The Weekly Spotlight: MAGA Is Organising Here.

For years, Britain’s anti-abortion movement has borrowed from America everything from the language and tactics, to the money and legal strategies.

Now the relationship is becoming much harder to ignore.

From MAGA to Europe

This week, HOPE not hate founder Nick Lowles sounded the alarm over Sarah Rogers, the Trump administration figure nominated to lead the US Agency for Global Media, the body overseeing broadcasters including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Rogers is no stranger to Britain’s far right.

Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that she had met influential European right-wing organisations and figures connected to Reform UK while developing plans for US government funding for MAGA-aligned think-tanks and organisations across Europe.

The programme was expected to focus on cities including London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels ready to push an ideological agenda far beyond Washington.

And guess who keeps turning up?

JD Vance has become one of the clearest bridges between the US MAGA movement and Europe’s nationalist right.

He is also one of the most powerful anti-abortion politicians in the US.

At the US March for Life earlier this year, Vance celebrated the Trump administration’s anti-abortion record and told activists to keep pushing after the fall of Roe v Wade.

Meanwhile, here in Britain, Reform’s policy operation is headed by James Orr, whose anti-abortion views have been well documented.

Orr has also been closely associated with Vance and the broader network of conservative organisations attempting to import US-style religious politics into Britain.

This summer, Nigel Farage joined right-wing politicians, US figures and anti-abortion campaigners at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London.

The same people keep appearing in the same rooms and abortion is part of the package

It is tempting to treat abortion as a separate “social issue”, disconnected from arguments about immigration, free speech, nationalism or LGBTQ+ rights.

The people organising against our rights do not make that distinction.

Research by openDemocracy found a sharp rise in abortion-related discussion among Reform-supporting and far-right accounts.

Amnesty International has also warned of a growing anti-rights movement in Britain targeting reproductive freedom, abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights together.

That is why we keep following the wider network.

Anti-abortion politics does not arrive alone.

It travels with attacks on equality, attempts to roll back LGBTQ+ rights, hostility to feminism and a politics obsessed with restoring supposedly “traditional” families and gender roles.

MAGA has already shown us where that road can lead.

We should probably believe them when they tell us they want to bring the same politics here.

This isn’t the US, but that doesn’t make us immune.

Our politics, healthcare system and abortion laws are different. Public support for abortion rights remains strong. 

But we have seen what happens when anti-abortion movements are allowed to build power while everyone else assumes the rights they are targeting are safe.

The important question is not whether Britain will wake up tomorrow with a US-style abortion ban.

It is whether anti-abortion politics is gaining money, access, political allies and institutional power.

And in three weeks on Saturday 5 September, the people pushing this agenda will be on our streets.

And we will be there.

Stand Up for Choice is Abortion Rights’ annual counter-protest, bringing together pro-choice campaigners, trade unionists and supporters to make sure the anti-abortion movement does not march through London unchallenged.

We’ll be gathering at Parliament Square, by the Millicent Fawcett statue, from 1pm.

This isn’t separate from everything we have been tracing in the Weekly Spotlight.

The anti-abortion movement gathering in London exists within a much wider international anti-rights ecosystem — one increasingly connected through money, organisations, political relationships and shared ideology.

Three weeks to go.

We’ll see you in Parliament Square.

Sources

• Nick Lowles, MAGA’s New Mouthpiece Targeting Europe, 8 August 2026
• Reuters, reporting on Sarah Rogers and the US Agency for Global Media
• Financial Times, reporting on US funding plans for MAGA-aligned organisations in Europe
• The Guardian, reporting on concerns over US political funding in Europe
• Associated Press, reporting on JD Vance at the 2026 US March for Life
• DeSmog, profile of Reform UK policy chief James Orr
• openDemocracy, reporting on abortion and Reform UK
• Amnesty International UK, research into Britain’s growing anti-rights movement