Priti Patel

Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel Has Ties to Group Behind ‘Extreme’ Trump Agenda

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Original article by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

Conservative MP Priti Patel speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2021. Credit: GB News / Facebook

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint proposes sweeping anti-climate policies.

New Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel earlier this year welcomed into Parliament a radical U.S. organisation behind Donald Trump’s hard-right plan for a second term as president. 

As reported by DeSmog, Conservative MP Patel met with Kevin Roberts and Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation in March, praising the pair on her Facebook page as “our friends across the pond” who stand for “Conservative values and beliefs at home and abroad”. 

Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation, while Gardiner is the director of its ‘Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom’. 

The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, which proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. 

Project 2025 has been accused of being “extreme” and “authoritarian” for setting out a plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump. The agenda also proposes radical tax cuts, and a crackdown on reproductive rights. 

On Wednesday (6 November), following Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Roberts sent an email on behalf of the foundation, saying that: “starting now, we will execute our plans to dismantle the administrative state.” 

At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House.

Patel also gave a speech about national security to the Heritage Foundation, hosted by Gardiner, in November 2021. Patel was at the time serving as home secretary, and her address was published on the UK government website. 

This news comes as the Conservative Party realigns itself after the election of new leader Kemi Badenoch, positioning itself as having better relations with the incoming Trump administration. 

In her first Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) this week, Badenoch called on Labour not to oppose a Trump address to Parliament, and asked whether Foreign Secretary David Lammy had apologised to the Republican for labelling him as a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” in 2020.

Patel was appointed to Badenoch’s new shadow cabinet earlier this week, alongside Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, who also has ties to the Heritage Foundation. 

In February, Jenrick – who came second in the recent Tory leadership election – gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC entitled, “Securing Sovereign Borders in an Age of Mass Migration”.

Project 2025 proposes new sweeping restrictions on immigration into the U.S., while setting the foundations for mass deportations – a key promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign. 

After being introduced by Roberts, Jenrick praised the foundation, and described meeting with and learning from Heritage while working as an intern for Condoleeza Rice, who served as secretary of state under Republican President George W. Bush. 

Jenrick also praised the event’s co-host Gardiner, whom Jenrick described as “the special relationship made flesh”. He said Gardiner, who writes a regular column for the Daily Telegraph, “creates links between conservatives here and in the UK”. 

As revealed by Democracy For Sale and Byline Times, Donald Trump and U.S. Republican campaigns received more than $45 million (£35 million) from donors who have funded the influential network of hard-wing Tufton Street think tanks in the UK. 

“That senior Conservatives would take time out to travel halfway around the world to give talks at a pro-Trump think tanks is very revealing,” said Peter Geoghegan, editor of Democracy For Sale. “We need to be aware that the dark money that fuelled the likes of the Heritage Foundation is washing up in Britain, where secretive Tufton Street think tanks refuse to declare their donors but take millions from pro-Trump U.S. conservatives.”

A Heritage Foundation spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Project 2025 is a coalition of conservatives who wrote ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ which was published in April 2023, before any candidate declared a run for office. Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign.”

Project 2025 and Climate Denial

Project 2025 proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation of the oil and gas industry. 

Speaking at an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Hungarian Danube Institute in September, key Trump ally Robert Wilkie – who served as U.S. veterans’ affairs secretary from 2018 to 2021 – confirmed that his former boss would “kill” climate budgets. 

The Heritage Foundation received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to the fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

The Heritage Foundation has disputed these figures, though has not offered its own calculations. A spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not.”

At a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, Nile Gardiner said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda”. He added: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”

As DeSmog has reported, Kemi Badenoch has regularly criticised the UK’s green ambitions, describing herself as a “net zero sceptic” during her Conservative conference speech in October. 

During the leadership contest, Badenoch published a 40-page manifesto that cited the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a U.S. group led by former advisors to Trump, which has likened climate science to believing the earth is flat. 

Jenrick has also attacked net zero policies and has advocated for increased fossil fuel extraction, including the development of new coal mines. 

Original article by Sam Bright and Adam Barnett republished from DeSmog.

Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. Second version, corrected text.
Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels. Second version, corrected text.
Continue ReadingShadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel Has Ties to Group Behind ‘Extreme’ Trump Agenda

Climate Denial Funder Pumps Another £30,000 into Tory Leadership Race

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Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Conservative MP James Cleverly. Credit: Andy Taylor / Home Office (CC BY 2.0)

Tory peer and major party donor Michael Hintze has funded the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Conservative Party leadership candidates have received tens of thousands in donations from a funder of the UK’s main climate science denial group. 

The latest register of MPs’ interests shows that James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat each received £10,000 in August from Lord Michael Hintze, a Tory peer who is one of the few known funders of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

Hintze, who has donated more than £4 million to the Conservatives since 2002, also donated £10,000 in August to leadership hopeful Priti Patel, who was voted out of the contest by Tory MPs this week. Tugendhat also received £3,000 from Hintze in December. 

The GWPF actively campaigns against the government’s climate policies and rejects established science on rising temperatures, calling carbon dioxide a “benefit to the planet”. 

Lord Hintze has said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity over the past century”, but “all sides must be heard” on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.

Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

The IPCC has stated that we are in the midst of “widespread and rapid [changes] … unprecedented over many centuries, to many thousands of years”.

Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers. 

Cleverly, Tugendhat, Patel are not the only Tory leadership hopefuls to have received donations from figures associated with the GWPF. DeSmog revealed in August that Kemi Badenoch had received £10,000 towards her campaign from Neil Record, a millionaire Tory donor and chair of Net Zero Watch (NZW), the GWPF’s campaign arm. 

Record is also a “life vice president” of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) think tank, which he chaired until July 2023. The IEA, which supports new fossil fuel production, has received funding from the oil giant BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018. 

Record has given money to both the IEA and the GWPF, which are part of the Tufton Street network of think tanks and lobbying groups based in Westminster campaigning for less government regulation, including on climate change.

The latest register of interests also shows that Record donated £2,000 to Tory MP Jesse Norman, who is publicly supporting Badenoch’s campaign.

As DeSmog has reported, Tugendhat also received donations and gifts worth £7,000 during the general election campaign from Tory donor and former party treasurer Lord Michael Spencer, who is a fossil fuel investor.

Spencer is the largest shareholder in Deltic Energy, which this year received licences to explore the North Sea for oil and gas. He also holds shares in Pantheon Resources, a UK company exploring for oil in Alaska.  

Spencer, who has donated £6 million to the Conservatives since 2005, previously told DeSmog that oil and gas investments are less than two percent of his portfolio.

Views on Net Zero

Tugendhat, Badenoch, and Patel have vocally criticised the UK’s climate policies. 

In a July interview on GB News, Tugendhat said the UK’s target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 was “not realistic”. Badenoch said in 2022 that it was “arbitrary” and last year suggested she would back delaying it, which would contravene the UK’s legally-binding climate commitments. Patel shares this position, and told GB News last year that net zero targets should be “paused” because the “public are not ready”.

Polling by More in Common and E3G during the general election period found that a majority of people in every UK constituency are worried about climate change. Some 61 percent of 2024 Conservative voters said they are worried about climate change, matched by 76 percent of Labour voters, and 65 percent of the country overall.

In his GB News interview, Tugendhat also defended the previous government’s support for new oil and gas extraction, saying: “Drilling our own oil in the North Sea is more carbon efficient than bringing it in from anywhere else.”

The claim that UK oil and gas has a lower carbon footprint than imports is “misleading” and can only be achieved “by comparing UK gas production to the very dirtiest gas imports”, according to the research and campaign group Uplift.

Cleverly has supported the 2050 target but has said he would favour a “competition-based approach” rather than using the power and funding of the state. However, the private sector has often acted to delay climate action. According to the non-profits groups NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, which surveyed 51 major companies, their median goal is to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030 – well below the 43 percent reduction identified by the IPCC. 

Cleverly’s leadership campaign told DeSmog that “We thank all of our donors for their support for James Cleverly as the best candidate to unite the Conservative Party and win the next general election.”

Tugendhat, Patel, and Hintze have been approached for comment.

Original article by Adam Barnett and Sam Bright republished from DeSmog

Continue ReadingClimate Denial Funder Pumps Another £30,000 into Tory Leadership Race

Human rights defenders demand shut down of detention center in the UK

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Original article republished from Peoples Dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre since its opening in December 2021 has been a site of regular protests demanding its shut down.

Dozens of human rights activists took part in a monthly demonstration outside the Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre demanding it to be shut down. The Derwentside Immigration Removal Centre, earlier known as Hassockfield, located in north east England is an only women detention center and was opened in December 2021 by former Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Original article republished from Peoples Dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingHuman rights defenders demand shut down of detention center in the UK

Priti Patel slammed over ‘law and order’ campaign video next to photo of Boris Johnson

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/06/priti-patel-slammed-over-law-and-order-campaign-video-next-to-photo-of-boris-johnson/

‘Hmm, but that bloke in the picture behind you broke the law, didn’t he?’

Priti Patel has been ridiculed after posting a general election campaign video on social media in which she talks of law and order, whilst standing next to a framed photo of Boris Johnson who was fined for breaking lockdown rules. 

The former Home Secretary was attempting to appeal to voters in the constituency of Witham in a video posted on her X account, in which she declared she is a “passionate believer of law and order”. 

In the video Patel said: “I have also been responsible for changing our laws to ensure that those who do the most terrible things, the most heinous crimes, serve longer prison sentences and I’m unapologetic about that because I believe in law and order and making the right punishment and deterrent to fit the crime.”

Hanging on the wall next to Patel, along with a Vote Conservative banner and a Union Jack flag, is a framed photograph of Boris Johnson. Patel was a key ally to Johnson and was rewarded in Johnson’s honours list. 

Not only was the former Prime Minister fined in 2022 for breaching lockdown rules but he was also found to have deliberately misled Parliament over Partygate and was part of a campaign to abuse and intimidate MPs investigating them, an official inquiry found. 

…

https://leftfootforward.org/2024/06/priti-patel-slammed-over-law-and-order-campaign-video-next-to-photo-of-boris-johnson/

Continue ReadingPriti Patel slammed over ‘law and order’ campaign video next to photo of Boris Johnson

Why it is essential that the UK’s shady think tanks reveal their funders

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Original article by Tom Brake republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

We know think tanks can shape government policy. But we often have no idea who is paying them to do so

openDemocracy’s Who Funds You? report finds think tanks raking in millions ahead of general election  | Getty

You don’t have to follow UK politics too closely to have spotted the names of a handful of think tanks cropping up again and again in the news.

There is little doubt these organisations exert significant influence. Just last year, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) was reported to have shaped then-prime minister Liz Truss’s disastrous budget.

And sometimes it seems like only hours have passed between the publication of a Policy Exchange research paper and the adoption and implementation of its content as government policy. This is perhaps unsurprising given even Policy Exchange says its “status as the UK’s most influential think tank is widely recognised”.

The influence of high-profile think tanks is also apparent in the revolving door between them and the government. The former CEO of Taxpayers’ Alliance (TA), for example, took up a job in Priti Patel’s office when she was home secretary.

So we know think tanks can shape public policy. What is often far less obvious, though, is who is paying them to do so.

openDemocracy’s annual Who Funds You? report, published today, assesses how transparent think tanks’ financial disclosures were in the past year, grading them on a scale from A to E based on how much they publish about their funders.

I should mention, at this point, that I am the CEO of Unlock Democracy, a think tank awarded an A rating (the most transparent possible) in the report.

The report has revealed that UK think tanks have raised more than £101m to influence public policy in the run-up to the next general election – £25m of which came from ‘dark money’-funded think tanks, which are opaque about funders.

Policy Exchange and the IEA were both awarded D ratings, the second lowest.

There is nothing in either think tank’s mission that indicates any requirement for high levels of secrecy surrounding their funders. So why are they so shy about revealing their backers?

Is it because the public and ministers might view any advocacy of slower action on climate change or accusations of ‘nanny-statism’ over limits on sugar, salt and fat in processed foods differently if their accounts revealed they were partly funded by oil or gas companies, large food manufacturers or private individuals with an interest in promoting deregulation or privatisation? Of course, they might not be. But that’s the point – we don’t know.

Or is it because much of the media might stop describing them, rather generously, as ‘independent’ if the truth were known about from where and whom they received financial support?

Or is it because pressure would build for Parliament to force these think tanks to register as consultant lobbyists?

Given the IEA, Policy Exchange, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and other think tanks have declined to take voluntary action to reveal their sponsors, it is time for the government to step in and require them to declare funders contributing over £5,000 a year.

The media could help by refraining from describing think tanks whose funding remains as murky as the waters in our polluted rivers as ‘independent’.

We would all then be better equipped to establish whether the exhortations of the most influential think tanks will help deliver ‘a stronger society’ or something far less attractive.

The full report is available at opendemocracy.net/who-funds-you/

Original article by Tom Brake republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.  

Continue ReadingWhy it is essential that the UK’s shady think tanks reveal their funders