Do you ever wonder what becomes of Dragons’ Den stars after their tenure on the long-running BBC investment reality show? Fans with particularly long memories might recall former Dragon Rachel Elnaugh, founder of Red Letter Days, and may have been surprised at the headline that appeared recently in The Mirror:
Dragon’s Den star turning ‘vagina of land’ into farm for ‘food apocalypse’ group
Filed under the “Weird News” section, the article details the entrepreneur’s involvement in “The Inner Sanctum”, (also known as Phoenix Rose), which purchased a 70-acre tract of land known as Cressbrook Dale, in the Peak District National Park.
The Times also featured the story, with a punnier but less explicit headline that summed up the substance of the controversy behind the land purchase:
Dragons’ Den star’s antivaxer sanctuary has locals breathing fire
The group’s intentions are not entirely clear, but their original brochure referred to freeholders having perpetual rights to the produce, including vegetables, from the land. Other statements suggested using the site as a shamanic retreat, and a site to create a “food forest” to nourish “the entire Cressbrook Community” when the “predicted food apocalypse” arrives.
Cressbrook village locals do not seem convinced by this offer, and having concerns over developments on the site, which they say risk destroying “an irreplaceable and unique landscape”, have formed the Save Cressbrook Dale campaign. Since its formation, the campaign group has secured an emergency Tree Preservation Order on the site; a Temporary Stop Notice which makes it illegal for the new owners to execute any more work on the land without seeking the relevant Planning Consents; and a Planning Contravention Notice, asking the owners to inform the authority about how they intend complying with planning regulations.
Elnaugh has responded with a series of videos, including one from 9th January 2023, which says that the site has been improved rather than harmed, including the installation of steps which she says have been vandalised as part of a campaign of intimidation, hate crimes, criminal damage and trespass.
From an outsider’s perspective, it is hard to judge the merits of the counter-claims, though given the decisions against Elnaugh’s group so far it certainly seems that she is facing an uphill battle to realise her group’s vision on the Cressbrook Dale site.
It is, however, encouraging to see that the local Cressbrook Dale village campaigners seem motivated not just by a desire to save their local tranquillity and wildlife. As The Times article reports:
one of the big concerns for residents was the fear that the area would become a beacon for people with extreme and potentially dangerous views.
What views might visitors or freeholders express that are of such concern to local residents?
On COVID-19, Elnaugh has tweeted that the vaccine programme is “Child Abuse” and that England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty “will hang for this”. This violent suggestion presumably relates to the ongoing and mistaken claim by anti-vaxxers that the Nuremberg Code prohibits the COVID-19 vaccine programme. However, as FullFact says:
The code says nothing about the use of tested and authorized vaccines or treatments on patients.
I must also have missed the bit where the code calls for Chief Medical Officers, doctors and nurses to be executed for giving well-tested vaccines to consenting patients, which is a topic that Elnaugh returns to in her more recent video, saying that ‘just following orders’ isn’t an excuse.
Elnaugh has also written that “these vaccinations will contain the nanotechnology to create trans-humans” and that Covid is part of “a much bigger plan of mass command and control”. The nanotechnology claims have of course been fact checked and debunked repeatedly.
In the same piece, Elnaugh wonders whether the World Health Organisation is so keen on vaccinations because “they are funded by Big Pharma”. While it is technically true that pharmaceutical companies do fund the WHO, it would be surprising if they were making policy decisions on the basis of such funding, which amounts to less than 0.001% of their total budget. My guess is that the WHO is keen on COVID-19 vaccines as they know vaccines to be extremely effective, and saved between 14.4 million and 19.8 million lives in their first full year of operation during the pandemic.
Elnaugh’s Twitter feed is full of retweets of people who are wrong about COVID-19, from 2021 Rusty Razor winner Michael Yeadon to Holocaust-comparing “vaccine-sceptic” MP Andrew Bridgen. She even retweets a Fox News interview with Dr Peter McCullough, who has made incorrect claims about the vaccines on both Fox News and Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Elnaugh also retweets her appearance on IckonicTV, which as the name suggests, is an online streaming platform containing – amongst other delights – 30 years of materials from everyone’s favourite goalkeeper-turned-conspiracy theorist, David Icke, who really did mean lizards and not Jews when he endorsed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, apparently.
Her feed also contains several posts encouraging people to head out and join a Stand in the Park, the stalls that sprung up as anti-lockdown hubs. These acted as one of the primary sources of distribution of anti-vax “truthpaper” The Light, which readers may recall heavily feature COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and also contain climate change denial, transphobic and homophobic authors, and defences of antisemitic hate speech and dictators.
Stray into the world of her Telegram, and you have a whole lot more. While it’s not clear whether Elnaugh manages the channel herself, or whether it’s managed by someone on her behalf, the first post on I found on the feed was a forwarded message from a channel called Tommy Robinson News, run by the far-right activist, which celebrated far-right French leader Marine le Pen leading the defeat of one of Macron’s COVID-19 restrictions. Scrolling on I found:
- A forwarded climate change denial meme.
- A forwarded chemtrails conspiracy theory meme.
- Posts about Freedom Alliance (the anti-lockdown party Elnaugh was going to stand for as MP) infighting and claims that they were “controlled opposition”.
- A post encouraging people to form a “posse” to go to a vaccination centre and check they are obtaining informed consent from the vaccinated.
- An explainer video on common law, which – based especially on references to Maritime law – sounded to my non-legal mind that it may have some beliefs in common with the Freemen on the Land movement.
- A forward of a poem comparing the pandemic restrictions to not just the Holocaust, but also the Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward and the Killing Fields.
This is, of course, a free country, and people are allowed to be wrong, and to associate with people who are dangerously wrong or who express disgusting opinions. However, we are also free to want to distance ourselves from such sentiments (as the UK Conservative Party recently did with aforementioned MP Andrew Bridgen), so I can very much understand the people of Cressbrook village not wanting a person with such associations to set up shop on their doorstep.
