The Global Story: British CPAC - Can MAGA politics be exported to the UK?

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1:20Now, every weekday on our show, we tell one story about where the world and America meet. And this week, the American right-wing movement landed in London with the first CPAC in Great Britain. The Conservative Political Action Conference started in the United States. And the Global Story decided to go visit the London version and report on the attempt to export MAGA to the UK. And by the way, if you all do enjoy this episode, which I really hope you do, you can find more of us by searching for The Global Story wherever you get your podcasts. Now, on to the show. Australia, we'll be in Japan, we'll be back in Argentina, we'll be back in Poland, we're going to be in Germany.

2:01The Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC. Think of it as a sort of political Coachella for the MAGO movement. In Italy, obviously, Great Britain, we haven't given up on Western Europe at all. And it's expanding overseas. This is Matt Schlapp, chair of CPAC, at its first event in the United Kingdom a few days ago. What they are doing in your country to destroy it, they are doing in my country to destroy it. This is the fight of our lives. Some VIP tickets for the London event were priced at more than$13 ,000. Prices that many people in the UK would bullcat. And there was an American-style feel to the event.

2:46Prayers to open the meeting, popular outright podcasters, and anti-abortion speakers flown in from the US. The tagline of the event was Save Britain, Save the West. From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman in London. And today on The Global Story, How much appeal does the MAGA movement have outside the United States? We've been to CPAC Great Britain to find out.

3:16And I'm very pleased to say that today we are joined by our very own Hannah Moore, producer on The Global Story. And Hannah, you have been at CPAC UK. Yeah, the Conservative Political Action Conference, the first one of its kind to be held in Great Britain. I spent several days in a hot and sweaty conference room and I'm here to hopefully enlighten you about what it was all about. Well, we're going to get on to all of that, Hannah, and all the people that you've met along the way there. But what actually is CPAC? Like, where does it come from? What's it supposed to do? OK, so the Conservative Political Action Conference was founded in 1974.

3:56Ronald Reagan was one of the first speakers. And for the first few years, CPAC was this kind of grassroots event, which was about exchanging conservative ideas. So it's about bringing people together from across the movement. And it's become a barometer of who's up and who's down in the Republican Party. CPAC has also expanded to other countries. It's been in Hungary, Poland, Brazil. And, you know, you get these big right-wing figures like Viktor Orban, the former prime minister of Hungary, Javier Millet, the president of Argentina. He spoke at CPAC in the US. You remember the scene of him handing the chainsaw to Elon Musk and saying, you know, we're going to slash state spending.

4:42This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! So you get these kind of like set piece, big speeches from big figures across the right. And this is the first time that sort of brand is coming to the UK. Well, the pictures that I've seen of CPAC in the United States are always of kind of large scale, glitzy, flashy affairs. When you think of political events in the UK, it's more sort of urns of tea and biscuits and maybe sort of evening receptions with slightly warm white wine. Sounds good to me. How does the American style political event transpose to the UK format? So CPAC Great Britain took place at the Intercontinental Hotel near the O2.

5:35The O2 is one of the biggest music venues in the UK. I was there a few weeks ago watching Robin. Very different crowd for that of CPAC Great Britain. I'm sure. Far fewer short leather shorts. And this hotel is kind of grand. It has a big view looking over the city of London. So the financial district, that district of power. So there was a veneer of glamour. But you didn't have to look too deeply to see that it probably wasn't as flashy as the US events tend to be. But the tickets for this event were being advertised on the CPAC website from£75. Which is what, like sort of$90 approximately? Yes, up to£10 ,000, which is, you know, more than$13 ,000.

6:26That's a lot of money. Was anyone actually paying that amount of money? It was very difficult to weigh up. And I think if you'd been hoping for that sort of level of glamour, you definitely weren't getting it here. So you had the sort of main ballroom space. And then you had this room of stands from sponsors, such as Tally Money, which is a gold company. And then you also had a golf simulator. You know, it's this kind of like little Trumpian touches, but without the kind of big scale glamour of the US events. Did you go on the golf simulator? Yeah, I did. How did it go? Well, my swing is very poor.

7:08I have no follow through. I mean... But the computer screen made me look like I'd done a great job. Yes, OK. Yeah, it was definitely there to flatter people. So it was augmented golf? Yeah. OK, all right. So CPAC, very established event in the United States at this point. I mean, it has had little outposts around the world. But why is it coming to the UK and why is it coming to the UK now? So the woman who's brought it to the UK is called Liz Truss, and she'll be familiar to anyone in the UK. She was actually one of our prime ministers for 49 days in 2022. One of the shortest serving prime ministers in UK history.

7:47Yes, but she said that she wants a Trump style revolution. All of the people here are working to make America great again.

8:01I believe that we can make Britain great again. And I spoke to her about this. Liz Truss, former British Prime Minister and Chair of CPAC GB. Thank you so much for joining us. Great pleasure. So please tell me, I know you've spoken at CPAC in the US before. You've obviously been very inspired by what's happening over there. And our listeners, a lot of them are in the US. We're really all about where the world and America meet. what made you think that that's something that needs to be brought over to Britain? Well this CPAC is a global movement so I've also spoken at CPACs in Hungary and also in Australia and what it is about is bringing together people that believe in liberty and sovereignty but they're not necessarily affiliated to one political party it's a movement of people who are concerned about issues like free speech concerned about issues like migration concerned about issues like net zero.

9:00Her argument is that politics in the UK has been in terminal decline for decades. What I think about Britain is the country is in serious trouble. The fact that we're on our seventh prime minister in 10 years shows there's a problem and we have a problem with the overall system. She said to me that when she looks at Donald Trump and Javier Malay in Argentina, She sees people who've come in to shake things up. She says that we have a lot in common with Donald Trump here in the UK. Obviously, I believe in low taxes. Donald Trump believes in low taxes. He believes in a strong America, you know, and being proud of being an American, like I am proud of being British.

9:45Liz Truss, just to give a little bit of background without going into it too much, she basically launched what was known as the mini budget. She announced unfunded tax breaks that then shocked the markets and caused mortgage rates to soar. So people are still feeling some of the effects four years on. And since she resigned from office, she's had a kind of curious place in public life. We're taking a new approach. It will be uncensorable and uncancellable. We can't give in. Welcome to the first ever edition of The Liz Truss Show. She has her own podcast, YouTube channel. You'd have to be watching the fake news BBC or living on Elon Musk's Mars mission to not know that Britain is going to hell in a handcart.

10:32where she often is interviewing kind of populist or alt-right figures from the US. And so you can see that with her slightly tarnished reputation in the UK, she is trying to pivot herself towards the kind of alt-right in the US. Who are the people who attended CPAC from the United States and from elsewhere in a kind of conservative international firmament. So you had Brad Pascal, who was Trump's campaign manager from 2018 to 2020. You had Matea Petrescu, who's a former spokesperson for Andrew and Tristan Tate. She was there to launch something called the Atlantic Strategy Institute. You had George Simeon, who's the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians.

11:24Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends from across Europe and the free world, It is an honour to stand before you today, not as a politician who came to promise, but as a fighter who came to warn and to fight. And he's been described by some analysts as a focal point of pro-Kremlin networks during Romania's election last year. He's strongly denied being close to the Kremlin. He said he's no friend of Moscow. but that question has kind of hung over him. There was a big Romanian contingent at CPAC. I would say that at some point, maybe a quarter of the room was made up of his fans who'd come over from Romania.

12:14And he spoke, and again, this was a kind of buzzword during the three days, about replacement theory. Great replacement theory, yes. So the idea that people of colour are being brought into Western nations to change the voting composition of the electorate, is that right? Yeah, and he said... This is not diversity. This is replacement. And the answer is not more compromises. The answer is re-migration. That is sending people back to the countries they came from. So, you know, hearing from somebody who has that kind of standpoint, very interesting when you've heard from what have been establishment figures who are making arguments along the same lines, but I think would be careful, even, you know, Nigel Farage would be very careful about using a term like remigration.

13:13And then from the US, you had Jack Posobiec. Now, he runs an alt-right site called Human Events, and he works for Turning Point USA, which was founded by Charlie Kirk. He has been on Megyn Kelly's show. He's been on Piers Morgan's show. He's been on Tucker Carlson's show. He's also well known for, you know, being controversial. He spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. and he was invited to CPAC to talk about this alternative media ecosystem that he's a real big part of, and I spoke to him. You're known for being very provocative. Oh, not me. And at CPAC a few years ago, you said, we didn't get all the way with January the 6th, and people will have seen that quoted.

14:03What did you mean by that? Well, I think if you actually watch the video, instead of just reading the quote, you can sort of hear the inflection in my voice and everyone in the crowd laughs. Yeah. So you meant it purely as a joke? I think it's self-evident. Okay. Okay. Well, keep in mind, keep in mind that the entire narrative going into that CPAC was that Donald Trump is anti-democracy, that Donald Trump is going to overturn democracy, that you are the end of democracy. So I'm twisting the words back and throwing it in the face, welcome to the end of democracy, because that's what they had been calling us.

14:40And it was really interesting to meet Jack Posobiec because he was very, very polished. He has a good relationship with Trump, even more so with J.D. Vance. I want to know what you think of Vance. You think Vance is going to be the next president? He's 48. I call him 48 all the time on Twitter. That's 48. What do you mean? He's right there. And he sort of spotted me from across the room and he spotted me holding my BBC microphone. and he went, Hannah, he doesn't know me at all. And he came up and he gave me a big hug. Really? Yeah. That's interesting. And even though his whole speech, and he's spoken about this often, is about the right needing to create a new media ecosystem that isn't bound by the constraints as they would see it of mainstream media, this is a man who is close to power and may not be a household name here, not a household name across all of the USA but he is somebody who is certainly a rising star and I think it is that deftness of being able to play between the kind of alt-right media scene and speak as he would see it I'm sure in a sort of unfettered way and knowing how to work with the mainstream media to gain more popularity and more profile.

15:59He helps run Turning Point USA which is attended by hundreds of thousands of young people, sometimes at their events. And it's been noted that CPACs over the past few years have been less well attended than they were sort of five, six years ago. And perhaps that is because people are turning away from CPAC and turning towards things like Turning Point that has this kind of younger energy and speaks to what they might term the new media. My name is Jack Gordon, Jack of all trades on social media. Right, and how old are you and where have you come from? I'm 22 years old and I came from Amsterdam, but originally Canada.

16:40OK, and how about you? And I spoke to a group of men in their early 20s. They've all got their own YouTube channels and podcasts. They weren't impressed by what they'd heard at CPAC. What they told me was that this is all the same arguments. These are establishment figures and we are the new generation. We're going to be in power and we are going to destroy feminism. And what you're hearing here is irrelevant.

17:14One of them told me that incels are going to be running the UK within a few years. Some points to be worked out. But the point is that CPAC, in trying to be a sort of broad church of conservatives, had a somewhat confused feeling message. Is it for people who want to be in mainstream power, who want to speak to mainstream media? Or is it for those alt-right people who say, well, the type of controversial things that we want to say won't be featured in the mainstream? Another figure I spoke to who'd been invited from the US was a man called Seth Gruber. Seth Gruber, CEO and founder of the White Rose Resistance.

17:59We're a Christian pro-life organization in the States. He is an anti-abortion campaigner, anti-transgender campaigner, because of what he sees as his deep Christian belief. Now, what he was saying was very contentious. I came from a uterus. So speaking as a former fetus, I'm like super grateful my mom didn't pay someone to rip my limbs off in utero. So I have I have the right to fight against abortion and a right to stop other people from killing their unborn babies. And if I can help in any way stay the madness and inspire people to use their voice and courage in Great Britain, then I will. And I would welcome the same kind of voices in America.

18:44Well, abortion is not a political wedge issue in the UK in the same way that it is in the United States, is it? But he'd been flown over to talk about this. But what was interesting to me about him was the religiosity of it. And that was a theme that you definitely saw coming through the conference. And that felt very, very different to British political conferences that I've been to. There's not a lot of religion at British political conferences, generally speaking, right? And CPAC started with a prayer each day. Yes. There was this kind of through line of Christian nationalism coming through in several of the speakers.

19:21So really very interesting, really very different to what you would see basically at any political event in the UK. Were there any other MAGA A-listers at the event, people who are household names in the US and around the world? Ron DeSantis was meant to be coming. they announced his name several times on the second day of the conference and he didn't turn up the organizers say that his plane was grounded but he he would have been the biggest U.S. name.

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21:02Well, how about Nigel Farage? He's well known outside of Britain. He portrays himself as a good friend of Donald Trump. He's one of the favourites to become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain if polls are to be believed. You went to go and see him speak. What was that like? there was definitely more excitement about Nigel Farage than about any other speech at this conference. Please welcome to the stage, leader of Reform UK and parliamentary candidate for Clapton, Nigel Farage. The room was completely full of people and people of all ages, which was quite interesting to see. He came out onto the stage and he has this kind of swagger in the way that he carries himself.

21:45people were immediately clapping and whooping for him. Well, thank you very much indeed. It's a pleasure to see CPAC in what we used to call Great Britain. And he spoke without an autocue for about 45 minutes, which I hadn't seen any of the other speakers do. And his argument was that Britain is broken, that British people have forgotten what British values are, that there is no ability for free speech in the country. And he said... We're actually engaged in a battle for the very soul of our nation to define what we actually are, what we stand for, what our values are, because they're under attack in just the most astonishing and extraordinary way.

22:42People talk a lot about Farage's charisma and there have been local council elections in which reform did very well recently as well. So that's why people are kind of looking at him as this maybe potential next prime minister. But the thing is, he's not actually a member of parliament at the moment because he resigned his seat in Claxton in the south of the country. In a surprise move. In a surprise move. In May, stories started to come out about his having accepted a£5 million donation from a crypto billionaire called Christopher Harbourn. That's almost$7 million. Yes. And he accepted this donation before he became an MP.

23:29And so his argument is that he can do whatever he likes with that money. it wasn't donated to him as Nigel Farage MP. It was donated to him as Nigel Farage, citizen and leader of Reform UK. And his story has changed several times over the months about why he needed that£5 million. Sometimes he said he needed it for security. Sometimes he's merely said, I can spend it on what I want. He said at times I could spend it on expensive cars if I wanted to spend it on that. But this story, which... Reform UK was trying to bat away as nothing has really stuck. And it's led to Nigel Farage resigning his seat in what he portrays as a mainstream media smear campaign.

24:19This happened in America, happened in America with lawfare being used and many, many other things. And I found myself and my colleagues being adjudged to be guilty, guilty of virtually everything. every single day. The issue of safety and security was present at this CPAC event that you attended. It took place in the wake of the killing of Anne Whittacombe, who was a prominent former spokesperson for the Reform Party, which is Nigel Farage's party, and a veteran Conservative MP, now retired. She was found dead in her home the week before last. And she was killed in what police are calling was a suspected targeted attack.

25:07Did people talk about that killing at the event? It was a shadow that hung over the entire event. On the first day, Liz Truss and Matt Schlapp stood and did their opening remarks and then Liz Truss turned to show this slideshow of pictures of Anne Widdicombe and she broke down into tears as she was talking about Anne Widdicombe and introducing these photos of her across her very long political career. What's happened since CPAC is that a man called Joshua Kerry, who's 28, has been charged with Anne Whittacombe's murder. As I say, that hadn't happened during CPAC at the end of last week. And it's something that several of the speakers showed concern about, something that Nigel Farage has repeatedly said he's concerned about in terms of MPs and former MPs' safety.

26:03The difference, Hannah, between UK politics and US politics is so stark. But what did this event at CPAC tell you about the direction that UK politics might be moving in to emulate the United States more? Yeah. I think it would be really easy to dismiss this event as a flop. And if you read a lot of the press coverage, it's focused on how empty the ballroom was, how tepid the reception was when some of the speakers were on stage. But it's not just about how many people were in the room. It's about the kinds of ideas that they were bringing forth about British identity, American identity, outsiders, migrants as being a threat to British values, British Christian values.

26:53that was spoken about a lot. And I think what was most interesting to me is stylistically what this CPAC was trying to learn from the US. The mainstream right in the UK is at an inflection point. The Conservative government, after 14 years, is out of power. And I think they're trying to work out what they represent now. And one of the things that Liz Truss is doing is looking to the US, where politics is done in a bolder, shinier way, where there's a concept that sometimes controversial speech is allowed on the right. And what she really wants to do and was trying to prove, I think, with CPAC Great Britain, is that there's a verve and an energy and something that UK politics can learn from the US and the way in which people present themselves on the right.

27:50Okay, so at this event, it sounds like a lot of the people there were insiders. I mean, you talked about a lot of young men in suits who were there attending who were already involved in this side of the political scene. If you're not getting actual voters to attend an event like this, who are energized by the political project on offer, does that tell us something about maybe the levels of enthusiasm for MAGA-style politics in the UK. Well, I spoke to a lot of people at the conference about their views on Donald Trump, and I can't say that anybody was really jumping with excitement about him.

28:29And, you know, that just as a kind of like anecdotal snapshot bears out where he is in the polling. The mainstream political parties in the UK are definitely feeling the threat of Nigel Farage and reform, not just because his ideas are speaking to parts of the population who feel they've been unheard, but also because his gregarious style, his speaking off the cuff, not using an auto cue, speaking directly to members of the audience, that Trumpian style, it does play well. And I saw that in the room. But the idea that the MAGA right is a political steamroller, which is preparing to take over not just the UK, but the whole European continent writ large, the evidence that you've seen at this event would suggest that maybe there is some way to go before that steamroller theory is actually proven.

29:29Absolutely.

29:35Hannah, thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. Pleasure to be here on the other side of the glass.