FROM Britain, the US Supreme Court decision to let states ban abortion looks shocking. The US jumped back nearly 50 years when it overturned the 1973 Roe V Wade decision, with Republican-led states already banning abortions.

The ban comes from the US Republicans’ hard-right turn, towards a mix of “culture war” social reaction and free-market fundamentalism.

British Tories have also amped up their “socially conservative” themes in recent years, to make up for the obvious failures of free-market politics.

With wages flat and housing in crisis, the Tories have turned to racist or migrant-bashing policies like the Windrush scandal theft of black peoples’ British citizenship, or the Rwanda asylum-seekers deportation plan, to win support. They seem to be using 1970s National Front slogans as a guide.

Will the Tories go further to ape the US right? Are any leading Conservatives close the US culture warriors?

Judging by his holiday choices, one top Tory, Liam Fox, is close to the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-trans gang, the kind of US Republicans who actively try to “supress” voting and argue the 2021 presidential election was somehow faked.

Fox had a three-day break in January at a luxury hotel for a conference organised by right-wing US group the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation funded the £14k trip so Fox could join US Christian conservative “culture warriors” at the event.

Fox says the Heritage Foundation paid for him to be speaker at its January “Awakening Conference” in the register of MPs’ interests. The conference was held at The Cloister, a luxury five-star hotel on a private island — called Sea Island — off the coast of the Southern US state of Georgia.

The Heritage Foundation call the event a “forum weekend for families on conservative principles and thought in the United States.” While Fox gave few details of the trip, I obtained a full agenda from the US Congress — congressmen who get freebies like this have to file fuller details of their trips than British MPs.

The agenda shows the conference focused on culture war themes like a session on “protecting children” from “radical sex education” led by Emilie Kao. She leads the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the most powerful conservative Christian campaign groups in the US.

The ADF funds and supports many legal challenges in the US to promote their “Christian” views like opposing Gay Pride marchers or attacking “radical transgender policies” — in the US, moral panicky attacks on transgender people usually sit prominently alongside anti-abortion and anti-gay politics.

The ADF believe “our Lord and Savior” helps them fight “radical ideologies” in schools like “equity, diversity and inclusion.” ADF opposes schools “teaching about racial stereotyping,” defends “conversion therapy” and argues “abortion harms women and destroys life.”

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, Kao said: “Today, let’s thank God that we have seen Roe fall in our lifetime.” The ADF was in fact quite involved in the Supreme Court decision because it had helped get a Mississippi law limiting abortion to 15 weeks passed: legal arguments about this law helped lead to the Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling.

The “Awakening” also had a session on “rebuilding marriage” in the US, worrying that while marriage is high among the “rich, religious and Republicans” in the US, more “young Americans will never marry and have children.” Speakers included opponents of gay marriage.

There was also a session on “how to raise a little patriot,” with child-rearing advice from Connor Byack. He is the author of the Tuttle Twins series of children’s books, which try to present Republican themes, including one book that tries promoting libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand’s ideas, to under-11s using the slogan “Are your children being brainwashed?”

He was joined by the director of outreach for “Prager University (aka PragerU online) — they are not a real university, but rather the publisher of right-wing online educational resources, including a Ronald Reagan colouring book which tells the primary school kids Reagan was governor of California but unfortunately mis-spells the word as “Goverenor.”

The conference also had a session on “the real fight for election reform,” led by US campaigners for “Voter ID” and other laws seen by many as supress-the-vote measures aimed at making it more difficult for poor and black citizens to vote.

One of the speakers, former Trump official Jessica Anderson, said in 2021 that these voter supression laws were designed to “right the wrongs of November,” when Joe Biden was elected president.

To add to the Trumpish tone, the conference included a rally on “Faith, Freedom and the Fight for Our Lives” led by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary.

The conference wasn’t just about families, it was for them too: the Heritage Foundation calls the conference “a safe place for conversations that influence the sharing of ideas that foster stronger families.”

Children had their own education programme. Under 9s had activities like “creating patriotic snacks while discussing patriotism and what the colours of our flag represent” with “education outcomes” including understanding “capitalism” and “individualism.”

Fox’s own presentation, on US-UK relations after Brexit, was sandwiched between a “Family Dinner” and “Children’s Movie Time.”

However, according to the register of MPs’ interests, Fox did not take his wife, Jesme Baird, to the family conference. The £14k funding was for “Flights and hotel accommodation for a staff member and me” to attend. Fox took his research assistant, David Goss, to the conference.

Fox’s luxury trip to a right-wing US conference stuffed full of anti-abortion Christian conservatives and vote-suppression activists doesn’t mean that the Tories are about to go anti-abortion here. Our “religious right” is weaker, and public support for abortion probably harder to shift.

But it does show that British Tories are close to and want to learn from the hard-right Republican “culture warriors,” especially when they can do it on a free trip to a five-star resort on a privately owned island.