The area’s former local MP has been linked to an organisation that fought abortion rights in the United States – described as “an unlikely conduit between MAGA Republicans and Reform UK”.
Writing in the “New York Times”, Jane Bradley and Elizabeth Dias said that when Nigel Farage appeared before Congress on Tuesday, 3rd September, claiming that free speech in the UK made it like North Korea, it was the result of a months-long campaign by one of America’s most influential conservative Christian groups – an architect of the effort that helped overturn Roe v Wade, a 1973 US Supreme Court decision that recognised a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
The report said that Alliance Defending Freedom has now brought its “playbook” to Britain and was establishing itself as a power broker between Reform UK and President Donald Trump’s Washington.
According to the “New York Times”: “It is catalysing Reform UK (to move) even further to the right on a conservative Christian agenda similar to the one that is sweeping through the United States.”
The article said that Alliance Defending Freedom had found success by framing its cases as being about protecting free speech, rather than restricting abortion.
It said that Alliance Defending Freedom employees, who are not registered lobbyists in Britain, did not lobby but “offered briefings to anybody who wishes to access it”.
Until recently, the group was a stakeholder in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Freedom of Religion or Belief, which provided Alliance Defending Freedom with access to Parliament “and politicians like Fiona Bruce, a former Conservative MP who was the prime minister’s special envoy on religion until 2024”.
Two days after testifying to Congress in Washington, Mr Farage was back in England for the Reform UK party conference.
Mr Farage made no mention of abortion but did attack the Government for doing “everything it can to crush free speech online”, and claimed that Britain refused “to acknowledge publicly the Judeo-Christian culture and heritage that we have and that underpins everything that we are”.
The “Times” said that that same weekend, some 120 miles away in London, Alliance Defending Freedom staff members took part in the March for Life UK, an anti-abortion rally led by one of their clients.
On a stage at the event, Mrs Bruce, the former Congleton constituency MP, introduced one of its lawyers. She reportedly said that the crowd may never have heard of Alliance Defending Freedom, “but that was not all that surprising”.
“Very often ADF has operated under the radar,” she said, “quite discreetly.”
The “Times” article conceded that in Britain it was “highly unusual” for advocacy groups to hold influence the way they do in the United States.
“Britain is, in many ways, an unlikely place for an American anti-abortion organisation to build a base and leverage influence. Abortion rights hold overwhelming cross-partisan support and, unlike in the United States, religion plays little role in national politics,” it said.
“But the ADF believes that British politicians, and the public, can be swayed and wants abortion rights to be rolled back, its lawyers said in an interview. More broadly, the group wants to empower conservative Christianity in Europe, and it sees Britain as a key bridgehead.”
“What’s emerging in the UK is a free-speech alliance of disparate groups who are all, for various reasons, shocked that we’ve ended up in the position we are here now,” Lorcán Price, a lawyer for the ADF, was quoted as saying.
The report noted that groups on the right in the UK had “raised alarms” about the arrests of people who posted inflammatory anti-migrant messages online during riots last summer – including a woman from Rode Heath – while those on the left had criticised the arrests of hundreds of peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters under terrorism laws.
Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers in Britain have challenged the prosecutions of Christians who were arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics, and taken up the case of a student midwife who was suspended after making anti-abortion comments on social media.
Said the article: “Britain has no similarly prominent political figures who push for the Christian faith to have a central role in government. The ADF has cultivated an unlikely ally in Mr Farage, who has previously described himself as a supporter of abortion rights and does not attend church, following a high-profile spat with the Church of England, which he described as ‘woke’.”
When asked in a brief phone interview with the “Times” about his relationship with the ADF, Mr Farage said that his party talks with “all sorts of groups”.
He denied speaking against abortion, telling a reporter that she was “talking utter bollocks”, which the “Times” said was “a crude British slang term for nonsense”.
He said that abortion was “No. 468” on Reform UK’s agenda and noted he had “hardly ever spoken about it in 30 years”.
