Project 2025: The UK Edition (Part 2)
A Cambridge academic, a YouTube influencer, and Reform UK’s old HQ - the ingredients for our own Project 2025 are already mixed.
This is Part Two of a Two-Part Deep Dive.
In this piece, I’ll discuss how the ideas and architecture of Project 2025 are already being imported into the United Kingdom through the newly rebranded Centre for a Better Britain (formerly Resolute 1850) - the Millbank Tower based think tank that’s quietly constructing policy, personnel and media infrastructure to deliver a UK version of the same authoritarian playbook.
In Part One, the threat felt distant, an American crisis unfolding at arm’s length. In Part Two, the distance disappears. The same strategies that hollowed out Washington’s institutions are now being quietly rebuilt in a familiar building in Westminster’s shadows.
If you missed Part One - start here:
In Part One, we learnt all about Project 2025 and what it actually is - not so much manifesto as manual, 900 pages that give explicit instruction on how to consolidate power, and something that the Trump Administration is treating as an operations guide.
The only comforting thought for readers in the UK would be “thank goodness it’s not happening here.”
Except that soothing thought is not necessarily true.
The same architecture is ever so quietly being replicated right in the heart of Westminster - the same funders, think-tank expertise and authoritarian style - just under a different name.
First it was Resolute 1850, now rebranded to Centre for a Better Britain
This is, unfortunately, not speculative - the infrastructure is already being prepared, the money is already flowing and connections are already well established. And just like Americans who were warned about 2025 and didn’t listen and act when it could have mattered, the UK is being given the exact same warning - except this time we have the advantage of actually seeing the American experiment happening in real time before it takes foothold in our country.
When it was incorporated in December 2024 as Resolute 1850 Ltd - named for the HMS Resolute whose timbers eventually became the Oval Office desk - the project was immediately scrutinised for the overt US symbolism and MAGA associations.
By April 2025 a rebrand was planned, and by summer of this year it was live the Centre for a Better Britain complete with a shiny new website and a public launch for September, which neatly coincided with Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham.
Through CFABB, the infrastructure is actively being built, the money is already flowing and the connections are being established - and just like Americans had warnings about Project 2025, the UK is being given the exact same warning - only this time with a Cambridge Academic as chair.
The big question is, will we learn from their mistakes before it’s too late?
What is CFABB - and what is it for?
In December 2024, Resolute 1850 Ltd was incorporated with offices in Millbank Tower in Westminster - very conveniently the same looming building on the Embankment that currently serves as the headquarters for Reform UK Ltd (Incorporated as REFORM 2025 LTD as of 17 May 2025) and which had previously housed the Tories between 2007 and 2014.
The Centre for a Better Britain was bought forth from this and is basically Resolute 1850 under a different flag - it has the same directors, same funding sources and same policy objectives.
The new name follows what has now become the established way of think-tanking in the UK, echoing bland names like the Centre for Policy Studies. It sounds mundane, reassuringly domestic and even a little bit patriotic.
The CFABB structure remains as a PLC rather than a charity in the same way that most think-tanks in the UK are, presumably to avoid constraints on political partiality.
Who is running CFABB - and what are their networks?
CFABB’s leadership team is a network that’s been assembled out of academics, political operators, industry funders and creator-led media.
Advisory Board Chair - Dr James Orr
Chairing the advisory board is Dr James Orr - an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge. He not only brings intellectual credibility to the organisation, but something far, far more valuable, a close relationship with current US Vice President JD Vance. The two have been in close contact since 2019, bonding specifically over Vance’s conversion to Catholicism.
Orr was one one of the facilitators of meetings between British Conservative politicians, and the Vice President during his visit to the UK in August this year, including with the Shadow-Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick. Orr has recently used his platform to attack the UK’s support for Ukraine with the claim that British politicians suffer from “Ukraine Brain” - a position that aligns with both Trump and Vance’s own scepticism toward EU and British security commitments.
Chief Executive Officer - Jonathan Brown
Brown, a former Foreign Office diplomat, continues on as CEO of CFABB, providing operational continuity from his former role as COO for Reform UK, becoming the organisational link between CFABB’s think-tankiness and the political machinery of Reform UK.
Founders and Funders - David Lilley and Mark Thompson
Thompson and Lilley are the organisations founding directors and major funders, both being metals traders with fossil-fuel interests and, importantly, “friends of Nigel”, having socialised with Farage while he was in the commodities business.
Approximately £274k in contributions to Reform have been linked to Lilley alone, and their board membership represents direct industry interests in the roll back of environmental regulations.
Special Adviser - Christopher Howarth
In August 2025, Howarth, a former special adviser to Priti Patel and advisor to the the European Research Group joined the organisation, further strengthening the connection to Conservative politicians.
Content Creator - Archie Manners
Manners is a YouTube personality that was hired in June 2025 by CFABB to lead social media and communications strategies. His channels have achieved well over a million subscribers, and it represents CFABB’s focus on reaching younger demographics, especially young and disillusioned male audiences.
His appointment is a signal that the organisation understands that political influence is increasingly flowing through creator-led content and parasocial relationships.
The hires undertaken by CFABB are neither random, nor are they haphazard - they’re a personnel pipeline that’s designed to directly connect American conservative ideology with British Political infrastructure, fossil fuel money and algorithm native media into a single, highly effective and coherent operation.
What is CFABB’s Policy Agenda?
The policies that are known about from CFABB so far loudly echo Project 2025 outcomes, but with British characteristics, but mostly boil down to hardline governance that’s being repackaged as “radical reform.”
The mission statement on CFAB’s website declares its mission as delivering “bold transformation” through “radical action to reform the state and return it to democratic accountability.”
The organisations ideological framework has been described in an interview with Noah Vickers from Politics Home by Orr as “the politics of national preference” and positioning it as “an organising matrix” that will be guided by a “post-Brexit, pro-nation, pro-sovereignty, pro-Britain impulse.”
The development of their policies have so far been:
Energy and Net Zero
CFABB’s first policy paper, expected to launch in Autumn this year, specifically targets climate policies, advocating for the rollback of Net Zero commitments under a banner of “energy realism.” Considering Lilley and Thompson’s fossil-fuel interests, the financial motivations here should be obvious.
Pensions Reform
Brown has indicated that the second report would address the thorny issue of “reforming the UK’s pensions system,” which is justified by his expectations of “a proper economic debt crisis within the next year, maybe before Christmas”. The framing here - manufactured urgency that demands radical restructuring - is something we’ve seen multiple times in the US this year.
Constitutional Reform
CFABB’s future plans also include developing US-style constitutional reforms - reforms that would significantly change the balance of the UK’s constitution. Brown told the FT that “what the country needs now is radical change”, arguing that the historic balance between parliament, the judiciary and the civil service has “fallen too much in favour of permanent structures” rather than elected ones and added that the UK is “in danger of being technically a democracy but run by the judiciary and bureaucrats.”
Brown has specific targets in mind: Supreme Court judgements, the ministerial code which “forces politicians to do a lot of consultation with civil servants”, the Climate Change Act and the Equalities Act.
CFAB holds Trump and Truss as a “double example” of the need to “make sure the civil service co-operates.”
In practice what this means is that we would have narrower judicial review, politicised regulatory appointments and tighter civil society funding, all executed through statutory instruments as opposed to executive orders as is the case in the US.
How is CFABB funded - and what exactly are the donors getting for their money?
To date, CFABB has secured over £1m in pledged funding, which has come through both UK and US right-wing donors. The FT reviewed internal presentations that confirmed active fundraising that has been targeting Trump-adjacent US donors, MAGA figureheads, Big Tech personalities and the religious right and CFABB, according to reporting from the Sunday Times, has set up an entity in Dallas, Texas presumably for this purpose.
Lilley and Thompsons, both with direct financial interests in maintaining fossil fuel dependence, provide, according to Novara Media the primary UK funding - their board positions present investment, they’re buying the policy outcomes that will best serve their business interests while packaging them as “populist reform”.
And what do the donors get in return?
Influence over policy in the UK, the professionalisation of Reform UK from a populist protest movement into a credible governing party with detailed implementation plans and the infrastructure to reshape the UK’s civil service, NHS, climate policies and civil rights protections.
Potential American donors will get something even larger in return though - a beachhead for conservative governance models that they’re desperate to see in Europe. It would be an opportunity to test a Project 2025 style framework in a friendly European country, and if it succeeds, they can move to provide a template for similar movements across the continent.
How does the Heritage Foundation fit into the picture?
Connection to the Heritage Foundation run deeper than just a shared ideology.
Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation President and leading architect of “institutionalising Trumpism”, has previously been publicly praised by Orr for building the organisation into a $100m operation capable of producing “Project 2025-style” policies and managing to staff “an entire administration with hundreds and hundreds of “bright young things, which is exactly the model that CFABB appears to want to replicate.
The Vance/Orr relationship further links to Roberts, with Vance having written the foreword to Roberts’s book, Dawn’s Early Light creating a direct channel through which Heritage strategies can flow into UK conservative politics.
Numerous UK Conservative politicians have also been making pilgrimages to Heritage for years, including:
Liz Truss, who addressed Heritage in 2019 and 2023 with the expected attacks on trans rights and woke culture and the need for a UK/US Trade Deal. Her own brief premiership of the UK demonstrated, for better or worse, the deregulatory agenda and antagonism towards the civil service that both Project 2025 and Heritage champion - the attempts at radical economic restructuring while at the same time dismissing institutional resistance as bureaucratic obstruction.
Robert Jenrick, in February 2024, delivered a speech focused on immigration and was introduced by Kevin Roberts, in which he described refugees as importing “different lifestyles and values” - rhetoric that directly parallels Project 2025’s approach to immigration.
Nigel Farage has a long-standing relationship with the Heritage Foundation, including delivering a speech ten years ago about Brexit prospects and more recently interviewing Kevin Roberts on GB News March of 2024.
Reform UK and Farage officially deny any direct ties to CFABB/Resolute 1850, however, reporting from Politics Home confirm that Farage and Richard Tice have held meetings with the founders and maintain close strategic coordination, while the fact that both organisations have offices in Millbank tower raises some rather pertinent questions.
The ideological alignment we’re seeing within Conservative politics in the UK explicitly connect policy agenda to American conservative movements.
Brown was keen to dismiss suggestions his organisation represented “some sort of UK MAGA,” insisting “the UK is a completely different country with different reasons and a different political consensus.”
The forming connections, however, tells a different story - same directors, same funding sources, same policy objectives - just a slightly different brand.
What’s CFABB’s Media and Influence Strategy?
An essential pathway that has become well understood by CFABB is that political shifts don’t happen with white papers - they happen through TikTok videos, YouTube personalities and parasocial relationships that are delivered as entertainment.
Archie Manners being hired into the organisation shows a sophisticated understanding of effective contemporary media landscapes by CFABB. Reform, as an example, has achieved significant social media success on both Twitter and TikTok with Farage personally having over a million subscribers on each channel.
The aims that become apparent from CFABB is the professionalisation of the already working strategies, transforming reactive social-media presence into coordinated influence operations targeting disillusioned young, primarily male audiences - the exact same demographic that American conservative movements reached through Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
The overall strategy taking shape appears to be:
Policy Papers that provide the intellectual legitimacy needed for mainstream media consumption.
Personnel Pipelines that train ideologically aligned people for future government positions.
Media Megaphones that amplify messages through channels like GB News, social media influencers and an increasingly sympathetic press.
In short, CFABB produces a policy paper, Orr or Brown provides the “expert” commentary on GB News, Manners creates the social media content for this and suddenly hardline governance is reframed as common-sense reform.
Why this matters now - and what happens if we ignore it?
When it was published in 2023, Project 2025 took to what was in effect hiding in plain sight. Experts on democracy, civil-rights organisations and journalists repeatedly raised warnings and voters were told, explicitly, what Trump would do in his second term.
That didn’t matter one bit, during the campaign, Trump distanced himself, then after winning, fully embraced the plan.
The United Kingdom is approaching a similar inflection point. As it stands, CFABB’s infrastructure is is embryonic, but advancing at a rapid rate - a Companies House registration, strategic hires, funding pledged and first policy papers already in the pipeline with a Cambridge academic providing gravitas and credibility and a well-oiled traditional and social media operation waiting in the wings.
While the publications that I gained my information from, Novara Media, Yorkshire Bylines, the Financial Times, DeSmog, Left Foot Forward and Politics Home have started digging and reporting, much of the British Press seems to be missing in action with nothing approaching any sort of sustained media attention, and the rebrand from Resolute 1850 to Centre for a Better Britain went largely unreported.
The problem now is that if we ignore this, Reform will continue its professionalising while gaining electoral success, CFABB will give it the policies that it can start socialising, opaque funding networks will be able to channel American money into UK politics and conservative politicians of all stripes will continue adopting Project 2025 style rhetoric.
If we don’t make sure we have clear sight and understanding of what’s happening behind closed doors, we will get to a point where the infrastructure of influence will be too far advanced, and just like in the US, members of the British public will continue to be told that nothing’s really happening, right up to the point that we find our Civil Service completely reshaped, our civil rights protections watered down and our institutions defenestrated by powers that would prefer far less scrutiny and accountability.
It feels like it’s too late for the United States - Project 2025 becomes more entrenched by what feels like the day. The Centre for a Better Britain is only starting.
The transatlantic pipeline is real - it’s organised, well connected and it’s building the infrastructure it needs right now in the UK.
The danger many of us are currently focused on is that Reform might win an election in 2029, but what we should be far more concerned with is that they not only win it, but have the policy infrastructure ready to go to implement radical and systemic transformation to governance structures. A 900 page blueprint already exists in the US, already tried and tested, and it won’t take that much adjustment to have it ready to deploy in the our country.
Americans were warned about Project 2025, warned explicitly what would be waiting for them and what Trump 2.0 would do. He won anyway and now it’s being implemented. The UK is being given the same warnings, if not as loudly, about CFABB - the question now is whether we will pay attention this time around, or whether we’ll keep believing polite but forceful denials.
It’s going to be up to the British press and institutions to start asking important questions. Questions like who is funding policy think tanks? Who are the people writing their papers? Which ministers mysteriously echo their language?
We’ll all need to watch for a few things - thins like rapid-fire “First 100 Days” papers with identical phrasing across outlets. We need to look out for commentators framed as “independent experts” who all trace back to a certain Westminster address.
We need to pay attention to UK politicians suddenly using phrases that feel uncomfortable to our ears, phrases like “administrative bureaucracy”, “energy realism” or “woke bureaucracy” - and ask explicitly where they got their script from.
Civil society organisations need to start mapping these networks - Companies house filings, donor disclosures, speech transcripts, shared personnel and overlapping advisory boards. They need to follow the money, the need to trace the rhetoric and start mapping the connections.
Because the danger is that if we wait until CFABB’s policies are being implemented, it will already be far too late.
I’m an independent writer with no corporate backing or billionaire funders - just time, research and too much caffeine. Pieces like this are only possible because of the extraordinary journalists who did the original digging: those at The Financial Times, PoliticsHome, Byline Times, DeSmog, Left Foot Forward, Novara Media, Yorkshire Bylines, and others who continue to shine light where power prefers the dark.
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The “Vance whisperer” “philosopher king” Orr is very, very dangerous,
https://bylinetimes.com/2025/08/26/james-orr-british-authoritarianism/
His contacts and fellow ‘thinkers’ are all abhorrent, as highlighted by the students at the faculty of divinity, Cambridge 2022
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/25-february/news/uk/students-at-cambridge-say-divinity-faculty-needs-to-combat-its-racist-views
Perhaps the Home Secretary should be investigating this nest of vipers more closely……🤬
Thank you for taking the time, it's a warning we should all be heeding.