BlufBear

When Roe v Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2022, many in the UK watched in stunned disbelief. A fifty-year-old precedent dismantled not just by judges, but by decades of lobbying, litigation, and quiet encroachment by Christian nationalist networks. It was a wake-up call, but not one we have truly heeded.

Because while the UK does not share the same constitutional framework or theocratic fervour as the American Right, the underlying tactics have already crossed the Atlantic. The architects of US culture wars are not content with domestic dominance. They are exporting it, and the signs are here, if we care to search for them.

Let us consider Project 2025, a policy blueprint backed by the Heritage Foundation and spearheaded by a coalition of hard-right US groups, many with overt Christian dominionist agendas. We can anticipate once implemented by the Trump presidency, the plan will consolidate executive power (in process), gut secular oversight, and institutionalise religious moral codes across public life. LGBTQI rights? Gone. Reproductive freedom? Extinguished. Trans healthcare? Criminalised. The legislation is not there yet, but it’s not fringe, either.

Sadly, these ideas do not stay stateside. Groups like Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, have expanded their influence across Europe, including the UK. ADF International has provided legal support to figures like Baroness Caroline Cox and been involved in UK cases challenging LGBTQI rights under the guise of “religious liberty.” This is not an accident. It is strategy.

Their money and legal muscle have found sympathetic partners among rising UK political entities. While we lack smoking-gun evidence of direct financial entanglements, credible investigative reporting and campaign finance irregularities have raised concerns that groups like Reform UK may be the beneficiaries, indirectly or otherwise, of transatlantic ideological funding. Their messaging, particularly around “woke indoctrination,” gender identity, assaults on free speech, and “family values,” echoes precisely the narrative architecture honed in the US.

This is the true “invasion from within” I fear. Not in the conspiratorial framing of far-right rhetoric, but in the gradual, seemingly innocuous import of moral panic, disguised as free speech or parental rights. As with Roe, the real damage comes not from open revolt, but from the incremental hollowing out of rights and secularism while people remain distracted by boats or are disengaged entirely.

It is no coincidence that misogyny lies at the core of these projects. The rollback of abortion rights is not just a blow to reproductive autonomy, it is a reassertion of control over women’s bodies and agency. The simultaneous targeting of LGBTQI people, particularly trans women, is part of the same cultural script: to reimpose rigid, patriarchal order under the banner of tradition and God.

The Auckland Declaration, which I support, offers a principled alternative. It warns against the “politics of division” that scapegoat minorities for the failures of the powerful, and calls for a renewed defence of pluralism, secular democracy, and universal human rights. These are not abstract ideals. They are the very foundations that Project 2025 and its ideological cousins seek to dismantle.

The UK is, in many ways, less vulnerable than the US. Our institutions are more secular, our judiciary more independent, our public more sceptical of overt religiosity in politics. But we should not mistake these conditions for immunity. Culture war rhetoric, when stoked by dark money and legitimised by political figures, can spread fast. The next moral panic is always just one manufactured outrage away.

We must remain alert, not just to what is shouted loudly, but to what creeps in quietly. It is not enough to oppose bigotry after the fact. We must see it forming, funding itself, and embedding its language into the public sphere, and name it before it names us.

The lesson of Roe is not that rights can be lost. That much we know. The lesson is how quickly, how surgically, how strategically those rights can be removed, if we aren’t watching.