Johnson's Oven-ready Freemarket Libertarian Brexit Deal Coming Your Way Soon...Friedman: “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change"
"IN the period immediately before the Brexit referendum and in the years since, a stream of prominent British politicians and campaigners, including Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, have flown to the US to meet with thinktanks such as the AEI and the Heritage Foundation ( right-wing pro deregulation 'independent' American think-tanks), often paid for by those thinktanks, seeking out ideas, support and networking opportunities. Meanwhile, US thinktanks and their affiliates, which are largely funded by rightwing American billionaires and corporate donations, have teamed up with British politicians and London-based counterparts such as the IEA, the Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade, to help write detailed proposals for what the UK’s departure from the EU, and its future relationships with both the EU and the US, should look like, raising questions about foreign influence on British politics.
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The organisations involved in this collaboration between the US and UK radical right are partners in a global coalition of more than 450 thinktanks and campaign groups called the Atlas Network, which has its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Members of the network operate independently but also cooperate closely in fighting for their shared vision of ultra free markets and limited government. They call themselves the “worldwide freedom movement”, collectively they have multimillion-dollar budgets, and many of their donors, board members, trustees and researchers overlap.
Brad Lips, the chief executive of Atlas, has said that his organisation takes inspiration from monetarist economist Milton Friedman’s famous insight that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.
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Alongside efforts to shape the media narrative, some Atlas thinktanks in the US have furthered their cause by writing blueprints for legislation for new governments. In 2017, Hannan set up his own new thinktank, the Initiative for Free Trade, which was an Atlas partner, to do something similar. The launch event took place at a Foreign Office venue with Johnson’s help. The IFT worked with nine other Atlas partners – including the Adam Smith Institute and the IEA in the UK, and the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center and the Heritage Foundation in the US – to draw up a detailed, 239-page draft legal text for a US-UK free trade deal that would radically liberalise the UK economy, including opening up the NHS to foreign competition. The Cato Institute helped with funding, and the focus was “not the EU, but liberalising trade with the rest of the world as the best way to alleviate poverty and spread opportunity”, Hannan told us. (IFT ceased being an Atlas partner in the summer of this year.)
How the right’s radical thinktanks reshaped the Conservative party
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... as-network
Take note, Dallow.