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Theresa May was dealt the worst of hands and has played it spectacularly badly

Andrew Rawnsley

She got the keys to Number 10 because Tory MPs thought her a safe bet. She’s been anything but

Sun 31 Mar 2019 08.00 BST

I

t nearly always ends in tears, whether they are shed publicly or just inside, but few premierships have drawn to a close with such wretchedness as that visited on Theresa May. She’s not quite out of the door yet and other Tories are already describing her as the worst prime minister in a hundred years. That is a savage verdict when the competition for this dismal accolade includes Neville Chamberlain, Ramsay MacDonald, Anthony Eden and David Cameron.

I think we can safely say she will not be remembered as one of the more strong and stable occupants of Number 10. Hilarious as it may seem today, she seized the keys in the summer of 2016 because colleagues thought her “a safe pair of hands”. She commended herself to Tory MPs – and was pretty popular with a lot of voters – as she seemed to promise a premiership of common sense and calm after the anarchic orgy of backstabbing unleashed by the Cameronian, Johnsonian and Goveite cliques. In that largely forgotten period when she appeared to be monarch of all she surveyed, and the cabinet was terrified of her, she was variously compared to Boudicca and Elizabeth I. To some of us, the early cult of Theresa was ridiculous even at the time. It is now so risible that thinking about it for too long risks permanent injury to your abdomen.

Now her cabinet plots her downfall. Her whips tell her to go – and to her face. She has lost the confidence of her European peer group. Her government has been held in contempt of parliament. She has set a new historical record for a parliamentary defeat. The country, some parts of which did have sympathy for the difficulties of her position, is signalling that it has had enough.

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It became her self-defined mission to “make a success” of Brexit by delivering on the referendum result while mitigating damage to the economy and without splitting her party. She has failed in each one of those objectives. The original withdrawal date has been scrubbed. Business leaders are tearing out what remains of their hair about Brexit blight. The Tory party is so vividly divided that it could be heading for a terminal split. Even promising to sacrifice herself wasn’t enough to get her withdrawal agreement through parliament at the third time of asking. The “safe pair of hands” has piloted Britain into extremely dark waters.

I think we can identify her three most significant strategic errors. The first was to act at the start as if the only people who mattered were the 52% of voters who backed Brexit while treating the 48% as an irrelevance to be ignored or insulted. Where she might have endeavoured to bind together a fractured nation and forge an alliance of the sane Brexiters and the pragmatic Remainers, her language and approaches have further polarised the country and radicalised opinion on both sides. This was compounded by concentrating her energies on trying to please the unsatisfiable subset of Brexiters who wanted the most impossibilist versions of the enterprise. One of the more delicious spectacles of the past few days has been watching Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and others in their gang of ultras crack and switch behind a withdrawal agreement that they had previously decried as “vassalage”. They flipped because they finally twigged that their game was up and they did not have the numbers to inflict a no-deal outcome on Britain. They never did have the support for that. Mrs May could have worked that out much earlier and shaped her strategy accordingly.

The second major mistake was to call the hubristic snap general election in the spring of 2017, squander her majority with an atrocious campaign and then respond as if, to use one of her most notorious phrases, nothing had changed. A bolder and more agile leader would have reached out to the opposition benches to see if a consensus could be moulded. I grant you that this would not have been easy when Labour is led by Jeremy Corbyn, as tribalistic as Mrs May in his own fashion. She could still have made an effort to build bridges with the many reasonable people on the opposition benches, but she didn’t even try. She instead made the fatal choice to turn herself into a hostage of the Democratic Unionists and the Brextremists on the Tory benches.

Her third large misjudgment has been the conduct of the endgame. Once it was very apparent her withdrawal agreement was neither popular in parliament nor attractive to the country, she persisted with trying to bludgeon it through. When it became evident this simply was not going to work, she might have pivoted to another strategy. She could have looked at alternative versions of Brexit. She might have allowed MPs to explore other ways forward, as they are very belatedly doing now. She might have embraced the offer from the opposition benches to allow her deal through the Commons subject to it then being put to the people for the final say in a confirmatory referendum. Fixity of purpose can be a virtue in a leader, but the durable ones are successful because they also understand when it is necessary to flex.

The rigidity of her personality has been a key component of her failures. She is not the first prime minister to find it difficult to trust anyone, but she is such a secretive operator even those closest to her struggle to fathom her intentions and motives. She is not the first prime minister to be awkward, shy and introverted, but these are very serious disadvantages in a political age that demands a high level of communication skills from leaders.

No one accuses her of being lazy or trivial. After the essay-crisis, seat-of-the-pants style of the Cameron premiership, the Tory party thought it would do better with a serious swot. One of her few friends once told me that Mrs May approached Brexit as if the country had set her a piece of fiendishly difficult homework. The downside of this doggedness has been inflexibility. When Ken Clarke described her as “a bloody difficult woman”, she embraced the label as a compliment. During their days in government together, Nick Clegg used to call her a “one-eyed politician”, by which he meant that she did not have the imagination to find creative solutions to problems.

She also has a vengeful streak. Many colleagues have been rubbished by her briefers, directly scorned and disdained by the prime minister, sacked or threatened with the boot. They know this vicar’s daughter does not follow the biblical injunction to turn the other cheek. A powerful leader can get away with being punitive towards those who cross them. But when authority drains away, your victims come back to bite you. Her paucity of friends is not just down to her lack of gregariousness – it is also because her conduct towards colleagues has made a great many enemies across the Tory factions.

It is premature to award her the title of worst prime minister in 100 years. How history sees her will depend on what happens next and who follows her. It is not at all a given that any other prime minister would be better than Theresa May – there are candidates who could be much worse. Perspective will likely soften judgments of her tortured premiership. We should remember that Mrs May is not the first Tory prime minister to be incinerated in the crucible of the European Question. Three decades ago, it was a trigger for the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. The party’s long uncivil war made a misery of John Major’s time at Number 10. David Cameron self-immolated by recklessly promising the referendum that he then lost. These were all very different personalities to each other and to Mrs May. She didn’t have the largeness of character and the breadth of political skills necessary to handle the vast complexity of the Brexit challenge, but then it is arguable that such a person does not exist. Even a leader with the power to inspire of Churchill, the team-building talent of Lincoln and the capacity to heal of Mandela would have struggled.

The Tory party is now preparing to find a new chief for its cannibalistic tribe. It will be convenient for a lot of people, especially those planning to contest for the corroded crown, to cast all the blame for 33 months of unrelenting and still unresolved chaos on the woman who will soon be leaving Number 10. Convenient, but not altogether accurate. The problem with the Conservative party is not Mrs May. The problem with the Conservative party is the Conservative party. The problem with Brexit is not Mrs May. The problem with Brexit is Brexit.

• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/31/theresa-may-dealt-worst-of-hands-played-it-spectacularly-badly#comments

My Comments :

Theresa May was dealt the worst of hands and has played it spectacularly badly

31 Mar 2019 15:13

1. I do might have expected a few more names in the presented narrative about the Rise and Downfall of the premiership of Theresa May.

2. The name Leadsom comes to mind, and so does Timothy and Hill, the alleged Rasputinian couple, that had been brutally sacrificed after the disastrously bad outcome of the 2017 snap elections.

3. Another name to be considered might very well have been Gina Miller, who single-handedly had been dealing a fatal blow to the commonly carried illusion, that Brexit could be (easily) delivered by the UK Government only, rather than by UK Parliament.

4. The overambitious "hostile environment" May apparently had only one final career wish on her sleeves, and that has been becoming PM at all cost.

5. She however succeeded only to fulfil that ultimate wish, by heavily compromising on her original Remainer points of view.

6. After all, to avoid an enduring and time consuming leadership contest in 2016, she and Leadsom did agree on the Tory party supported proposition, that in exchange for the keys to No 10, May had to not only defend Brexit, but had to deliver Brexit as well on a silver plate to the Nation.

7. That construction of mutual convenience did present her with the infamous red-lines during the two years of negotiating (only) the terms of the withdrawal agreement with the EU.

8. So by insisting on her burning ambition to stay PM at all cost, in the end she did lose out to the diehard Leave campaigners Leadsom, Gove and Johnson, to just name a few Brexit canons.

9. What did not help May either was the fact, that the unexpected judicial success of Gina Miller, did change the fundamentals of the Brexit dynamics at a blistering way, by obliging from that victorious decision, the final say of Parliament on the conditions of the UK leaving the EU bloc.

10. May also had to silence the critics that kept on mentioning, that May in her heart has always been a Remainer, by exercising a strict rule of dogmatically repeating the mantra, that "we have to fulfill the democratic will of the people".

11. Taking absence thereby of course from the notion, that a voters ignorance based (*), highly polarised and highly demagogic Remain versus Leave campaign never ever could have led to the valid conclusion, that this campaign had been a truly democratic exercise.

12. The other Brexit guidance that May did receive during the first leg of her PM ship (and most probably on an informal base until this very day) has been taken in from her old Home Office advisers Timothy and Hill, who allegedly had been introducing a (rather impopulair) culture of cabinet-bullying into No 10.

13. In the end she had to give in to the harsh reality of ruling with a deeply divided party within the parameters of a hung parliament, depending on the ultra-right religious militants of the DUP, mirrored in rigidness by the Looney Right of the ultra neo-nationalist and hyper-Xenophobe ERG, by acknowledging that she had not been blessed by a parliamentary majority for her WA.

14. Do remember, that May - in order to be able to cling on to her much desired Premiership - deliberately had been taking the risk of the UK crashing out of the EU with no Deal, a scenario, that has been haunting many on each side of the Channel from day one.

15. From that very same erratic logic she simply had to persist on a partisan approach during the last three years, because any move to a more bi-partisan approach would have set her on collision course with the Hard Border-liners from the DUP-ERG (**) sect.

16. A sect, that only does seem to care for steering towards a Hard Brexit, in the context of aggressively opting for the regressive ideology of a new Feudal UK, where the citizens do have to unconditionally obey their supposed Rulers from Heaven.

(*) Not to mention the relative X-factor of the professional electioneering by obscurantist NATO / CIA associated firms like Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, that did covertly address the unconscious area of the electorate by brainwashing the Remain voters with the rejectionist voting concept, that might have (to a high degree that is) delivered Trump the Keys to the White House as well.

(**) The ERG seems to be leaning on right-extremist ideologues like Camus and Houllebecq.

NB. Apart from the ignorance-based aspect of the referendum - that already did remove any pretence of democracy on its own merit - one simply would have had written some decisive mechanism into the (ADVISORY) referendum rules such as a two third majority and / or an eighty percent voter turn-out.

Plus of course, a highly qualified awareness campaign, including well-explained, scientifically based future projection scenarios on all the possible relevant elements that had to be taken into account before the electorate could have made any responsible decision at all.

Don’t ask, don’t tell: how a conspiracy of silence will corrupt Britain’s next election

Brexit chaos could trigger a general election at any moment. Whenever it happens, there will be dozens of MPs who get elected illegally. Here’s how.

James Cusick

20 March 2019

Craig Mackinlay campaigning with Boris Johnson in April 2015

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Gareth Fuller/PA Archive/PA Images. All rights reserved.

British general election in the next few months became more likely yesterday. Knowing that Theresa May was likely to ask for Brexit to be postponed – as she did this morning – the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said that only something as compelling as a second referendum or a general election could justify a delay.

That makes a little-reported trial that concluded in January of critical importance now. Marion Little, an experienced organiser employed directly by the Conservative Party’s central headquarters, was found guilty of breaking electoral law. In a bid to prevent UKIP leader Nigel Farage winning in South Thanet in 2015, Little deliberately exceeded campaign spending limits and created dishonest documents to hide what she had done during the election. She was given a nine-month suspended sentence and fined £5,000.

Little effectively ran Tory MP Craig Mackinlay’s winning campaign in South Thanet. (Mackinlay himself was cleared of breaking electoral spending laws.) In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Edis said laws relating to elections were there “to protect democracy itself”. But in an uncoded warning to those in the Conservative Party above Marion Little who supervised her work, the judge said that there was “a culture of convenient self-deception and lack of clarity as to what was permissible in law and what was not at Conservative Central Headquarters”.

The Conservatives’ declared campaign spending in South Thanet in 2015 came under the £52,000 legal limit for the constituency. But they spent more than double that amount – a further £66,000 – without declaring it, on everything from additional staffing to hotel accommodation and other expenses. Expenditure returns were described in the trial as “woefully incomplete and woefully inaccurate”.

What happened in South Thanet has implications far beyond Kent. Looking ahead to Britain’s next vote, whenever it comes, openDemocracy has investigated how local elections are run, and the rules that are supposed to govern them. We’ve looked at a number of closely contested seats, and examined previous spending returns – including, in great detail, those of one marginal London seat. And we’ve examined the powers and governance of the elections watchdog tasked with protecting our democracy.

All evidence points to just one outcome: the next House of Commons will contain potentially dozens of MPs who, along with the covert cooperation of their election agents, will have broken the law on campaign spending, and are sitting on the green benches illegitimately. Instead of being disqualified for breaking the criminal law, they will making the law.

Clean-up? What clean-up?

That Britain’s electoral laws are in urgent need of reform is no secret. A 2016 report by the Law Commission said that our campaign finance laws were so serpentine that even lawyers found them difficult, and made a series of recommendations to streamline the legislative framework, improve management and tighten oversight. The commission also called for new primary legislation and, crucially, changes to the way campaign expenditure was regulated, calculated and inspected. However there is little appetite in government for such reform. Asked about the progress of reform, a senior Conservative party official – who will have a major say in how the Tories fight the next general election – said simply: “There is none.”

The report is ‘’probably gathering dust in a bottom drawer and largely unread”, a Law Commission official told openDemocracy.

The result is that a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture of electioneering pervades. And those bypassing the rules are most likely to represent the key marginal seats that determine who forms the government. An insider familiar with how election campaigns are run told openDemocracy that senior party leaders “don’t want to be bothered with the daily dirt and shit-tricks that you need to win in places where you have to win. They’ll leave that to us.”

‘Culture of toleration’

How high up the party supervision chain did knowledge of Marion Little’s activities in South Thanet go? Channel 4 News, whose extensive investigative work broke open the full story and the wider implications of the scandal, was reassured on camera by Andrew Feldman, former Conservative Party co-chair and principal fundraiser, that “everything [in South Thanet] was done properly and in accordance with the law”. That turned out to be far from the truth.

In that 2015 general election, Feldman, along with other senior party operatives such as Stephen Gilbert, the former Tory deputy chairman, and Grant Shapps, another former co-chair of the Conservatives, signed off extensive hotel bills for activists involved in the Tories’ controversial national “battle bus” campaign, RoadTrip 2015. The battle bus targeted key marginal seats, using teams of mainly young Tory activists who flooded into dozens of swing-vote locations on a fleet of logo-emblazoned coaches. The aim was to boost local campaigns. The party picked up all hotel and food expenses. The bills were paid through national campaign funds, with nothing declared in official local spending accounts.

At the same time, Marion Little was parachuted into South Thanet to help defeat UKIP leader Nigel Farage. A proportion of her party salary should have been declared on the official spending return. It wasn’t. Her stays at an expensive local hotel should also have been declared. Mr Justice Edis said there was a belief at Conservative Party Headquarters (CCHQ) that anyone employed by central office was a central expense, and needn’t be included in a candidate’s election expenditure.

So who decides what is listed as a part of ‘national’ campaign spending, and what constitutes the local campaign to elect an MP? The judge said he had heard nothing during the South Thanet trial that suggested those in senior positions above Little had “made any effort” to regulate and distinguish between the two different regimes. Little, the judge said, “was not alone in that she worked in a culture which tolerated some of what she did”.

Straight out of 'Yes Minister'

The Law Commission has called for the independent watchdog that oversees elections, the Electoral Commission, to be given far greater powers and authority to police Britain’s elections. The Electoral Commission has frequently supported this call – and the members of its board will play a critical role in achieving and implementing any positive change.

A new member was appointed to the Electoral Commission’s board last November. His name is Stephen Gilbert. And he should be very familiar with what happened in South Thanet. Because, in 2015, he was political secretary inside David Cameron’s Downing Street charged with fighting a general election.

As the election’s campaign director, it was Gilbert who devised the 40/40 strategy. This focused on holding 40 marginal seats and winning another 40. The priority was early selection of candidates in such seats – South Thanet being one of them – and to install full-time campaign managers, heavily subsidised by Tory CCHQ. This gave central control of what was happening in the seats that would determine the outcome of the coming general election.

The appointment of Gilbert and what it represents has not gone unnoticed. The former shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, Labour MP John Trickett, said: “[Stephen] Gilbert designed the very Tory campaign strategy that led to the breaking of electoral rules in 2015. His appointment to the body responsible for enforcing electoral rules makes a mockery of our democratic system and reeks of yet another establishment stitch-up that will weaken public trust in politics.”

At the time of his appointment to the Electoral Commission board, Gilbert said he had worked in politics for 30 years, respected elected politicians and said the commission had a “vital role in our democracy”. Some of his colleagues were less flattering. Another former Labour MP, now in the House of Lords, told openDemocracy that Gilbert’s appointment was “so straight out of a 'Yes Minister' script that I could see Sir Humphrey trying to smile and explain”.

‘You don’t say, and they never ask’

Nick Timothy was another of the Tory activists who billeted themselves in South Thanet during the 2015 election and whose expenses were not declared in the official local expenditure accounts. At the time, Timothy was a senior aide to then Home Secretary, Theresa May. He would later join May in 10 Downing Street as one of her most trusted advisers. Both he and Fiona Hill were forced to leave Number 10 after May’s disastrous 2017 election campaign.

May was among the long list of Tory bigwigs who visited the Kent seat during the 2015 campaign. A former Westminster aide, who now describes herself as “just a foot-soldier activist”, said “the dirty business of local finances must never cross the path of any senior figures”. She told openDemocracy: “You never bring it up, simple as that. The big beasts come and they wave and they leave, and you don’t say, and they never ask.”

She said the South Thanet verdict against Little would not mean an automatic clean-up of all “tricks”, adding: “At the last two party conferences we heard about a new generation of specialist data campaigners that would help us with ‘targeted’ campaigning. The hint was that social media messaging was still under-used and that this would change. However there were also reassurance that the streets and knocking on doors and face-to-face campaigning, marshalled by centrally funded organisers, was still critical to winning key seats.”

The message? Inside the party itself, current election strategists recognise the ongoing need for activists. According to one think-tank boss with close links to senior party organiser, “Something like a RoadTrip project, something which gets round local expenditure limits, will have to be reinvented. And that will need people in the streets. If not quite business as usual, it will be creatively close.”

‘Mates’ rates’

Following discussions with sources in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, openDemocracy examined the official spending returns in one key London marginal in the 2017 election. We examined all the invoices for printed election material collected in the official declaration of the winning candidate. These were then anonymously discussed with print companies in neighbouring areas with similar retail rents for the exact same products, which included leaflets, posters and cards.

Commercial printers, asked to quote for similar material, described a number of invoices as “clearly mates’ rates”. One company said “Sorry, no one does it for that.”

On a selection of specific print orders, the difference between the claimed cost of campaign cards, flyers and leaflets and the comparable market rate for the same material was over £5,000.

Electoral law says that if a supplier discounts a price by 10% or more below what it would normally charge, or if the difference is more than £50, the campaign must record the commercial rate and not the discounted rate in the expenditure return.

If someone had successfully challenged the invoices examined by openDemocracy immediately after the election in question, the difference of £5,000 could have seen the winning candidate kicked out of Parliament and facing criminal sanctions for breaking the legal spending limit – which would constitute electoral fraud. However, with the election now more than a year ago, there can be no formal challenge.

The candidate’s main opponent was asked if they had checked, in detail, the spending returns of the winner. No one had. According to one former agent, “there’s almost an unspoken code about election spending. And the reason you don’t ask is that you don’t trust that your returns will stand up to too much scrutiny.”

Tip of the iceberg

In early 2017, the Electoral Commission levied a record fine of £70,000 against the Conservative Party for undeclared or misdeclared spending totalling just under £250,000. As part of a wider investigation into election spending, the Crown Prosecution Service was believed to be considering charges against 30 other people, including 20 sitting MPs. As many as 16 police forces in England were examining evidence.

If they had pressed ahead with all of these charges, a swathe of by-elections could have ripped into the numbers on the government benches – threatening the slim working parliamentary majority of just 15 (including Sinn Fein abstentions) that Theresa May had inherited from David Cameron.

In the end the CPS, for evidential reasons – and because the time limits to continue with other complex investigations had passed – decided to focus solely on South Thanet. Channel 4 Newshad also done a lot of the heavy lifting. When Downing Street announced the snap general election of June 2017, it denied there was any connection between the prospect of a swathe of imminent by-elections and the prime minister’s decision to call the vote, something she had consistently denied she would do.

Future elections: "damaging democracy"

In 1946, George Orwell described the English electoral system as “an all but open fraud”. Despite subsequent legislation, our laws are hopelessly opaque, and open to routine and systematic abuse.

One specialist barrister who spoke at length to openDemocracy said it would be “a miracle if electoral laws were not broken again [at the next general election]”. He said: “I’d never take a job as an election agent because, even for me, the law is so byzantine, difficult and impenetrable. What if on the night you found your candidate had overspent? Do you confess, tell the returning officer, and void the whole election? I mean, who does that. Nobody does that.”

Meanwhile, the Law Commission’s 220-page-long 2016 report is gathering dust. A general election has taken place since its publication, and another one could be coming soon. One MP said there was no intentional delay: “We’ve just been too busy with other business [Brexit] to have time for this.” However a government lawyer told openDemocracy: “The Commons finds time for obscure and complex issues. But when it comes to the way they themselves are governed, they are slow, very slow, to act.”

South Thanet and the fear of a Farage victory meant that Marion Little, according to Mr Justice Edis, was “carried away by her conviction” that defeating the UKIP leader was an “overwhelmingly important political objective”. There are few signs that this culture in Conservative head office has changed.

A former Westminster aide said the Tory’s younger more ambitious activists, like those once linked to Conservative Way Forward (CWF), a campaigning Tory pressure group founded by Margaret Thatcher, still operated with a “madrassa mentality” and paid little attention to campaign rules and regulations. “They feel that only winning will get them noticed, and they’ll do anything if that means they get marked down as a future parliamentary candidate. That’s the game and it makes its own rules.”

For one political consultant familiar with the training of election agents, South Thanet was in some respects a one-off, with the limited sanctions delivered by law doing little to deter those willing to take risks to win. However, the fallout has changed attitudes among professional political operators on election spending who believe clarity on the law is overdue. The consultant added: “I’ve heard good people still being told to be creative, when what they’re actually being told is ‘break the law’. But if we don’t have clarity on the regulation of campaign expenditure and we ignore needed reforms. We’re doing the opposite of discouraging corrupt and illegal practices – we’re damaging democracy, and hoping no one will notice.”

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/dont-ask-dont-tell-how-a-conspiracy-of-silence-will-corrupt-britains-next-election/

Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian ‘fundamentalists’ pour millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe, boosting the far right

MEPs call for action as openDemocracy analysis reveals ‘shocking’ flows of cash crossing the Atlantic to push ultra-conservative agendas.

Claire ProvostMary Fitzgerald

27 March 2019

US Christian right ‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Between them, these groups have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called our findings “shocking”. Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than 40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “US Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.

Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. 

Another organisation has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based ‘institute’ backed by Steve Bannon. 

And a number of the groups are connected to the World Congress of Families: a network of ultra-conservative activists which has links to far-right politicians and movements in several European countries, including Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Serbia.

None of these American groups discloses who its donors are – though at least two have links to famous conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the Tea Party Movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary.[USA Education Secretary Betsy deVoss and Eric  Prince Blackwaters ]

Nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups

Alyn Smith MEP

The increasing ties between some of these US Christian conservative groups and the European far right will be on display this weekend at a summit of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in Verona, Italy.

Right-wing politicians and their supporters from across the continent are expected to attend – including the Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who has described the WCF as a showcase for “the Europe that we like”.

In a letter copied to the presidents of the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament, the cross-party group of MEPs has demanded action to protect European democracy “against nefarious outside influences”.

Scottish National Party MEP Alyn Smith, who sits on the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and signed the letter, today said: "This investigation by openDemocracy is extremely timely and shines a light on a major challenge facing democracy in Europe.”

Our findings “are highly alarming and nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups”, he continued. “No group of any kind should be able to use dark money to distort debate and to subvert democracy in Europe, least of all group such as these whose causes are deeply regressive”.

‘The Europe we like’

In the first analysis of its kind, openDemocracy has examined a decade of US Christian organisations’ financial accounts and found that several of them appear to have significantly increased their spending in Europe over the past five years.

Our findings come as far-right parties aim for big wins in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, and show how large amounts of foreign money have supported the spread of their ‘traditional values’ messages.

openDemocracy has reviewed hundreds of pages of financial filings for a dozen religious conservative groups that are registered in the US as tax-exempt non-profit organisations, and thus are required to disclose some information about their foreign spending.

Some of these groups have been previously accused of supporting campaigns to criminalise homosexuality in Africa, “draconian” anti-abortion laws in Latin America and controversial projects to encourage gay people in the US to “leave homosexuality”.

But the extent of their European activity has – until now – received little scrutiny. Our investigation reveals that some of these groups have:

• Sent teams of lobbyists to Brussels to influence EU officials
• Challenged laws against discrimination and hate speech in European courts
• Supported campaigns against LGBT rights in the Czech Republic and Romania
• Funded a network of ‘grassroots’ anti-abortion campaigns in Italy and Spain
• Deployed ‘ambulance-chasing’ evangelists after tragedies such as the Grenfell Tower fire, and in the wake of terrorist attacks

Five of the conservative groups have previously been listed as partners of the World Congress of Families (WCF) network, which is meeting in Verona this week.

It’s not just European politicians who are concerned about them: these groups are controversial in America too. The WCF itself has been described as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist movements and tracks this network’s increasing connections with the far right.

The SPLC explains that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical or simply opposing same-sex marriage” is not enough to be categorised as a “hate group”. Groups on this list go further – claiming that homosexuality is dangerous, linked to paedophilia and should be criminalised, disseminating “disparaging ‘facts’ about LGBT people that are simply untrue”.

This is, says SPLC, “no different to how white supremacists and nativist extremists propagate lies about black people and immigrants to make these communities seem like a danger to society”.

Joseph Grabowski, a WCF spokesperson, told openDemocracy: “We dispute entirely the premise [of the ‘hate group’ designation]... It’s an unfortunate slight for the countless Americans and the people around the world who hold the same views as we do on marriage, the nature of family and the right to life, that are part of the fabric of Christianity and also other traditional points of view,” he said.

The WCF is a project of the International Organization for the Family and the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, whose directors include an ultra-conservative Spanish activist linked to the leader of the far-right Vox party.

Other directors include a close associate of a Russian oligarch who sponsored a 2014 ‘secret meeting’ in Vienna with key French and Austrian far-right leaders – and an Italian politician facing corruption charges in his country.

Over the last decade, the WCF has hosted at least seven major meetings in Europe, attended by hundreds of religious right activists and a growing list of far-right politicians. Its 2017 meeting in Budapest was opened by Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán.

Among the conveners of this week’s event in Verona is an Italian anti-abortion group linked to the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party, whose leader is also expected to attend the WCF.

A Forza Nuova demonstration, 2017 | NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Trump, the far right and the Christian ‘legal army’

Two of the Trump-linked American groups examined by openDemocracy are Christian right legal powerhouses: Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the American Center for Law and Justice. Together, they have spent more than $20 million in Europe since 2008.

ADF supported a 2016 law in Belize making gay sex punishable with 10 years in jail

They don’t disclose their funders, but US journalists have previously traced at least $1 million in grants to ADF from a foundation controlled by the billionaire family of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, and Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater mercenary firm.

ADF was co-founded by Alan Sears, a US Christian right leader who co-authored a book against “the homosexual agenda”. It is increasingly active internationally, including in Latin America. It supported a 2016 law in Belize making gay sex punishable with 10 years in jail.

This group tripled its annual spending in Europe between 2012 and 2016, to more than $2.6 million a year. It now has offices in Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland and the UK, and spends hundreds of thousands of euros lobbying EU officials, according to separate transparency data.

Among its European projects, the group has supported the defence of a notorious German activist who compared abortion to the Holocaust and accused specific doctors of murder.

This year, ADF International also co-hosted an event with the French group La Manif Pour Tous, which has been previously been linked to the far-right party Front National.

Ahead of the last European Parliament elections in 2014, La Manif Pour Tous launched a ‘Europe for Family’ campaign which got 230 French candidates to sign a pledge opposing marriage equality, trans rights and sex education.

Speaking to openDemocracy, a spokesperson for ADF International said they are “exclusively privately funded by people from all over the world, who care about human rights” and that its activities include “advocating for freedom of speech in Europe”.

Asked for more detail about who the group gives its money to, they said: “Since our advocacy involves court cases in countries where people are harassed, stigmatised, and even killed because of their religious convictions, it is our general policy not to disclose any recipients of funding in order to protect their personal safety and livelihoods”.

French far-right leaders Marion Maréchal-Le Pen and Gilbert Collard at a demonstration of La Manif Pour Tous in 2016 | Blondet Eliot/ABACA/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The second of the two Trump-linked groups, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), also operates through the courts. It was founded in 1990 by American televangelist Pat Robertson to oppose the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLJ has praised Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda”

The group’s current chief counsel is Jay Sekulow, a conservative talk-show host who has been described as “the top lawyer” on Donald Trump’s legal team in the Mueller inquiry.

For more than 20 years, this group has had an office in Strasbourg, France – home of the European Court of Human Rights – from where it has intervened in numerous cases on issues including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and artificial insemination.

The director of its Strasbourg outfit has also represented the Holy See at the Council of Europe, while its Moscow centre has praised Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda”.

Trump, Franklin Graham and US-sanctioned Kremlin officials

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is another major spender. It is led by the famous US evangelical preacher’s son, Franklin Graham, who said Satan is the architect of same-sex marriage and described Islam as an “evil and very wicked religion”.

Melania Trump, Donald Trump, and Franklin Graham at his father Billy Graham’s funeral | Chip Somodevilla/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Franklin Graham, who has supported Trump as someone who “defends the faith”, was in Russia earlier this month meeting Kremlin officials who are under US sanctions, on a trip that he said was personally signed off by Vice President Michael Pence.

In 2018, his group organised festivals in England and Scotland amid protests from Muslim and LGBT rights groups. It also supports “rapid response chaplains” that target crises and have been accused in the US of “chasing ambulances” and “exploiting tragedy”.

Its filings disclose more than $23 million spent in Europe through two different US entities between 2008 and 2014 – making it the largest spender in this region, of the American groups analysed by openDemocracy.

However, 2014 is the latest year for which we were able to find public documents for this group, which has offices in the UK, Germany, France and Spain, so the true extent of its influence in the region is not yet known.

Training Europeans, on the ‘front lines of the Culture War’

A number of groups spending smaller amounts of money appear to have increased their activities in Europe in recent years.

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which combines a conservative Christian worldview with free-market economics, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Koch family foundations

This group spent more than $1.7 million in Europe since 2008, with its spending in the region rising in recent years (from around $166,000 in 2008 to almost $240,000 in 2017).

In Italy, it has collaborated with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute – of which Steve Bannon is a trustee – that has locally controversial plans to use a monastery outside Rome as a “gladiator school for culture warriors”.

Also on the list is the US branch of the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), an ultra-conservative transnational Catholic movement that says it’s “on the front lines of the Culture War, peacefully defending the values of tradition, family and private ownership”.

This group said it spent about $100,000 in Europe since 2010. Its filings don’t detail where this money went but the TFP has been linked to a controversial ‘think tank’ in Poland that has helped develop policy for far-right Law and Justice (PiS) politicians.

The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property | baldeaglebluff/Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0. Some rights reserved.

A ‘wake-up call’ to prevent ‘foreign interference’

Under US law, the groups analysed by openDemocracy are required to publicly disclose some information about their foreign spending, but not the names of their overseas recipients, details of what activities they fund – or the identities of their own funders.

The $50 million figure drawn from openDemocracy’s analysis is also a likely underestimate of the resources that US conservatives have channelled into Europe in recent years.

Data for 2018 is not yet available; meanwhile there are some important loopholes. Religious organisations registered as churches, for example, don’t need to file the same disclosures.

A number of other US Christian conservative groups appear to be spending money in Europe, but do not disclose this on their US filings – including the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, which has coordinated the WCF network.

The scale of this meddling by US extremists is shocking

Caroline Hickson, International Planned Parenthood Federation

Reacting to our findings, German Green MEP Terry Rintke, who sits on equality-related committees at the European Parliament, has said: “This extreme extent of financial support flooding the EU is shocking – especially with the European elections ahead of us."

The SNP MEP Alyn Smith has said he and his fellow parliamentarians who signed today’s letter have called for the mobilisation of “EU institutions and member states in preventing malign actors such as those identified in the investigation from interfering in the European Parliament elections in May – and beyond”.

Caroline Hickson, regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s European Network, said: “The scale of this meddling by US extremists is shocking, but sadly no surprise to us. Every day European societies face concerted attacks by outside forces seeking to impose reproductive coercion… This is utterly at odds with the European values of democracy and human rights.”

“This is dark money coming into Europe to threaten human rights, and we're not doing anything about it”, warned Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, describing the amounts of money involved as “staggering”.

“It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”

Additional reporting by Peter Geoghegan

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/revealed-trump-linked-us-christian-fundamentalists-pour-millions-of-dark-money-into-europe-boosting-the-far-right/