This month has seen an election in the UK, and a change in government. And while it’s true that skepticism as a toolset should remain politically neutral, that isn’t to say there is no role for a skeptical view of politics, or that politics is wholly separate from skepticism. Politics is relevant to everything, because everything is influenced by – and can influence in return – the political landscape. Where policies mis-cite evidence, or cite misleading evidence, or tell outright falsehoods, skeptics should take keen interest.
With that, I’d like to first of all congratulate Dr Danny Chambers, who, on top of being a practicing vet and a writer for this magazine, has now been elected as the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester. I’d also like to congratulate the new Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, Lizzi Collinge, who is a long-time skeptic and regular attendee of skeptical events like the QED conference. I’m certain both will take a strong skeptical attitude and appreciation for the value of good evidence into their constituency work, and that both will be assets to parliament.
In further good news, the election saw a change of representative in Leicestershire North West. Its incumbent MP – former Tory-turned-independent-turned-Reclaim Party MP-turned-independent-again, Andrew Bridgen – lost his seat to Labour’s Amanda Hack. Parliament will be a better place without Bridgen, not least because he used his time there to push for multiple debates about the supposed harms of Covid-19 vaccines, wasting parliamentary time with misleading statistics and misinterpreted studies in the process, following his very public radicalisation.
Bridgen continues to enjoy great support within the conspiracy theory circles – most recently, when an interview he gave to a conspiracy theory channel back in April resurfaced in which he claimed that Joe Biden and “his controllers” were so desperate to stop Donald Trump from getting winning the election that they’d be willing to start WWIII… or even, Bridgen feared, actively try to assassinate Trump.
This is now being claimed as cause for a victory lap by Bridgen and his supporters, though it remains… let’s charitably say “unconfirmed” that Thomas Matthew Crooks’ assassination attempt was ordered by “Joe Biden and his controllers”.
Despite being the incumbent MP, and despite having such ardent support among frequenters of conspiracy Telegram and parts of the right-wing press, Bridgen amassed just 1,568 votes, or 3.2% of his constituency. The result was, suffice to say, disappointing to him and his supporters, including among readers of the conspiracy-tinged blog “Conservative Woman”, where they published the following letter:
Dear Editor
Andrew Bridgen has achieved heroic status for his statements on vaccine injuries from those knowledgeable of the injuries suffered from the covid intervention. He has received various abuses on the parliamentary estate and declined offers to benefit his circumstances to remain silent in his criticism of the vaccines.
After 14 years as the efficient and successful MP for his North West Leicestershire constituency, increasing his majority at each election, he received a miserly 1,568 votes as an independent in the recent general election.
Something does not add up.
Conspiracies upon conspiracies, clearly.
Save Us Now
Bridgen is not the only fan of conspiracy theories to have been running in the election. In Gateshead Central & Whickham, voters had the chance to put their cross in the box for Graham Steele of the Save Us Now party – a prospect I found particularly interesting, as I have twice interviewed the leader of the party.
Mark Steele, brother of Graham Steele and founder of Save Us Now, first made his name when he tried to take Gateshead council to court, accusing them of installing 5G transmitters in their street lights, which were “causing cancer and microwaving babies in their beds”. Gateshead council, for their part, denied being part of the New World Order, and pointed out that their street lights do not contain 5G transmitters.
I first spoke to him about this in April 2018, where he claimed his background as a weapons engineer for the Ministry of Defence gave him the technological insights to understand how dangerous the (non) 5G streetlights could be. It is worth pointing out that there is no evidence for Mark having a background in weaponry, aside from a 1993 conviction for shooting a teenage girl outside a pub, for which he served eight years.
Three years later, I requested an interview with the leaders of the new Save Us Now campaign group, unaware of who those leaders were, only to be somewhat surprised when my Zoom call was answered by Mark Steele. That was July 2021, and the 5G fears had merged with anti-vaccination scaremongering. During the call, Mark told me that 5G, Covid, and the vaccine were all created by Satan himself, with the aim of planetary depopulation – in fact, by the end of 2021, the death toll in the UK would have reached 55 million. 82% of the population. Suffice to say, he was wrong.
Save Us Now received 170 votes in Gateshead Central & Whickham, with at least some of those people knowing what Graham and Mark Steele stood for. Thankfully, those votes represented just 0.4% of the constituency.
The Freedom Alliance
While Save Us Now stood in just one seat, the same can’t be said for anti-vaccination party, The Freedom Alliance. An informal collection of candidates, the Freedom Alliance has prolific support among conspiracy groups on Telegram, or at least the ones I regularly follow. They were founded during the pandemic as a way of protesting and defying measures to control the virus, and from there they rolled into anti-vaccine misinformation, and onward through a variety of conspiracy theory panics.
The Freedom Alliance says it stands for “individuals, families and communities to be freed from state and global corporate control”, but mostly their output suggests their priorities are opposing 15-minute cities, central bank digital currencies, the great reset, net zero, and social credit scores.
The party ran five candidates, none of whom secured a seat, all of whom lost their deposit:
- Catherine Evans in Birkenhead – 324 votes, 0.8% of the vote share
- Ian Pugh in Wallasey – 197 votes, 0.5% of the vote share
- Earl Jesse in Newbury – 131 votes, 0.3% of the vote share
- Mark Turnbull in Paisley & Renfrewshire South – 113 votes, 0.3% of the vote share
- And Wesley Massumbukoly in Derbyshire North East – 108 votes, 0.2% of the vote share
The English Constitution Party
Elsewhere on the fringes of politics is the English Constitution Party, a nationalist outfit whose political platform was “MEGA – Make England Great Again”. The use of “England” in the acronym is not merely for convenience; the party argues we need to void the Act of Union and disband the United Kingdom, so that England can stand alone, run under a system of common law. They argue that parliament contains Scottish MPs, Welsh MPs, Irish MPs, but “not a single English MP”… because they’re British, not English.
The desire of the party is to make England self-determined and Independent, with:
Separation of powers restored in favour of the people, in whom sovereignty lies in perpetuity, not the state. Individual rights respected again in law.
Understandably, such a change could result in some legal challenges, but the party has a proposal for how a self-determined and independent England should handle those challenges:
Common law and Constitutional Rights final appeal heard in USA not Continental Europe. America did not Americanise the English, the English anglicised America, America as a Protégé of England became the master of the common law and the protector of the Christian faith, God’s Law. The English common law.
In short, if we have any legal issues, we take them to a court in America, and only then will England be truly independent.
The English Constitution Party are run by Graham Moore, who goes by the pseudonym “Daddy Dragon”. He is a former QAnon promoter, and vocal supporter of Donald Trump, who called for supporters to protest the coronation of King Charles in 2023 by bringing rape alarms and throwing eggs. His website also currently includes a page selling the benefits of Ivermectin, and a recipe for a fruit smoothie that will treat cancer.
The English Constitution Party ran four candidates:
- Joe Greenhalgh in St Helen’s – 274 votes, 0.7% of the vote share
- Colin Birch in Romford – 195 votes, 0.4% of the vote share
- Brett Frewin in Broxbourne – 87 votes, 0.2% of the vote share
Their final candidate was Daddy Dragon himself, Graham Moore, who ran in Chorley gaining 1007 votes, or 3% of the vote share. This might seem unusually high, but Chorley is the constituency of the House speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, and it’s conventional for none of the big parties to campaign against the speaker, allowing them to get back in unopposed. So the higher vote share to the English Constitution Party might reflect that.
Near Zero for Net Zero Watch
The absence of new fans of pseudoscience is not the only cause for skeptical celebration following the election – the losses suffered by climate change denialists were also significant. In 2022, The Skeptic gave our Rusty Razor award for pseudoscience to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, aka Net Zero Watch, the well-connected think tank (and registered charity) whose board includes sitting MPs, and whose influence spread disturbingly far within Whitehall.
According to campaigners DeSmog, there were more than 30 MPs with links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation prior to this election – of those, 28 have now left office, including prominent and influential figures like Philip Davies, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam Cates, Andrea Jenkyns, Jonathan Gullis, Craig Mackinlay, Julian Knight, and Damien Moore, as well as Net Zero Scrutiny Group founder and Global Warming Policy Foundation trustee, Steve Baker.
Of those 36 MPs who are supporters of – and are in turn supported by – a climate change denialist group, the only ones who still have a seat are Esther McVey, Sammy Wilson, Mark Francois, Lee Anderson, Greg Smith, John Whittigdale, Bob Blackman and Iain Duncan Smith.
It is not ideal that there are twice as many still associated with the GWPF as there are Green MPs, but for now at least, their influence will be greatly reduced, and the GWPF will need to start over in wooing sitting politicians. Hopefully there will be fewer from this intake willing to take those meetings than there were from the last government.
