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.
