Last year, the United States published a National Security Strategy with an extraordinary diagnosis of Europe. It warns of “civilizational erasure”, predicts some NATO countries could become “majority non-European” within decades and celebrates the growing influence of “patriotic European parties” a cause for “great optimism”.
US policy, it says, should include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
This isn’t a leaked diplomatic cable or an allegation made by America’s opponents. It is US government policy, written down.
The language of patriotism does a lot of work. Migration and demographic change are presented as a threat to European civilisation itself.
The strategy’s language was quickly linked by analysts and reporters to one of the international far right’s most notorious racist conspiracy theories: the Great Replacement - the idea that Europe’s existing population is being displaced through mass immigration.
Now there is money attached.
The US State Department intends to provide $12 million to conservative organisations in Britain. $7 million is destined for 878, a recently established organisation co-founded by former Conservative Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Its priorities include ending mass immigration.
Another $5 million is reportedly going to Free Speech Union International, an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by Conservative peer Toby Young.
Meanwhile, senior State Department official Sarah Rogers has been on a European road trip promoting the grants and the MAGA administration’s free-speech agenda, meeting figures from Reform UK and strengthening ties with the European right.
The money, the political outreach and the published strategy are all pointing in the same direction.
Taking back control, with help from Washington
Free speech is central to the justification. The Trump administration increasingly portrays European attempts to regulate online content as censorship, with Britain’s Online Safety Act becoming a particular target.
The Free Speech Union shares that fight. It has described the Act as “Orwellian” and cultivated relationships with figures in the Trump administration.
This week, the Financial Times reported that the FSU had gone a step further, urging US Vice-President JD Vance to press the British Government to pause the Online Safety Act and stop funding its anti-disinformation unit.
A British campaigning organisation was inviting Washington into a British policy fight.
There is a certain irony in a political project so preoccupied with sovereignty, borders, patriotism and interference by unaccountable outside forces turning to a foreign government for money and political leverage.
Toby Young himself criticised Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit debate in 2016. Britons, he argued, could make up their own minds. Apparently foreign intervention in British politics looks rather different when the foreign government agrees with you.
Perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is how little it looks like foreign interference. We’re used to looking for Russian money, shell companies, bots, cyberattacks and covert networks.
Here, almost everything is happening in broad daylight.
The Government clearly knows foreign interference is a risk. It’s already tightening the rules, including a new £100,000 cap on political donations from overseas electors. That’s welcome.
Foreign money, though, doesn’t need to go anywhere near a political party to influence British politics.
Modern political influence has a supply chain. Money funds organisations, research, campaigns, events and social media. Ideas move into newspapers and television, reach politicians, shape political debate and eventually become policy. No foreign cheque needs to arrive at party headquarters.
If we’re serious about stopping foreign interference, I’d argue we need to look further up the chain too - long before foreign money turns into a political donation.
Normally, the hard part of foreign interference is proving that it’s happening. This time, America has written down what it wants for Europe, put millions of dollars behind it and started building relationships with the people who will help deliver it.
We don’t need an intelligence agency to uncover that.
We need a democracy equipped to deal with it.
ANY foreign interference with any government is abhorrent. But when it is from a dementia-ridden cretin like Trump, it is down-right, bloody, dangerous. For this country to allow ANYTHING American to interfere or be part of our culture is so morally wrong in every which way. Streeting sold part of our NHS to Palantir, and now he is doing the same with our armed forces. But to allow Trump, along with the stuck prig who is Jacob Rees Mogg, to have any influence in our government scares the life out of me.
As a dementia-ridden cretin (the same age as donald, incidentally, the lower case 'd' being deliberate) I was the first person to 'like' your post :)
What terrifies me is that the reach of right wing funding has become uncontainable in recent years (that may be decades, mayn't it?) and that centrist politicians co-operate unthinkingly with those funders - as Streeting/Palantir demonstrates once again.