Pericles never wrote this

HR Director, interim specializing in International M&A and EU disputes ex reservist officer all views are my own RT is not agreement

[The Receipts UK ♿ @david_hollas]

Great Oakley Airfield: The Event Went Ahead Without a Licence.

Three weeks ago, we published the letter confirming Great Oakley Airfield was always the plan for Nigel Farage's Clacton victory celebration, not the last-minute security decision it was presented as. Camping, caravans, a main stage, big screens, live music, several hundred people, all lined up in advance for the evening of 13 August.

What wasn't clear at the time was whether the event actually had the licence it needed to go ahead legally. Tendring District Council has now confirmed, in writing, that it didn't.

A Temporary Event Notice was submitted for the 13 August event. The council refused it. A counter-notice was served, because the application missed the statutory timescales required under the Licensing Act 2003. No authorisation was granted.
The event went ahead anyway.

Asked directly whether the council was aware the event proceeded without licensing cover, and whether it's looking at the matter now, the council's licensing officer gave this response: "As the matter may now involve potential enforcement considerations, Tendring District Council is unable to comment further on any ongoing or potential investigations by Licensing or other council departments; nor provide any further details about the TEN submission."

That's not a refusal to engage. It's the specific form of words a council uses when there's something live to protect, an active or possible investigation it isn't yet in a position to discuss. Councils don't reach for that phrase over nothing.

Whether any licensable activity, alcohol sales, regulated entertainment, actually took place at the event is something the council won't confirm. But an event of the scale already documented, hundreds of attendees, a main stage, camping laid on overnight, is not the kind of gathering that typically runs without licensable activity of some description.
Under section 136 of the Licensing Act 2003, carrying out a licensable activity without authorisation is a criminal offence, punishable by up to six months' imprisonment or an unlimited fine.

Reform has been approached for comment on who organised the event, whether the party was aware the TEN had been refused before it went ahead, and whether alcohol or entertainment was provided on the night. This piece will be updated if a response is received.

[Right of reply outstanding as of publication. Comment invited from Reform UK's press office.]

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

CLARKE: What Russians are good at is creating social disorder, or using social media to create domestic disorder.

Anything they can do to increase sense of anxiety in population, or political discord, or to work on any fault lines.

We’ve got lots of fault lines in our politics, all political systems have, Russians work on any fault lines they can find.

Whether it’s Reform Party, immigration, small boats, devolution, Welsh and Scottish demands for independence.

Anything they can find that's a potential fissure in Britain’s social cohesion, they go for it. There’s more of that.

Russians don’t create these issues. These issues already exist. Russians didn't create the immigration crisis.

They take something that exists, make it worse, polarising it, making people feel even more strongly about it.

How? By distorting facts. They take basic facts, distort them, add few more things to them, invent few quotes.

So people who've been bit critical are made to seem extremely critical through manipulation of their words.

It’s even happened to me. I’ve had things that I’ve said on Sky News taken and added to with things I didn’t say.

To make it look as if I said this, when I didn’t at all. They take something real, and turn it into something else.

Something that makes other people angry. It goes back to the old communist system of subverting the West.

[The Independent @Independent]

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has received £20m in donations from cryptocurrency investors since the general election, The Independent can reveal.

Read more: https://t.co/1ViWtgd4gS

[The Finance Guy @OneFinanceGuy]

You do know one of your big donors, Sasan Ghandehari, was operating a company out of UAE (Orico) which in turn had all its revenues from Government projects in Iran, right? You do know the company itself was linked to the Revolutionary Guards, right? So how about you stop playing dumb, @nadhimzahawi? Come clean about your party's links to dark money, because the paper trail is already catching up with you.

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: They hunted the vice president to kill him. They built a gallows on the Capitol lawn. They assaulted police officers with flagpoles and bear spray, and they tried to seize the presidency for Donald Trump.

And to this day, Mike Collins supports that violent attempt to overturn the election. He honors and defends them. He went to visit them in jail.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

🚨 Mitchell Palmer is a New Zealander who began at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, then gained a degree in History and Economics at Oxford.

He won the Oxford Union inter-collegiate and LSE Intervarsity debating tournaments, and the Mont Pèlerin Society's 2022 Hayek Fellowship, a credential the Society hands to young scholars specifically to induct them into the Hayekian tradition.

Talk about 'indoctrination camps'!

He then worked in economic consulting in NZ and at a Singapore think tank, before becoming a special advisor to David Seymour, ACT Party leader and NZ's Deputy PM, running Seymour's office's quantitative policy research.

He now holds a dual role as an economist at #TuftonSt's Adam Smith Institute and a Snr Policy Advisor at the NZ Parliament, and as of August 2026 he's Robert Jenrick's chief economic adviser at Reform UK, having helped draft Jenrick's welfare-reform speech.

Palmer said it's "long past time" to privatise OUR #NHS, has called the pensions triple lock fiscally unsustainable and wants it scrapped. He's argued for migration on narrowly instrumental grounds, as a tool for "global poverty alleviation" rather than any humanitarian framing - an example of how free-market economism can produce a pro-migration position that sits awkwardly next to Reform's actual electoral coalition and rhetoric.

His broader ASI output is standard neoliberalusm: planning deregulation, a fisheries paper proposing transferable property rights and privatised quotas, tax cuts, opposition to "anti-growth, anti-business" regulation.

Palmer was formed inside the movement from the start, Hayek Fellow at Oxford before he ever worked professionally, then ACT Party (NZ's own free-market libertarian party) before ASI.

This is a career built entirely inside the transnational neoliberal apparatus that the Mont Pelerin Society exists to reproduce. The MPS itself was founded by Hayek in 1947 explicitly to train up a cadre of scholars and politicians who would keep classical liberalism alive against what its founders saw as a double threat: external communism and the collectivist drift of Western elites themselves. Palmer's Fellowship is the mechanism working as designed.

The ASI sits inside the #55TuftonStreet cluster, alongside the IEA, CPS, TPA, Civitas (and the New Culture Forum), all rated the lowest possible score for funding transparency, and all part of a network that has taken tobacco money and fossil-fuel-adjacent funding.

The ASI itself insists relies on *undisclosed* private donors

The ASI is also a member of the transatlantic Atlas Network, founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher, a founding ASI trustee: the ASI's Atlas link isn't a later add-on but baked into its DNA.

Atlas has channelled millions in anonymous US donor money to UK free-market think tanks including the ASI, funding an institutional culture whose policy outputs (the ASI has directly influenced enacted UK legislation, per its own internal Philip Morris-documented tracking) skews toward deregulation that happens to benefit large capital, particularly US capital, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Palmer is a textbook case of the "revolving door" between transnational libertarian think-tank infrastructure and populist-right parties.

He's not a Reform UK ideologue in the culture-war sense, his public statements are dry technocratic neoliberalism that would sit just as comfortably in a Truss government as in Farage's party.

His appointment tells you plenty about what Reform's economic policy is actually going to be underneath the immigration rhetoric: not economic nationalism or protectionism for the "left behind" voters Reform courts, but standard Tufton Street austerity-and-privatisation, dressed in different clothes.

That tension, between Reform's populist 'anti-establishment' positioning and an economic adviser from the most establishment wing of free-market think-tankery, its own dark-money-adjacent network, and a self-perpetuating Hayekian credentialing system.

[Reform UK Exposed 🇬🇧 @reformexposed]

“Andrew Tate is an important voice for men” @Nigel_Farage.

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: The Government says France has stopped 185 boats and over 4,300 migrants from reaching the UK since the new deal three months ago

[Shabana Mahmood MP @ShabanaMahmood]

We will always welcome those who come here legally and seek to build a better life.

But if you come here illegally, or you break our laws, we will send you home.

Returns of those here illegally are up 52% under this Government – to the highest levels since 2016.

I know there is more to be done. That is why we are pursuing new legislation that will more swiftly remove those here illegally.

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

Immigration down 82%
Small boat crossings down 43%
Deportations at highest level in 10 years

Yet the likes of Lowe, Farage and Yusuf wail to the media we are being invaded and the media amplify the lies

Deportations hit 10-year high as Shabana Mahmood says change 'sends a message' https://t.co/UlIZJ8AXE7

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: The Government says 80,000 illegal migrants and foreign criminals have now been deported since 2024 - the highest level since 2016

[Robin Holloway 🇩🇪🇬🇧 @B1EMW]

It should never be forgotten it was the Tory party who blocked investigation into Russian interference to protect Billionaire’s Brexit. They pretend they are the patriots waving their flags, but plenty of them took the ruble.

[Lionel Barber @lionelbarber]

“Tory client press” translated means Telegraph. TImes and Mail which have ended the mid term flirtation with Farage and Reform UK. Why? Not so much crypto donation scandal, but owners (Dopfner, Murdoch, Rothermere) who don’t see him as a winner, quite apart from policies (immigration, welfare etc) that don’t add up

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

America cannot project power without alliances. Trump burning all America’s most important alliances makes America weaker, poorer and less safe, even if they now bully their backyard as a matter of policy.

Article: https://t.co/KZ0gvHJSkH

[Rupa Huq MP @RupaHuq]

Significant intervention on how BBC current affairs coverage prioritising Reform. This is the corporation’s ex head of news speaking, rather than just me banging on about it @CommonsCMS

The Gibbisation of the beeb is a disgrace

https://t.co/Lk3gu676Bk

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

👏 Sir Bill Browder just said what no UK minister has dared to say:

A Reform politician took money from a Kremlin-linked agent to advance Russian interests inside Britain.
Browder calls it treason, says the sentence is too short, and warns this is “the tip of the iceberg”.

He’s right tick ✅

🔥 The Russia Report was buried.
🔥 The Foreign Affairs Committee was blocked.

And anyone asking questions - including those challenging the Brexit vote in court - was smeared!@JMPSimor

Gill isn’t the whole story.
He’s the proof the story is real.

How much Russian interference have we not been allowed to see?

[Pericles never wrote this @PeterSBowyer]

@Microinteracti1 Getting inside the OODA loop will make a significant difference

[Trevor McArdle @McardleTrevor]

Arron Banks is a Russian asset

Russia’s foreign policy is to gather ‘Kompromat’ (compromising material) on key figures in other countries to use as leverage

Most successful project to date is Trump

Arron was, and still is, fishing for Kompromat

[George Greenwood @GeorgeGreenwood]

A former business partner of Nigel Farage was an influential figure in a conspiracy-based cryptocurrency group that was accused of scamming investors out of thousands of pounds.

With @tomfball and @sianushka

https://t.co/z9CquaxKsm

[Gabriel Pogrund @Gabriel_Pogrund]

EXCLUSIVE: Nigel Farage’s secret donors can both be linked to crypto betting platform implicated in potentially illegal gambling for first time

Christopher Harborne firm used to facilitate UK client bets with Tetherbet, in which George Cottrell is key man https://t.co/2Air2R6wI6