Nativist Conservative MPs for Fossil Fuels versus Science, Education, Research, Analysis & Society

Interesting article from a science journalist at The Guardian on comments made about ‘woke’ science by the Tories in the UK at the Conservative Conference in  ‘Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories’ by Philip Ball.

However, this is neither unique to the UK Conservatives nor dissimilar elsewhere, but it is a long game strategy against grounded science, research and analysis, like Trojan horses to disrupt curricula and universities, why? 

It’s both protection for fossil fuels and avoiding climate science (Covid too) while denigrating centre right through left moderate attitudes and policies as e.g. ‘woke’, to energise older right (and too many left) voters including Brexit, Trump and now in Australia ‘The Voice’ Referendum on Aboriginal recognition.

The fulcrum globally is Koch Network think tanks found at Tufton St. London, of course the US, Australia and other parts including links via Atlas Network and in Hungary, Heritage Foundation partnered with Danubius Institute, sharing anti-EU and pro fossil fuels sentiments, shared with Putin’s Russia and fossil fuels oligarchs, also includes the EU’s regulation for environment and financial transparency.

Overall, like Covid and climate science denial, denigration of experts, analysis and universities, with the nativist Tanton Network that shares donors with Koch in the US, is used to deflect from climate science by highlighting immigrants and population growth as environmental hygiene issues.

The end game is more alarming with their and e.g. Murdoch media support for corrupt nativist authoritarian leaders and governments who deny climate science and humanity?

‘Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories

Michelle Donelan’s plan to “depoliticise” science with new guidelines on sex and gender research is a chilling move

The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.

Scientists do not seem too delighted to be defended in this manner. “As a scientist, I really don’t know what this means,” tweeted Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “This is totally shocking and is something I never thought I would see in the UK,” said Buzz Baum, a molecular cell biologist for the Medical Research Council.

What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.

You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity. On top of that, there are the complications of developmental and cognitive biology, which, among other things, can produce intersex individuals and conditions where, say, people with a Y chromosome can be anatomically female.

But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed. Arguably, this is an area where science can’t supply definitive answers to all the germane societal questions.

This is not a case of academic research being trammelled by an imposed ideology, but rather, of a range of differing views among academics themselves. Besides, rather than await clarification, Donelan has evidently formed her opinion already: she called guidance that data on sex should only be collected in exceptional circumstances “utter nonsense” and a “denial of biology”. What is the point of a review if you have decided already what it must say?

More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime. While that might sound a slightly hyperbolic response to a transparently desperate ploy to stoke culture-wars division, the principle is the same: a government deciding an approved position on science and demanding that academics toe the line.

Much as Donelan tries to position herself as a champion of the objectivity and freedom of science, this intervention supplies more evidence of the government’s distrust of academics in general and scientists in particular – it’s of a piece with Rishi Sunak’s assertion that scientists were given too much power during the pandemic. Witness the disturbing way this policy direction is framed. However contested and emotive this particular issue, it is hardly relevant to the large-scale practice of science – yet Donelan is seeking to leverage it to imply that all of science somehow stands at risk from “woke ideology”, as if the integrity of truth itself were at stake.

That is perhaps the most ominous aspect of this announcement. The creation of a fictitious, ubiquitous enemy to scare the population is indeed straight out of the fascist playbook. It was thoughtful of the Conservatives to drive this point home with the spectacle of party member Andrew Boff, chair of the London Assembly, being escorted from the conference hall by police on Tuesday when he voiced protest at Suella Braverman’s criticism of the term “gender ideology”.

The notion that science can be “depoliticised” at all, let alone by an agenda-driven political party, is understood to be nonsensical by those who study the interactions of science and society. Of course political agendas should never dictate research results. But the questions asked, priorities decided and societal implications of advances made absolutely make science inextricably tangled with the political landscape – not least in a controversial area like sex and gender. That entanglement can get messy, but no true democracy tries to control the narrative.’

• Philip Ball is a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

For more related blogs and articles on Climate Change, Conservatives, Environment, EU European Union, Fossil Fuels, Koch Network, Media, Science Literacy, Tanton Network and University Teaching Skills click through

Conspiracy of Denial – COVID-19 and Climate Science

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Trojan Horses – Ultra Conservatives Disrupting Education Curricula to Influence Youth

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

There are far more significant opponents of the single market than Johnson, but many concur with his anti-immigration rhetoric which was neither original nor temporal but deep seated Anglosphere eugenics i.e. dog whistling of refugees, immigrants, population growth, low income, women, minorities etc.. 

Such tropes were used to get the Brexit vote over the line to exit EU regulatory constraints on financial transparency, trade agreements, environmental regulation, security & intelligence sharing, work health & safety and labour rights; Russia and others share similar interests and reservations.

US or Anglo led nativism operates in a parallel universe with the, often fossil fueled, libertarian socio economic ideology promoted by The Republican or GOP, UK Conservatives or Tories and Australian LNP Liberal National Conservative Parties, along with many others in media and/or have influence e.g. climate science denial and blaming ‘immigrants’ for environmental ‘hygiene’ issues.

This anti-immigration ideology can be traced back to Thomas Malthus, Thomas Galton who developed ‘social-Darwinism’ and later Madison Grant, then fast forward to 1970’s ZPG Zero Population Growth, white nationalist John Tanton, then Tanton & Koch Networks’ symbiotic and codependent relationship and tactics, to keep the more enlightened centre right through left out of power.

In the case of the UK 55 Tufton Street seems to be the fulcrum of such transAtlantic links and rumours of Russian influence, via Koch Network think tanks i.e. IEA, Global Warming Policy Foundation now NetZeroWatch, TaxPayers’ Alliance and an alleged Tanton Network NGO cited in the article, Migration Watch. 

This suggests more than just Johnson, who is an enabler, but more deep seated ideology of the past promoting a nativist libertarian Anglosphere but opposed to liberal democracy and open society aka the EU, and in fact quite authoritarian when sole or SME business interests are ignored.

Article from ByLine Times:

The Single Market Taboo Won’t Last Forever

Martin Shaw 7 June 2022

Martin Shaw explains why a softer Norway-style Brexit was derailed by Boris Johnson’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and how the tide may be slowly turning

In his bid to retain power, Boris Johnson told Conservative MPs that his victory would prevent a reopening of the UK’s membership of the European single market which would follow his defeat. This was a reference to the proposal by Tobias Ellwood, one of his critics, to deal with the mounting problems of Brexit (plummeting trade, damage to agriculture, a looming trade war over the Northern Ireland protocol): “All these challenges would disappear if we dare to advance our Brexit model by rejoining the EU single market (the Norway model),” Ellwood argued. 

It has to be said that none of the other 147 MPs who voted against Johnson endorsed Ellwood’s idea. Tom Tugendhat, the leadership hopeful of what passes for the Conservatives’ ‘liberal’ wing, was one of the first to disagree, while Mark Harper, chair of the parliamentary Covid-deniers and another probable contender, slapped him down: “The UK voted to leave the EU. That meant leaving the Single Market and putting an end to freedom of movement. The end.”

Yet Ellwood is manifestly right. Leaving the EU itself ended Britain’s participation in the union of peaceful European democracies just when it was threatened by far-right reaction within and without. But it was leaving the single market which caused the most economic damage and created the intractable difficulties in Great Britain-Northern Ireland relations. Ending freedom of movement, one of the market’s four main pillars, has contributed seriously to these harms.

Why the UK Left the Single Market

Formally, leaving the single market was not a necessary consequence of leaving the EU; it was not on the ballot paper in 2016. In principle, it was possible for the UK to retain many of the benefits of European integration through the ‘Norway option’ which enabled non-EU states to be part of the market, an idea which Leavers from Nigel Farage to Johnson had flirted with at times, and which had been central to the only serious economic prospectus for Brexit. Yet this was comprehensively rejected by Theresa May’s government and lost out in the hung parliament of 2017-19.

Harper’s comments help explain why this happened, and why the idea of reviving the UK’s single market membership will arouse fierce resistance on the right. 

Ending freedom of movement was not most Tory Leavers’ original motivation; many prioritised undiluted national sovereignty and a surprising number the ability to make independent trade deals. But these were not ideas which aroused mass support. Instead, as Farage and UKIP showed over a decade, it was only when leaving the EU was linked to anti-immigration politics that it became popular. His argument was that the EU’s freedom of movement had allowed the mass immigration of East Europeans; his slogan ‘Take Back Control’ echoed ‘immigration control’. 

The key to understanding the single market issue is that in the referendum, the Vote Leave campaign led by Conservatives including Johnson and Michael Gove took over UKIP’s approach lock, stock and barrel – they even pinched Farage’s slogan although they kept their distance from the man himself. Under the direction of Dominic Cummings, they used extensive racist propaganda, strongly echoed by the Tory press, to mobilise a coalition of mainly anti-immigrant and outright racist voters and push Leave over the line. This development of the campaign was key to the intimidating atmosphere of its final weeks, which produced a wave of hate crime against Europeans, Blacks and gays as well as the murder of Jo Cox. 

May’s insistence on the centrality of ending freedom of movement. “Let’s state one thing loud and clear”, she said in 2016, “we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again.”  Her ‘letter to the nation’ in 2018 – “We will take back control of our borders, by putting an end to the free movement of people once and for all” – did not just reflect her personal views or her role in the hostile environment policy. Rather, the Leave victory transmitted this anti-immigrant climate of the referendum to the heart of her government. 

Theoretically, Leave’s narrow 52:48 win pointed to a compromise soft Brexit. But politically the single market and freedom of movement were the last things that May (or any incoming Tory leader) could embrace in 2016-17. Retaining freedom of movement would have split the Tories and incited a Farage-UKIP revival, while ending it divided Labour. Johnson agreed; it was vital for the UK not to ‘surrender’ on immigration, he said as he resigned from May’s government the same year, going on to attack Muslim women in his drive for power.

The anti-immigrant symbolism of Brexit, reinforced by the new restrictions which came with the exit from the single market at the end of 2020, led to a substantial reversal of EU migration to the UK. This was the right’s greatest victory in six decades of anti-immigrant campaigning. With May’s and Johnson’s help, Farage’s campaign had succeeded where Enoch Powell’s 1968 call to slow and reverse Black migration had ended in failure.

Continuing Resistance to Freedom of Movement

This victory certainly shifted the ground of immigration politics. Johnson took advantage of it to quietly dispense with the net migration target which was such an embarrassment for Cameron and May. Even the compensating increase which is occurring in non-EU immigration has aroused little political attention, with the hostile campaigning of Migration Watch seeming increasingly irrelevant. Indeed liberal commentators emphasise that attitudes to immigration are now more positive than they have been for a long time. 

As voters rue the Brexit bureaucracy that entangles them in all European contacts, while the losses of nurses, carers, airport and farm workers cause pressures that ministers struggle to explain away, could the time for rejoining the single market have come? There are, unfortunately, reasons for caution about such a conclusion, even if Johnson eventually goes. 

The weakness of anti-immigration attitudes has a lot to do with the disappearance of overt anti-immigrant campaigning and the fact that anti-immigrant voters believe they have won. 

The political racism of the right and their press has not gone away; it has merely refocused on the soft, visible target of helpless Channel asylum seekers. Have Johnson and Priti Patel got their electoral interests wrong by pandering to this with their outrageous Rwanda scheme? While public attitudes to immigration have softened, British Future’s polling shows that 45 per cent, disproportionately among the Tory/Leave electorate, still want more controls. 

Against this backdrop, Ellwood’s call may be a step too far not only for the Conservatives, but also for opposition parties which aim to appease residual Brexit supporters. Well before the referendum, prominent Labour politicians wanted to compromise on freedom of movement; afterwards, even the ‘anti-racist’ Jeremy Corbyn abandoned it along with the single market. Keir Starmer shows no interest in entering the new debate, while the Liberal Democrats, chastened by their 2019 failure, also seem wary. In choosing their candidate for the Tiverton by-election, they passed over members prominently associated with their pro-EU stance.

Rising to the Free Movement Challenge

Yet the road back to the single market cannot avoid the principle of free movement. There would be rich rewards in restoring this. Awareness of the restrictions that Brexit has imposed on British people is growing, while Europeans in the UK remain profoundly dissatisfied with the Settled Status scheme. As the failure of limited visa schemes has shown, European workers need more than short-term rights if they are to be attracted to the UK. Attitudes to free movement are much more positive when it is explained as a mutual benefit rather than a ‘threat’.

Since Johnson’s hold on power remains tenuous, the debate which Ellwood has re-ignited could find fertile ground in the coming months. However it requires a new boldness from liberals and the left. Campaigning for free movement will involve opening up the current balance of migration policy – a compromise on the far right’s terms – and confronting positions which have become entrenched in the political mainstream. To answer the objection that free movement merely advantages white Europeans, it must address the bureaucratic nightmares that the immigration and asylum systems create for non-EU migrants and refugees as well as those which have arisen from leaving the single market. 

There will certainly be vigorous pushback, but this is a debate which cannot be suppressed as the momentum mounts to remove not just Johnson but the whole discredited Conservative party in the next two years.

Martin Shaw is a political sociologist and author of Political Racism: Brexit and Its Aftermath (Agenda 2022).

For related blogs and article click through topics or links below:

Neo Conservative Rasputins? Putin and Dugin – Trump and Bannon – Johnson, Brexit and Cummings

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Australian Brexit?

US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism

Putin’s Russia – Dugin – Alt Right – White Christian Nationalism – the Anglosphere and Europe

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

The Beast Reawakens 1997 – Review – Radical Right Populism in Europe and the Anglosphere

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Of late UK investigative journalists especially centred round The ByLine Times and The New European have discovered the ‘architecture of influence’ at 55 Tufton Street, used to keep the Conservative Party in power, and achieving Brexit. This has been done by using US linked Koch and Tanton Network think tanks to produce ‘research’ and responses that support radical right libertarian ideology and white nativism (mutually inclusive relationship), whether eugenics or Anglo exceptionalism.

Of course it’s no coincidence that many similar think tanks, also under the influence or auspices of Koch and Tanton Networks, plus the Koch influenced Atlas Network; have very influential presence in the Anglosphere especially, i.e. the US, UK and Australia.

From The New European:

‘55 Tufton Street, SW1: The most influential address you’ve never heard of

It’s home to pro-Brexit groups and climate change sceptics. But just how much power over this government is wielded by the tenants of 55 Tufton Street?

James Ball 13th January 2021

There is, at most, a very short list of political addresses familiar to a UK audience. The most famous, of course, is 10 Downing Street, the cramped office, official residence and party venue of the prime minister.

A British audience will probably also be familiar with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is Washington DC, the address of the White House.

Far fewer will be able to name a third political address. If they can, it’s almost certainly 55 Tufton Street, which is strange as it has no official role in government life and isn’t home to any departments.

Instead, as the spiritual home (and often the physical base) of a loose coalition of nine think tanks and campaign groups – plus as a shorthand for a wider network less connected to that physical address – it has, through soft power and indirect influence, had perhaps more influence on the course of UK politics over the past decade than many departments and most political parties.

Now, as we look to the next decade, and several parts of the machine seem to be turning their attention towards climate change and the path to (or away from) net zero, is a good time to look at the history of the network, its tactical approach, and what it’s doing – if for no reason other than to try to make sure its future efforts are less successful than those in the past.

The first of the Tufton Street groups to really come to public attention was the cleverly named TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), which brands itself as a “non-partisan” and “grassroots” organisation. Its modus operandi was to consistently highlight apparent government waste, often picking issues with relatively small sums of money at hand, but which would attract clear public scorn and media coverage.

Unlike other think tanks which would conduct detailed policy research aimed at informing actual government policy, the TPA would aim squarely at the media, producing easy-to-digest briefings for which the stories would write themselves. Journalists, through a combination of time pressure and laziness, would find it incredibly easy to transfer TPA research onto front pages.

This media-friendly approach extended further: any reporter who has needed to get a reaction quote for a story on a Saturday knows that many press officers won’t bother to answer the phone.

This was never the case with the TPA – not only would someone always pick up the phone, but they’d also have a quote tailored to the exact story within 15 minutes.

People would look for reasons of chumminess, ideology, or the old school tie as to why some places get quoted more than others. The reality often comes down to who will reliably pick up the phone and deliver the goods. These media-savvy tactics were soon transferred more directly into changing British politics.

As one of their conditions for forming a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats secured a referendum on whether the UK should switch to the Alternative Vote system.

TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive Matthew Elliott became the director of the cross-party NOtoAV campaign, and adopted a playbook that became very, very familiar in an even higher-profile referendum a few years later. The campaign came up with a highly dubious figure as to the cost of switching to AV, settling on £250m, a total debunked by numerous fact-checkers as highly inflated.

This inflated number was then deployed against a series of emotional images, including veterans and even premature babies in a neonatal ward. The latter had the slogan “She needs a maternity unit, not an alternative voting system.”

The high-minded but hapless Yes campaign, faced with the task of both explaining a new voting system and persuading the public to care about it, was outgunned entirely: AV was defeated in a 68-32 landslide.

This success and the growing profile of the TPA encouraged the Tufton Street think tanks – which included a broader network of like-minded organisations not based there but who would regularly meet to swap ideas, tactics and generally to socialise – and led to more financial support and to more success.

Tenants of No.55 have included Leave Means Leave, the climate change sceptics of the Global Warming Policy Forum and Net Zero Watch, the “anti-woke” New Culture Forum, the anti-surveillance group Big Brother Watch and Migration Watch, which led the charge for lower net immigration.

Down the street are the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

A key source of ire for Tufton Street opponents is that none of the organisations in the network disclose their funders – and on the few occasions where details have leaked out, these organisations have shared donors, and have taken money from some with clear agendas of their own, co-producing events with tobacco or alcohol industry groups, for example.

Where these detractors misstep, however, is that they assume this means those donors then need to order these think-tankers as to what they should say in their subsequent reports or research.

The reality is more subtle: there is no need to give any instruction of this sort, because the companies already know these organisations are on-side.

It is akin to the old Humbert Wolfe rhyme: “You cannot hope to bribe or twist/thank God! the British journalist/ But, seeing what the man will do/ unbribed, there’s no occasion to.’’

There need not be some backroom deal or secret set of orders – the organisation is funded because its staffers sincerely believe in deregulation, and donors feel free to commission work on topic areas that suit them, knowing in advance the recommendations will line up.

It should be noted that this is not unique to the right of politics, or to the Leave side of the argument.

A pro-EU donor commissioning an internationalist think tank staffed by trained and sane economists could commission research on, say, trade with the EU and be confident in getting a report they like.

Tufton Street’s splashy tactics and closeness with those in power came to the fore through the Brexit referendum and its aftermath – a set of actions so covered and so familiar that to retread them all here would be tedious in the extreme.

Tufton Street alum ran the campaign, became Number 10 staff, and held huge sway over the eventual deal that was shaped.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was how little the tactics needed to change: £350m a week for the NHS was nothing different from the NOtoAV £250m tactic, albeit with a larger number and on a larger stage.

Neither the left nor the centre of the British political world have come up with anything to trouble the longstanding playbook of the Tufton Street network.

Popular threads on Twitter – and pub talk among the animated Remain camp – paints the above network as something akin to a deliberate conspiracy, a concerted effort to infiltrate politics and create hidden networks of influence.

The people involved laugh at this as a deranged conspiracy theory.

And yet it isn’t wrong on the actual facts: Tufton Street serves as a nexus of political influence, and does work to tie up corporate and other undisclosed interests into the political process.

But it doesn’t do it in a way that feels malign to those involved: it is a network of people who agree with each other on most issues, have been colleagues and often friends, and who obviously have sought employment in organisations aligned with those they’ve worked at in the past. Who wouldn’t agree to have a drink with an old friend they used to work with?

Who wouldn’t consider a talented former colleague for a job in their new workplace? Who wouldn’t pick up the phone to pick the brains of their old boss when they’re stuck on a problem?

These all feel very normal and natural to any of us. It’s just very, very different when, almost without you noticing, your friendship group has become the group of people effectively running the country – or at least a decent chunk of it.

This is not a case of the banality of evil, but of the banality of influence.

It’s also why a fairly accurate set of accusations can be made to sound ridiculous to the people targeted by them – there isn’t one person or a small cabal deliberately directing all of this. But that should hardly matter.

The Tufton Street network is moving on from Brexit and deregulation (although not leaving them behind) and increasingly becoming active on climate.

Their playbook still hasn’t changed. Nothing has forced it to do so.

What’s needed is something that counters it – instead of what we keep doing, time and again, which is merely publicly complaining that it keeps on working.’

Blogs and articles regarding Koch Network, Tanton and related architecture of influence: 

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

Ecosystem of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere 

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Anglosphere Triangle – Immigration – Environment – Population Growth – Radical Right Libertarians

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes