be provided by the winner.

The amazement and wonder shown on the doorstep by June was very convincing, but was it genuine?

In journalistic terms, either this ranks alongside the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences, or something is seriously awry in the setup of the story. Greater Manchester Police are now reviewing a complaint about the competition.

A request for comment has been submitted to Reform UK, but so far, nothing has been forthcoming.

The findings raise questions about how the channel acts as a potential springboard for prospective parliamentary and council candidates on the political right.

‘People’s Panel’

The phenomenon goes back to the channel’s earlier days. A Sunday show hosted by Camilla Tominey, first aired in January 2023, featured a “people’s panel”.

Announcing the show’s launch, Tominey said it would “take opinions from people across the country, not just the Westminster bubble”, and in the first episode, aired 8th January, Tominey described how “we feel that political shows take too long to preach at you as an audience and that you don’t get to have your say”, directing people to apply to attend through the GB News website. 

However, analysis of the “People’s Panel”, during the time it was active under the Sunak Government, reveals that it often platformed Conservative councillors and future Reform prospective parliamentary candidates, as well as an assortment of other individuals with ties to political parties, often without naming them as such in the show.

In one episode, shot in Birmingham on 15 January, interviewer Olivia Utley introduces a young guest, “Jay”, or Jay Chan, described by Utley as “a student” and by himself as “a young student and patriot”. 

But Byline Times has found that between August 2022 and May 2023, Chan was social media manager and graphic designer for Birmingham Young Conservatives, as well as having been a campaigner for ‘Liz [Truss] for Leader’. 

Between February 2023, the month after the episode was aired, through to present, her LinkedIn profile shows he also held various other party positions, including Deputy Chair of Royal Sutton Coldfield Young Conservatives and Deputy for Birmingham Young Conservatives respectively, and was formerly an assistant to Marco Longhi MP. 

On the same episode, Olivia interviewed “Mark”, a “business owner here in Birmingham”. The following year Mark Hoath, the businessman in question, would go on to stand as the Reform candidate for Sutton Coldfield. 

During the episode he described the biggest challenge facing the country as “the useless Conservative Government we’ve got at the moment”, before talking about how the NHS needs “reform” to remove “waste” in the organisation and bemoans “some of the woke projects it gets involved in”. He has since appeared as a commentator on GB News multiple times.

In another episode, from June 2023 and filmed in Leighton Buzzard, Patrick, or ‘Pat’, is quizzed on the topic of immigration, advocating for housing migrants in army bases “where there’s a security fence that surrounds those bases”, adding “we’ve got to protect our citizens and we’re not doing it at the moment”. He thinks that “we’re letting the world in with no consequences”. 

Not revealed to viewers is that Patrick Hamill is a former UKIP councillor, and at the time was an independent for central Bedfordshire. In May 2025, he joined Reform, stating “Only Nigel Farage’s party have the answers to the biggest problems facing the country.”

Speaking to Byline Times, Hamill confirmed that he was “an independent at the time of being on the panel and I do have my own opinions”, adding that “GB News knew I was a councillor and I was given specific questions to answer as I recall”.

Launch Pad

The trend of unnamed candidates appearing on GB News as ‘normal’ punters continues. As first reported byThe New World, in January 2025 the channel platformed one Kieran Mishchuk as an unnamed local man.

Presenter Patrick Christys failed to inform viewers that he was in fact Reform’s 18-year-old councillor for Milton Regis on Swale Borough Council. Mishchuk has now defected to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. 

Related reading: How Neo-Nazis Posing as ‘Ordinary Parents’ Embedded Themselves in Anti-Immigrant Protests

The channel has also featured guests and background audience members who have, following their media appearances, gone on to become political candidates representing Reform UK. 

Again, this is not a new phenomenon for the channel. Back in November 2021, during an episode of ‘Farage at Large’, the Reform leader took questions from local business leaders, including Paul Donaghy, a local Conservative councillor since May of that year. 

By 2023, Donaghy had defected to Reform UK, where he remains chairman of Washington & Gateshead South. He stood for Reform in the 2024 North East Mayoral election, and is understood to be standing in the May 2026 elections for Sunderland City Council. A recent Byline Times investigation found that Donaghy, who boasts of skills in business ‘compliance’ had ten firms struck off for breaking company law. 

(Paul, talking with Nigel Farage on ‘Farage at Large’, in Sunderland, November 2021). 

Donaghy declined to comment on-record for this article, instead referring Byline Times to the Reform Party media team. 

During an episode of Tominey’s People’s Panel aired on 19th February 2023, shot in Reading, correspondent Katherine Foster interviews three people, among them “George… a property developer from Wokingham” who was described as a “Conservative Party member”. 

Within a month, a Facebook group established for George Evans stated that he was “standing as Barkham’s Conservative Candidate in the upcoming local council election on 4th May’. While failing to get elected at that time, he successfully stood a year later as a Conservative councillor in the area. 

During the 2023 Spring Budget Special, filmed in Doncaster and hosted by Farage, Surjit Duhre was sitting behind him. Duhre was a 2019 Brexit Party candidate who would later go on to become Reform’s 2021 mayoral contender for Doncaster, and Reform 2024 prospective candidate for Doncaster Central. 

Similarly, one-time Reform 2024 candidate Andrea Whitehead, who stood in Leeds, also pops up in the background of a GB News segment from June 2023, filmed in Barnsley, prior to her candidacy, which featured Miriam Cates discussing “gender ideology” in schools with Nigel Farage. Whitehead was eventually dropped by the party after accusations of racism regarding her social media activity. 

It is not known how many Reform candidates and councillors have appeared in GB News audiences since its launch, but the channel has platformed a striking number of politicians for the party, even discounting the MPs who take a salary from the channel. 

Partisan Pundits

The political affiliations of some prominent GB News presenters, like former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, husband and wife duo Esther McVey and Philip Davies, or Reform Party MPs Lee Anderson and Nigel Farage are well-documented.

On-air presenters have also included Reform deputy leader Richard Tice MP and his Dubai-based partner Isabel Oakeshott and, until recently, former Brexit activist Darren Grimes, who is now deputy leader of Durham County Council. Grimes has said he “gave up a well-paid national media job because I simply couldn’t stomach watching my country being run into the ground any longer.”

Also featured prominently has been Alexandra Philips, who joined Reform in 2023, after previously serving as a Brexit Party member of the European Parliament for the South East of England from 2019 to 2020, and current GB News presenter Matthew Goodwin, who stood unsuccessfully for Reform in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election. Martin Daubney too, another regular presenter, was a Brexit Party MEP, and Michelle Dewberry is a former Brexit Party candidate.

While that is all well known, what has not been clear until now is that the channel appears to have been acting as a springboard for prospective Reform Party candidates, un-named Conservative councillors, and far right activists since at least 2022, a trend which continued throughout the 2024 General Election cycle, and today. 

In some instances, the candidates were in fact named as such. But those listed here were not, and had their views broadcast to viewers under the guise of impartiality.

While it is not uncommon for politicians to be given slots to air their opinions, many individuals have featured on the channel, apparent as ordinary members of the public, when they were in fact far-right party activists. 

Campaign group HOPE not hate noted in its most recent ‘State of Hate’ 2025 report: “GB News is increasingly the mouthpiece for Reform UK, something which now seems even more true than had been previously assumed.”

There is no suggestion those appearing deliberately hid their political affiliations.

GB News and Reform UK were contacted for comment.

An Ofcom spokesperson said: “Whether or not a programme participant’s political affiliation needs to be referred to on-air will depend on the nature of that affiliation and the context in which the contributor is appearing. Editorial decisions, including the selection and description of contributors, are matters for broadcasters, provided they comply with the Broadcasting Code.

“Our broadcasting rules strike a careful balance between protecting viewers from harm and preserving broadcasters’ and audiences’ rights to freedom of expression. Under these rules, broadcasters must also ensure that their programmes do not materially mislead audiences so as to cause harm. We apply these standards fairly and equally to all Ofcom licensees. When they fall short, we take action – as we have with GB News in recent years."

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on tips@bylinetimes.com 

It comes as the full slate of candidates running for the local elections in England is announced on Friday (10th April). The Greens, currently experiencing a polling surge under Zack Polanski, expect to make significant gains, particularly in London. The party is running more candidates in England than the Liberal Democrats, according to analysis by Election Maps.

At the party's elections launch in the capital on Thursday, leader Zack Polanski admitted vetting candidates had been a "real challenge." The highly decentralised nature of the party may be part of the reason.

The lack of national rules for candidate selections – non-binding guidance is issued instead – emerged as this outlet found a local Green Party has been accused of "serious procedural failures" in a candidate selection process.

The controversy exposes problems for the party nationally following its rapid surge in the past year.

Wembley Park Selection Row

A selection meeting for Wembley Park (Brent, London) held on 1 April is now the subject of a formal complaint from a would-be candidate who lost out amid claims of voting chaos.

In their response, the local Green coordinator admitted there were many flaws with the process, a position the national party agreed with.

More people voted in the first vote for selecting the local candidate – conducted using a Google Form – than were actually attending the meeting. That method was then abandoned.

Then the organisers took a virtual show of hands instead. That saw some members again vote twice. A third vote was then conducted using the online Chat facility.

In response to a complaint, the local party's coordinator wrote: "We recognise that the process was compromised due to members voting twice which led to the chair taking action."

No Binding Process

The coordinator added: "The Green Party does not have a constitutionally binding process for holding elections. The suggested process is long and could not be used this time as the deadline to submit paperwork to the council so that candidates could be on the ballot paper for May was one week away. The party has used in meeting votes (usually by show of hands) for most of our selections because of the time pressure."

He added: "We will be reviewing our method for voting in situations where a decision is needed quickly going forward and would happily invite you to be a part of this process."

There doesn't appear to be a clear-cut selection process that local Green parties must follow.

A Green Party spokesperson said they backed the coordinator, telling Byline Times: "The London Party is aware of the complaint and how difficult it can be for everyone involved when we have fantastic members put themselves forward and not enough resources to run them all as candidates."

Polanski told his party's local election launch in Deptford in South East London on Thursday that vetting so many candidates was a "real challenge, and I think it's important to be honest about that the Green Party is growing at such an immense pace, and whether it's our systems around our conference, whether it's about membership packs, and indeed, whether it's about finding candidates and making sure they're appropriate for their local communities, we're having to upscale everything that we do."

He added: "I also recognise that we're dealing with an immense amount of people very quickly, and so I won't be surprised if we have the odd candidate where we have to distance themselves from them."

Labour Defections and Fallout

The Brent selections row follows five Labour councillors defecting to the Greens there in December 2025.

Local member Hussain Sharifi, who missed out on selection, said: "The local party has now responded in writing admitting every procedural failure. They confirmed they have no constitutionally binding election process. They confirmed they have never used a secret ballot...They upheld the result anyway."

Sharifi, who identifies as neurodivergent, told this outlet: "This is not a local party dispute. This is a case study in how machine politics migrates between parties and how disabled people get crushed in the process."

The Green Party of England and Wales' constitution states: "all Local Party constitutions…shall lay down a democratic procedure for the selection of candidates to all levels of government."

The party delegates the design of that democratic procedure to each local party. Across hundreds of local parties, that can end up looking quite messy.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

Nonetheless, from climate action to new laws being proposed, the UK's Labour Government has been busy with some pretty major reforms, as well as some smaller initiatives that could significantly affect people's lives.

Most of these have been buried well away from the newspaper front pages. 

So here's a collection of some recent news from Westminster and Whitehall you may have not seen, as part of an occasional series looking at what the Government is really getting up to. 

This list is by no means conclusive, and it is up to you whether you think the news is either good or bad. Mostly, as you'd imagine, they are things the Government sees as positive developments – as we've picked out announcements which haven't been extensively reported on. 

However, the examples do offer a flavour of some of the things that we could, but aren't, talking about. The war in the Middle East is a clear reason behind some of these silences. But it doesn't account for all of it. 

1. Orgreave Inquiry formally launched

On 26th March, the Orgreave inquiry began investigating the violence that arose between police and picketing miners at Orgreave Coking Plant on 18 June 1984, resulting in 95 arrests and scores of injuries. 

The attacks by police – and the search for truth about what orders they were given and how they behaved – have been a bubbling concern of unions for the past 42 years. 

Those arrested were charged with riot and unlawful assembly, but all charges were later dropped after police evidence was discredited. 

The terms of reference have now been published, in consultation with the Chair, the Rt Revd Dr Pete Wilcox, the Bishop of Sheffield, and informed by his engagement with campaigners, policing bodies, and local representatives. 

The inquiry has formal statutory powers to demand evidence. Chris Kitchen, General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said: "Our hope is that once the truth has been brought to light, those directly and indirectly affected can finally start to move on." 

2. New rules on 'subscription traps'

A new Government crackdown on unwanted and misleading subscriptions has been launched which ministers say will save consumers around £400 million every year.

New rules, announced on 2nd April, aim to make it "simpler and far less painful to escape unwanted subscriptions, stop people being silently rolled onto expensive contracts and ensure that companies are upfront and open when selling subscription services." 

The hope is to tackle the cost-of-living by giving consumers greater control over their spending.

Newspaper groups have expressed concern that a new 14-day cooling off period for subscriptions will mean people can reap the benefits of their reporting for free during major events, before cancelling. It is the first battle the Government has engaged with the media for a while. 

3. Badger culling to end

Campaign group Protect the Wild says that environment department Defra has confirmed that badger culling will end once the final Cumbria licence expires.

The group says: "Back in 2022, midway through the cull, we released undercover footage from Grafton Pet Crematorium in Northamptonshire. What it showed was shocking. Badgers being carelessly handled and stored, with a complete disregard for basic biosecurity.

"This is a cull justified on the basis of disease control, yet those involved were behaving as if there was no risk at all. If these animals truly posed such a threat, why were they being treated like this? It raised serious questions, not just about standards, but about the entire premise of the policy…"

Related reading: From Coal Tip to Clean Energy: The UK Projects Turning Former Mines Into Renewable Powerhouses

"Now, we have to be listened to…it is so important that we recognise moments like this. This is progress. This is a win."

Groups like Badger Trust and Born Free have also been fighting the cull, alongside high-profile figures like musician Brian May.

Defra has been contacted for comment.

4. Species Recovery Programme funding doubled

The Government has unveiled the first five species set to benefit from the "largest ever amount" of Government funding for threatened species in England. 

The turtle dove, diamond-backed spider, Eurasian oystercatcher, red-billed chough and glutinous snail are among the hundreds of species set to benefit from new funding for recovery projects across England. 

The Government will invest £60m over the next three years – more than double the previous round of funding – into the Species Recovery Programme, administered by Natural England. A further £30m will be dedicated to fund species recovery on the national forest estate. 

Defra has also revealed a new campaign, "Wild Again: Restoring England's Wildlife", which will promote work to protect and recover native species. 

5. First Young Futures Hubs open

The first eight 'Young Futures Hubs' have opened in Birmingham, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, County Durham, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, and Tower Hamlets. 

It's part of the National Youth Strategy, with a network of 50 Hubs eventually providing joined-up services across mental health and wellbeing, employment and crime prevention. 

The hope is to "transform the lives of young people, cut crime and protect communities, divert them away from knife crime and anti-social behaviour, provide them with services and advice to combat social isolation, mental health and unemployment, and give access to safe, trusted adults." 

Related reading: James Orr and the Messianic Transatlantic MAGA Alliance Trying to ‘Save’ Britain

6. Green hydrogen

The Government is investing directly in a major green hydrogen project. 

A combined £86.5m cash injection from the Government and GB Energy will fuel a 1GW green hydrogen facility in South Yorkshire, with GB Energy taking a 10% stake in the firm behind it, ITM Power. 

Energy Voice reports: "GB Energy has secured a £40m stake in ITM Power as the Sheffield-based firm sets its eyes on building 1 GW electrolyser manufacturing line.

"ITM Power also secured a £46.5m grant from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). The funds will support the establishment of a new large-scale automated manufacturing line in the UK with an annual production capacity of 1 GW for its Chronos electrolyser stack, underpinned by strong order momentum and growing order backlog over the last 24 months, according to the firm."

It comes as the Government implements "streamlined" planning and regulatory approvals for Sizewell C nuclear site (hoping to power 6m homes and create 17k jobs) and the Lighthouse Green Fuels sustainable aviation fuel plant. 

7. New Election Protections

The Electoral Commission has issued new guidance to demand "respectful" campaigning ahead of May's elections, and making clear that AI-generated disinformation is unacceptable.

Candidates at elections have been subject to "unacceptable abuse" while campaigning in recent years, the elections body says. The Commission's most recent candidate research found that 61% of respondents, who were candidates at the 2025 local elections in England, experienced harassment or security threats during the campaign. 

The Commission is working with the police to tackle electoral abuse and intimidation, "encouraging all forces to treat allegations seriously and consistently."

Candidates will be directed to Government guidance about how they can improve their security and when to contact the police. 

Related reading: Greens Could Be ‘Kingmakers’ in Wales as Leader Reveals Power-Sharing Demands

The Commission has published a set of principles to guide campaigning at the May elections, with a focus on maintaining respect, safety and honesty during robust debate. 

It was created in response to recommendations made by the Speaker's Conference on the security of MPs, candidates and elections.

A spokesperson said: "The principles build on common themes across parties' existing codes of conduct, and aim to put in place a common, minimum standard of behaviour, to make sure that campaigners feel supported and protected."

8. Cost of Living Help

The Government is promoting some significant cost-of-living measures that came into force at the start of April, including:

• Two-child limit for Universal Credit and tax credits claimants scrapped – lifting an estimated 450,000 children out of poverty
• Prescription charge freeze in England (it's being kept under £10)
• National Living Wage rise to £12.71/hr; National Minimum Wage rises for under-21s and apprentices
• Average £117 reduction on household energy bills for the next three months, plus the £150 Warm Homes Discount for lower-income households
• Most inflation-linked benefits uprated by 3.8%
• Child benefit increases by 3.8%. Weekly rates have risen to £27.05 for the eldest/only child (up from £26.05) and £17.90 for each additional child (up from £17.25). It means an annual increase of £52 for the first child and £33.80 for subsequent children
• A new £1 billion/year Crisis & Resilience Fund launched to replace the Household Support Fund
• Healthy Start vouchers increased by 50p a week
• A state pension uplift of 4.8%, rising to £241.30 per week
• Universal Credit standard allowances given an additional 2.3% uplift

9. London: Youth Clubs brought back

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has pledged £30m for a new youth club in every London borough. 

The new 'Youth Lates' programme aims to "bring youth clubs back into every community after almost two decades of austerity." 

City Hall says it's the biggest ever investment in youth clubs by a Mayor and "will keep young Londoners safe and tackle the causes of crime." 

Youth Lates will offer young Londoners activities, mental health support, mentorship and food under one roof.

Related reading: Voters in Reform Seats Don’t Like Nigel Farage’s Plan to Rip Up Workers’ Rights

The Mayor's team says he is also providing "record funding" for tougher police enforcement as "one part of the solution to tackling crime." 

Youth Lates will feature activities that could include music production, gaming, sport and creative opportunities, alongside wider support for mental health, life skills, careers and education, after school hours. 

10. New Ofcom chair

Sir Ian Cheshire has been named as the Government's preferred candidate for Ofcom Chair. 

The broadcast watchdog has a big job on its hands – not only regulating broadcast media now but the internet too through the Online Safety Act (particularly around protecting young people), as well as new powers governing streaming services. And of course the question of what to do about 'Reform TV' – GB News.

Cheshire was Chair of Channel 4 until April 2025 but his background is primarily in business.  He has held FTSE 100 Non-Executive Director roles at Barclays PLC, including as Chairman of Barclays Bank UK, and others.

He spent 17 years at Kingfisher PLC, an international home improvement company, becoming CEO. He's also been CEO of B&Q and held senior roles at Debenhams. Cheshire's Government experience is limited but includes being the lead Non-Executive Director at the Cabinet Office. 

The New World reported that Cheshire's tenure at Channel 4 was politically fraught. Labour strongly criticised Cheshire's appointment as chair of Channel 4 in 2022, suggesting he was a Conservative plant: "This decision stinks of more cronyism," then shadow-culture secretary Lucy Powell said. 

While he was brought in by then-Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who was campaigning to have the broadcaster privatised, Cheshire is generally seen to have helped Channel 4's successful efforts to resist privatisation. Other candidates on the final three shortlist were veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge, the respected former chair of the Public Accounts Committee and now a Labour peer, and Sir Jeremy Wright, who served as Culture Secretary and Attorney General during the last Conservative Government. 

Related reading: Blow to Nigel Farage After Government Bans Crypto Donations in Urgent Crackdown on Foreign Political Interference

11. Employment Rights Act in force

Major planks of the Government's flagship workers' rights legislation have just come into force.

Provisions now in effect from 6 April 2026, include rights to statutory sick pay from day one of illness, paternity leave as a day-one right, doubled collective redundancy 'protective awards' (payouts), and whistleblowing protections for sexual harassment complainants. 

The TUC says up to 9.6 million workers in the UK are set to benefit from the strengthened statutory sick pay changes.

Employers will also need to create action plans around menopause and gender pay gaps. These will be voluntary from 6 April 2026 but will become mandatory sometime in 2027. Trade unions' path to official recognition by employers is being simplified, and unions will have access to larger workplaces to organise employees. 

A new Fair Work Agency has been established to protect workers and enforce employment rights, though the Institute of Employment Rights fears it lacks real teeth. 

12. £12,000 solar panel grants 

The i Paper reports that Ministers are "accelerating the roll-out of grants and loans for solar panels and batteries to provide households with cost of living relief in the wake of the Iran war." 

"Low-income families could receive fully funded installations of solar panels and a battery up to a cost of £12,000, while higher earners will get low or zero interest loans," the outlet revealed.

It's part of the £15bn Warm Homes Plan published by the Government in January, though the measures are likely to be sped up amid the fall-out of the Iran war. 

13. Clampdown on illegal tree felling

Are we finally going to see some proper enforcement of environmental standards? A Leicestershire landowner has been ordered to pay a record £268,751 fine for illegal tree felling. 

The landowner was sentenced in January but the story has only just come out. Motor Fuel Ltd pleading guilty to failing to comply with an Enforcement Notice that was served following unlawful felling of broadleaf woodland beside a petrol station in 2019. The trees were felled to clear the way for a future development proposal to extend the premises at the site.

Related reading: Deaf Residents in Reform Councils Say They Have Been ‘Shut Out’ as Party Replaces Collapsed Deaf Charity With Just £22,000 in Funding

The court ordered the landowner, Motor Fuel Ltd, to maintain the trees replanted for 10 years. If the landowner does not comply with this Court Restocking Order, they could face action for contempt of court, with further financial penalties or even a custodial sentence.

A Government spokesperson said: "This case is the latest example of robust action by the Forestry Commission to protect the nation's trees, woodlands and forests." 

14. Waste reduction in Wales

The Welsh Parliament (Senedd) has voted in favour of new regulations that will establish a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in Wales from October 2027. 

Officials there say the decision marks "another important step in Wales' journey towards a circular economy and tackling litter." 

A Deposit Return Scheme works by adding a small deposit to the price of drinks in eligible containers when they are bought. Members of the public will get that money back when they return the empty container to a designated return point, such as a machine in a supermarket or shop. The containers are then collected and recycled or reused, keeping valuable materials out of landfill and off the streets.

It will be the only deposit return scheme in all the four nations to include glass bottles. Other schemes across Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland are also set to launch in October 2027. 

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

What once powered communities through fossil fuels – an extremely slow and toxic form of solar power, in a way (the fossilised plant matter was, after all, given life by the sun) – will now utilise the sun directly. The public – via the Government – is the majority shareholder.

The only problem for Brits: it's in Greece.

When I shared the story, it got a lot of interest. And some understandable jealousy. "Why can't the UK do this?" was one person's rather representative reply.

As it turns out, we are. But you probably won't have heard of many of the projects. I don't know why. But each of them are inspiring in their own ways. I've been researching where renewable projects are being built on former industrial heartlands, and giving them new life.

Coed-Ely Solar Farm, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales

Built on a reclaimed 84-acre colliery tip, a solar farm in Rhondda is now switched on and supplying electricity directly to the Royal Glamorgan Hospital via a dedicated power line. The hospital board tells me it will fully power their operations on the sunniest days, and 15% of their energy use across the year. Panels were fully installed by Earth Day, 22 April 2025, just a few months after construction began. By October, it was fully operational.

A spokesperson for the hospital tells me: "By sourcing electricity through this project the hospital benefits from greater cost certainty and reduced exposure to volatile energy markets, helping to deliver ongoing financial savings and allowing saved resources to be focused on patient care."

Gateshead Mine Water Heat Network, Tyne & Wear, England

Gateshead Energy Company – owned by the council – uses water heated underground in the mines to power thousands of homes. It's been operational since March 2023 and is the largest project of its kind in the UK.

Mine water, at 15 degrees C, is taken from drilled boreholes and passed through a heat exchanger which transfers heat, via a heat pump, into a network of underground pipes that supply hot water at 80 degrees C to over 350 homes and more than 25 buildings – including Gateshead College, the Glasshouse and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. There are plans to expand to 270 more private homes, a conference centre and a hotel.

A spokesperson told Byline Times: "Our prices are guaranteed to be 5% minimum below market prices…[It's] also very reliable and efficient, and the tariff means customers are protected from big spikes in their energy bills that tend to happen when you are wedded to volatile international energy markets." The solar park next to the heat pump building also means the machinery itself runs on 100% sustainable energy for several months of the year.

Miners from Poland visited last July to look at what could be done with former coal sites, and seemed inspired by the idea.

Lindsay Mine, Carmarthenshire, Wales

A mine water heat scheme became operational in March 2025, harnessing previously untapped heat from a mine water treatment scheme near Ammanford to provide low-carbon heating for a nearby business.

A spokesperson said: "Wales, with its industrial heritage and coal mining past, has recognised the potential of mine water heat, through its Heat Strategy for Wales, as a viable option to support a just transition to renewables."

Black Law Wind Farm, Forth, Scotland

Across 1,850 hectares of abandoned coal mine land, 88 wind turbines are generating vast amounts of wind power in South Lanarkshire. The site is an old opencast coalmine, much of which has been restored to shallow wetlands. It's been operational since 2005 — one of the first renewable projects of its kind on ex-mining land.

Related reading: Kemi Badenoch Campaigns For North Sea Drilling at Company Owned by Oil and Gas Executive Who Donated £250,000 to the Conservatives

Oakdale Wind Energy, South Wales

A 4MW wind farm at the old Oakdale Colliery in South Wales provides about 10GWh a year and annual carbon savings of around 4,400 tonnes. The two 130m turbines sit over Oakdale Colliery, which closed in 1989, and can power 2,400 homes. Another public-sector led reclamation project, and a success by all accounts.

Welbeck Colliery, Nottinghamshire, England

A 30MW solar portfolio now sits on the site of five former collieries — your archetypal brownfield land. Developer Anesco says the installations will generate enough low-carbon energy to power around 9,000 homes while saving up to 14,000 tonnes of carbon per year. Welbeck was the first site to come online in 2014, covering almost 32 acres with 44,160 solar panels.

Lochhead Open-Cast Mine, Dunfermline, Scotland

Now home to a 100-acre site of 80,000 solar panels and a large battery storage system, it's ready to power the equivalent of 15,000 homes per year. A second site at Cullerlie near Aberdeen uses 26,000 panels across almost 50 acres. Together they will deliver renewable energy equivalent to 20,000 homes annually. The Dunfermline project is going through final commissioning — seemingly another victim of Britain's grid bottlenecks — but is already generating some energy. I'm told they'll move to "100% of forecast capacity shortly" once the paperwork is signed off.

Related reading: ‘Nigel Farage’s Patronising Coal Mine Fantasy Says a Lot About What He Really Thinks of Working People’

Williamthorpe Colliery Solar Farm, Chesterfield, England

Funded by a £700,000 grant from GB Energy's Mayoral Renewables Fund, around 14,000 ground-mounted panels are due for completion in "Spring 2026". So hopefully very soon.

The 2MW solar farm will be council-owned. The former coal mine has been shuttered since 1970 and is now a nature reserve — soon it will provide renewable energy too, powering over 700 homes annually and saving the council more than £3m over the project's lifetime. GB Energy officials tell me its the only ex-colliery project they're supporting right now. At any rate, others are doing it without the need for public funds.

Holme Hall Quarry, Maltby, England

A planning application for a solar park at Holme Hall Quarry was submitted to Doncaster and Rotherham councils in August last year. Backers Infinis tell me they are hopeful of a decision in the coming months. "If approved, we would aim to begin construction shortly afterwards," which would likely take 12–18 months. Once complete, it would power approximately 5,500 homes each year.

"For decades, coal mines like this powered industry and local communities. Today, those same sites can support a cleaner, more secure energy system," an Infinis representative tells me. 

Solar sites typically require smaller permanent teams once operational – there will not be thousands of jobs in this directly. But the firm already operates a Captured Mineral Methane (CMM) facility at the former colliery, which provides more employment. 

Related reading: Conservative MP Helps Coal Mining Firm Sue UK Government in Secretive ‘Corporate Court’

Seaham Solar, County Durham, England

A proposed solar park near the former Dawdon Colliery would power approximately 11,000 homes each year and displace around 19,000 tonnes of carbon annually. It includes a voluntary community benefit fund of £20,000 per year over its 40-year lifetime. The application is awaiting a decision from Durham County Council and Sunderland City Council. "Subject to approval, construction is expected to take around 12 months, with first electricity generation targeted in 2027."

Also worth watching: new solar farms in Northumberland were set to power 30,000 homes, with the Bedlington site on a former open-cast coal mine and the Blyth site over former coal seams.

And in January 2024, then Mayor of the West of England Dan Norris announced a £1.6 million study to explore whether flooded coal mines across Somerset and South Gloucestershire — more than 100 of them — could heat over 100,000 homes via mine water heat networks. Unfortunately, Norris was arrested in April 2025 and stood down, and we are trying to find out whether this project is still live.

Top Tips

Former mine sites – and the waste tips that so often accompany them – can make pretty perfect locations for solar energy generation. The areas covered are huge and exposed. You can plonk turbines on top of spoil tips for increased elevation and wind exposure. And still use the land underneath for other purposes. 

Crucially, many sites already have the essential infrastructure — transmission lines and roads — reducing development costs.

But really, the political and moral dimensions feel most significant. The projects offer economic renewal to communities still bearing the scars of deindustrialisation. And they give us that pulse of power we all need right now: hope.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

In January this year, Orr hosted Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel in Cambridge for a series of his 'Antichrist Lectures', which he hailed as "the highlight of our academic year". He described the Palantir co-founder and Donald Trump's long-time backer as "a walking antidote to the modern multiversity". The next month, at a press conference launching Reform UK's "shadow cabinet", Orr was named head of policy and credited with "building networks of elite defectors".

As this Byline Times investigation suggests, Orr appears to have played a major part in the defection of at least three senior Conservative politicians to Farage's Party, as well as providing a pivotal role in the growing alliance between Trumpworld and the British hard-right.

Since becoming head of policy, Orr has refused to rule out replacing the NHS with an insurance-based system on the BBC's Question Time. At CPAC in Budapest, he talked about not just stopping mass migration but "thinking about how we reverse it" - presumably with some kind of repatriation policy. On his increasingly active and partisan X account, Orr has been weighing in on Burka bans and Muslims, the "reckless insanity" of net-zero carbon reduction policies, and many other hot-button political topics.

But how did a former lawyer-turned theologian become Reform UK's lead ideologue and political heavyweight on so many issues?

To understand that, you have to follow a covert combination of faith and finance, of evangelical doom-mongering and disruptive tech and media, from the two real kingmakers in right-wing British and American politics — the deeply religious and deeply wealthy owners of GB News and Palantir: Sir Paul Marshall and Peter Thiel.

Faith and Finance

An alumnus of one of Britain's top public schools, Winchester, and a graduate of Oxford University, James Orr was already on the well-paved path to becoming a successful corporate lawyer working in the "magic circle" of UK and US law firms, when, at the age of 24, slightly worse for wear at a 2003 New Year's Eve party, he asked for signs that God existed.

The signs came when, among other things, he narrowly avoided a fatal skiing accident.

It was a road-to-Damascus moment. But as Orr himself admits, it would not have been enough unless he had found a community – his commitment "probably would've disappeared quite quickly had I not been welcomed into an extraordinary church in London, Holy Trinity Brompton".

Orr had luckily stumbled across the phenomenon of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) church, and one of Britain's most prolific and important political donors, Sir Paul Marshall.

As James Bloodworth has examined in Byline Times, HTB is not an ordinary parish church but the cradle of an evangelical revolution.

A Victorian gothic revival building "in one of London's wealthiest neighbourhoods… it functions simultaneously as a spiritual home and a social hub – a place where theology and networking merge seamlessly".

Related reading:

In the 1980s, HTB launched the Alpha Course, which has since grown into one of Christianity's most successful evangelistic tools, reaching tens of millions worldwide through small-group discussions on faith basics.

Of the Alpha course, Orr has said: "I think the warmth of the welcome of that church family was so intense and so real for me, that I just couldn't deny that I'd stumbled on the truth."

A similar revelation seems to have happened to Paul Marshall, co-founder of the Marshall Wace hedge fund, and now one of Britain's biggest media moguls with his ownership of broadcaster GB News, the Unherd website, and the Spectator magazine.

Having lost his Christian faith after leaving Oxford University, Marshall found it again by attending the Holy Trinity Brompton and the Alpha Course in the late 1990s.

For the next decade or so, as Orr studied for an MPhil and then a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University, Marshall's hedge fund — now with more than £70 billion assets under management — grew along with his political influence.

Marshall became a major architect of Liberal Democrat policies and a co-author of the Orange Book manifesto, the bible of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government of 2010-2015.

During the Coalition, Marshall forged a connection with the then Education Secretary Michael Gove (now Editor of the Spectator) after setting up the ARK charity of independent academy schools.

Meanwhile, Orr was a beneficiary of Marshall's other philanthropic largesse as he progressed from HTB through the St Paul's Theological Centre (SPTC) at St Mellitus College.

Paul Marshall was a founder member of St Mellitus, one of the Church of England's largest and most influential theological training institutions, with HTB at its institutional core. His charity has given at least £10 million to the Church Revitalisation Trust, the vehicle through which HTB plants churches across Britain.

After four years on a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University, Orr moved to Cambridge and was appointed a director of his alma mater, SPTC, in July 2019. Marshall joined him as a director a year later.

A Second Conversion

By 2019, the now knighted Sir Paul Marshall had undergone another conversion – from middle-of-the-road Lib Dem supporter to an ardent Brexiter.

According to Tim Shipman in his book All Out War, it was Marshall's intervention which persuaded Michael Gove to shock his old friend and colleague, Prime Minister David Cameron, and campaign to leave the EU. Gove's defection spurred Boris Johnson to follow him as the most high-profile leader of the Vote Leave campaign.

By the time the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016, Marshall had donated £100,000 to Vote Leave. Meanwhile, Marshall Wace's Global Opportunities Fund gained more than £50 million on the day of the Brexit vote with profits from short positions on UK stocks like EasyJet.

Marshall, who reportedly lives modestly, did not appear to spend all that disaster capitalism windfall on himself. With a personal net worth now of just under £900 million, his personal charity, the Sequoia Trust (chaired by Marshall, his wife, and their son Winston Marshall), has dispensed more than £80 million in charitable donations since 2015.

Apart from various evangelical and religious causes, the fund has donated to Policy Exchange, the think tank that helped shape Conservative immigration policy for a generation; and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative intellectual network which Orr has been part of.

Orr himself seems to have followed that path to political activism and radical right-wing politics.

As Byline Times reported five years ago, Orr became an advisor to Toby Young's Free Speech Union (FSU) and to the then Conservative MP Danny Kruger over Boris Johnson's 'Levelling Up' agenda.

His Oxford colleague, Professor Nigel Biggar, a theologian who chairs the FSU, was also an advisor to Kruger's project. Orr was appointed by the Government to join a Ministry of Justice advisory assessment panel.

Related reading: For Whom the Bell Curves: Advisor to Johnson’s Levelling Up Ally Hosts Race Science Extremist

At the same time, as director of Trinity Forum Europe – a self-described Christian charity that runs events at Oxbridge universities and in Whitehall – he invited the controversial author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, to speak at Cambridge.

After his progress from the cloisters to the corridors of Whitehall, Orr then followed Paul Marshall's move into the media.

Marshall founded the Unherd website in 2017 and became the major shareholder of GB News in 2021 before taking over the Spectator and bidding unsuccessfully for the Telegraph.

In Marshall's wake, Orr has appeared regularly in his media ventures, both as a podcast interviewee in Unherd, a participant at their 'Universities' outreach events, and as a GB News guest.

It was after an appearance on a GBNews show hosted by Andrew Doyle in 2022 that actor and comedian John Cleese was introduced to Orr.

Cleese told Byline Times he was then invited to discuss religion in Cambridge for approximately 150 students.

After the lecture, Cleese said he was taken on an intimate tour of Orr's new base in Cambridge, which he and his wife have called his "Conservative Kibbutz" on the River Cam: The Moorings.

Another Cambridge Analytica

It is not known quite how Orr entered the orbit of one of Donald Trump's major donors, the prime Silicon Valley 'broligarch', Peter Thiel.

Thiel was at this time heavily involved in defining the Trump administration's political agenda.

A co-founder of PayPal, board member of Facebook, and the co-founding CEO of data-mining behemoth and Pentagon contractor Palantir Technologies, Thiel was appointed to Trump's Transition Team Executive Committee after a $1.25 million donation.

By the time Orr was appointed as an Associate Professor of Divinity in Cambridge in 2019, Thiel's cultural investments in the English university town were already well underway.

Leading the transatlantic charge was Charles Vaughan, chief of staff at Thiel Capital, the venture capital fund that provides strategic and operational support to Thiel's investment initiatives, including lobbying the US Government over issues like energy and education.

By 2017, sources told Byline Times in 2021, Vaughan and his circle "were starting to think about putting together a network of people" and "engage with the elite universities and try to find clever people who were sympathetic within a conservative frame".

Related reading: The Transatlantic Triumph of Trumpism: Boris Johnson – A Plan Years in the Making

This was not the first time Cambridge had attracted the attention of Trumpworld activists and major hedge fund donors.

Trump's campaign manager, Steve Bannon, backed by the billionaire founder of the RenTech hedge fund, Robert Mercer, first co-founded the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica there and recruited the editor of Breitbart London during the tenth anniversary conference of the Young Britons Foundation at Churchill College in 2013.

Cambridge Analytica, which was closed down in 2018 after revelations it had unlawfully harvested the data of more than 80 million Facebook users for political targeting, drew on the expertise of Palantir employees to engineer its psychographic models of American and British voters.

In late 2018, Vaughan flew out to a dinner at the Hawks Club – an elite members-only sports and social club at Cambridge University – to meet members of a potential fledgling network who were discussing the possibility of securing a visiting fellowship for the 'alt right' intellectual Jordan Peterson at the University.

Several staff members of the Faculty of Divinity attended, including Michael Hurley, Douglas Hedley, and James Orr. It is here that Peter Thiel and Paul Marshall's commercial and ideological interests clearly begin to overlap.

Related reading: Cambridge Faculty of Divinity Ignores Demands for Inquiry into Peter Thiel’s Far-Right Influence

Both Thiel and Marshall are on the evangelical right, with Thiel growing up in a Lutheran family and regularly attending a conservative church.

But their financial interests also coincide. In August 2021, as The Nerve reported, Marshall Wace participated in a significant private investment round in Palantir Technologies in a PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) transaction worth approximately £108 million.

The Hawks Club meeting was also attended by Jordan Peterson in his capacity as the chancellor of Ralston College, a private, unaccredited liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia.

The next year, according to Democracy for Sale, Marshall's Sequoia Trust gave no less than £18 million to Jordan Peterson's Ralston College.

In the aftermath of the pandemic and the rise of the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, something seems to have gelled in conservative circles, with 'anti-woke' becoming a buzzword.

In response, Marshall donated £1 million to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a right-leaning international group co-founded by Jordan Peterson in 2023 to promote Western values, family, and policy alternatives to "woke" ideologies.

Orr was a member of ARC's advisory board and was on the initial organising committee when it launched its first London conference in 2023.

The National Conservatism – NatCon – conference, which Thiel had helped launch in the US, was then transposed to the UK in 2023.

Orr not only spoke at the first event about 'Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom'. As chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which received anonymous grants from the Donors Fund to which Thiel had donated millions, he helped organise it. Paul Marshall's son, Winston, was a regular attendee.

All The President’s Men

The clearest indication of the intersection between the two millenarian hedge fund owners, Marshall and Thiel, is Orr's friendship with the US Vice President JD Vance.

Vance was a protégé of Peter Thiel in an even more direct way than Orr was of Marshall.

As a young Ohio law student, Vance met Peter Thiel when he spoke to Yale Law School students in 2011. Thiel was already a distinctive and combative political figure among the Tech Bros. He had written, as far back as 2009, that he"no longer believed that freedom and democracy are compatible". His funding of right-wing causes, publications and candidates was becoming systematic, and his reliance on state contracts systemic.

Palantir, named after Tolkien's all-seeing stone, was by then already embedded in US intelligence operations and would become a major player in the NHS.

The two men got on. Thiel mentored Vance as an employee in his other Tolkien-themed fund, Mithril Capital, which invested in disruptive tech companies like Lyft, Airbnb, and Uber.

Related reading: Nigel Farage Advisor Tied to Russian Oil Profits Via Orban-Backed Influence Operation

Thiel then became the lead investor in Vance's new venture when he branched out and co-founded Narya Capital in 2019.

Orr told The Times that he met Vance "through a mutual friend" around this time but failed to disclose who that joint contact was. When asked whether either of them had provided the introduction, neither Thiel nor Marshall responded to Byline Times.

By then, Orr had returned to Cambridge as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity – a strange, Pac-Man-shaped building on the city's edge. He and his wife, Helen, a Anglican vicar, would soon buy extensive property on the eastern edge of the University town.

Beyond their rich hedge fund backers, both Vance and Orr had undergone religious conversions – the American law student to Catholicism, the British lawyer to Anglican evangelicalism.

Orr has said that he and Vance then bonded on long walks in France, and that he was "just a normal guy. At the barbecue, we didn't talk politics. He likes his beers. He was just having fun with friends".

Both framed their politics in the language of St Augustine's ordo amoris: ordered love, civilisational hierarchy, the proper arrangement of loyalties.

Loyalty certainly was shown by Thiel. Three years later, in 2022, he contributed more than $15 million to Vance's successful Ohio Senate campaign – a record for a single race at the time. He was also instrumental in introducing JD Vance to Donald Trump, who nominated him to join him on the 2024 Presidential election ticket.

Orr met Vance for lunch in the US Senate dining room shortly before Vance accepted the Republican nomination. "I did say to him, Your life is about to change forever," Orr later recalled. "And he smiled."

Vance would subsequently dub Orr his "British sherpa" – a trustworthy guide to the terrain of UK conservatism. Politico would call him" JD Vance's English philosopher king." Both titles, Orr has said, were bestowed tongue-in-cheek.

In the months following Trump and Vance's election victory, Marshall Wace's additional investments in Palantir had risen along with the stock and were valued at approximately £404 million.

Co-Opting British Conservatism

The US-UK fraternity deepened as Trump successfully ran for a second term in the White House.

Orr joined JD Vance and the Conservative MP and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman at the 2024 NatCon conference in Washington DC. That summer, Vance visited Orr's Cambridge residence with his wife, Usha, children, and in-laws on vacation.

Last year, as the serving Vice President of the United States, with all the attendant security and publicity, Vance invited Orr to the Cotswolds for a barbecue, along with the then senior Conservative MP Danny Kruger.

Thanks to an introduction by Orr, Vance also met another senior Conservative, Robert Jenrick, and had a separate meeting with Nigel Farage.

Related reading: Robert Jenrick Accepted £25,000 Donation from Firm Controlled by Sanctioned Oligarch

Soon, Orr was meeting up with Thiel directly. Rod Dreher, a regular guest at The Moorings and also close to J D Vance, claimed Peter Thiel was among its seminar speakers.

As DeSmog reported, Orr interviewed Thiel at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium Feszt in Esztergom in August 2025, a right-wing Hungarian festival funded by Russian oil profits.

A few months later, Zia Yusuf, then-head of policy of Nigel Farage's resurgent Reform UK, announced Orr's appointment as senior adviser, and he took over their new think tank, Centre for a Better Britain.

"James is a brilliant academic, theologian, thinker," Yusuf said. "He has been a bastion of common sense and patriotism at Cambridge University... I believe he will have a pivotal role in shaping the future of this country."

According to The Telegraph, Orr's role would be "responsible for building networks of elite defectors from academia, business and law", creating what he described as "a party of second chances".

Jenrick, Kruger and Braverman – former senior Conservative ministers who had met JD Vance through Orr – would answer that second chance call and join Nigel Farage's Reform UK party the following year. Kruger and Braverman have both stayed or spoken at The Moorings.

By then, Paul Marshall's GB News was in lockstep behind Reform UK. In an investigation published in March 2026, the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger concluded that the channel had "essentially become Reform TV".

Farage has declared £585,000 in GB News fees since becoming an MP in July 2024; his company holds nearly 500,000 shares. Sir Paul Marshall has lost an estimated £100m supporting the venture.

The transatlantic ambition behind this network is no longer covert. In September 2025, Sir Paul Marshall flew to Washington to launch GB News’s new American bureau at a private members’ club packed with Trump administration figures.

Josiah Mortimer reported for Byline Times that the White House threw its “full weight” behind the event, with Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick among the speakers, and almost a dozen Cabinet members in attendance.

Marshall was reportedly close to tears as he quoted Churchill and appealed to the MAGA crowd: “We need you to come and save us. To rescue us.”

Less than two years after the Conservatives' election defeat, ‘Reform TV’ has merged with MAGA TV and cannibalised key parts of the historic party with the help of Orr, and the hedge fund millions of Thiel and Marshall.

But to what end?

Related reading: ‘America Must Save Britain’: MAGA-Mania and Conspiracy Theories Broadcast Nightly on GB News’ New US Show

Prophesying Doom

The culture and ideology of this transatlantic MAGA movement will be part of a further in-depth investigation by Byline Times. But it is already clear that, as Marshall and Thiel’s money and politics have converged, their concerns have escalated into something urgent and alarming.

From a survey of his private Twitter account,  Hope Not Hate and The News Agents revealed in 2024 that Sir Paul Marshall's views seem to have shifted much further right. He repeatedly liked and retweeted extremist content from an array of far-right and conspiracy theorist accounts, endorsing tweets that called for mass deportations and suggested a civil war between "native Europeans" and "fake refugee invaders" was imminent.

Such alarmist views have become an obsession with Peter Thiel, too, as he tours the world with his 'Antichrist Lectures'. In January 2026, Thiel delivered four of his End Times talks in a succession of private, invite-only, off-the-record events at St Catharine's College's Ramsden Room in Cambridge, hosted by Orr.

So the story of Dr James Orr, the lawyer turned theologian, sits at the centre of a clandestine transatlantic nexus of faith, finance, think tanks, seminars and seminaries, media companies and conference events — and an apparently catastrophic view of politics.

In our next article in the series, we will be revealing some of the apocalyptic theology of this influential Anglo-American religious alliance.

In the meantime, for all GB News’ talk of national pride and Orr's 'Better Britain' religiosity: for all Reform UK's disavowal of foreign migration and common sense patriotism, the disruptions of global big tech and international disaster capitalism of hedge funds seem to speak louder than anything.

Coming Next: A Dark Enlightenment: The Secret History of the Moorings - Clandestine Cambridge Societies and the ‘Attractions Of Naziism’

This article was corrected on 7 April to clarify that Dr Orr was trained as a theologian at St Mellitus College but not ordained as a priest.