Britain’s governing Labour Party has criticized Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party, over an appearance in the American Congress that was brokered by an influential U.S. anti-abortion group.
The New York Times reported last week that the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian organization that helped end the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, had arranged Mr. Farage’s testimony in Washington in September. He used it to attack Britain’s free-speech rules.
It was one of several meetings and briefings that the alliance’s British arm helped arrange between influential U.S. officials and Mr. Farage this year, according to messages and officials with knowledge of events.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Labour Party said, “Reports that Nigel Farage’s appearance in the U.S. Congress was arranged by a group behind America’s abortion rollback are deeply concerning.”
It added, “This comes in the same month as Reform has hired James Orr as a senior adviser — a man who opposes abortion in every circumstance, even after rape.”
Mr. Farage announced the appointment of Dr. Orr, a right-wing Christian theologian at the University of Cambridge, in an interview in The Telegraph on Sunday. Dr. Orr is a close ally of Vice President JD Vance and has hosted him at his Cambridgeshire home. Dr. Orr has previously claimed Britain had “one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world.”
Dr. Orr did not respond to a request for comment.
Reacting to the Times investigation last week, Mr. Farage said that his party talked with “all sorts of groups” and that abortion was “No. 468” on its agenda, noting he had “hardly ever spoken about it in 30 years.”
Reform U.K. has led British opinion polls for most of this year, driving the political agenda with an aggressively anti-immigration stance, and it won hundreds of municipal seats in May elections. Mr. Farage, a serial disrupter of British politics and a key architect of Brexit, is a longtime ally of President Trump. But unlike the MAGA movement, which is deeply entwined with Christian conservatism in the United States, Mr. Farage’s political base is not notably religious.
His appointment of Dr. Orr, and the role of the A.D.F. in guiding Reform’s leadership to the right on a conservative Christian agenda, is striking in Britain, where religion plays little role in national politics and where a vast majority of the public supports abortion rights.
Until now, public knowledge about the relationship between Reform U.K. and the A.D.F. was limited to a single quotation Mr. Farage gave to the group, which it pushed out in a press statement about free speech and abortion clinics. But the A.D.F. has quietly been courting the party since at least 2024.
As the A.D.F.’s influence in Britain has grown since Mr. Trump’s re-election, Mr. Farage suddenly started speaking out against abortion. The Times could find no previous record that Mr. Farage had campaigned against abortion during his 31-year political career. In 2019, as the leader of the Brexit Party, Mr. Farage stated he had no official party stance on abortion.
But last November, he called for British lawmakers to debate rolling back the abortion limit. He went further in May, calling the current limit of 24 weeks “utterly ludicrous.”
Ed Davey, leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party, which has the third-highest number of lawmakers in Parliament, said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Farage appeared to be “actively colluding with the Trump administration to roll back women’s rights in Britain.”
“While most people in the U.K. look at what Trump’s doing to America with alarm, Farage just craves the opportunity to do the same in our country,” Mr. Davey said. “If we are not careful, Trump’s America will become Farage’s Britain.”
The A.D.F. has represented clients in the United States who are opposed to abortion, gay and transgender rights and contraception coverage in health care. In Britain, the A.D.F.’s task force of lawyers has challenged the prosecutions of Christians who were arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics and taken up the case of a student midwife who was suspended after making anti-abortion comments on social media. Abortion “buffer zones” — protected areas around clinics designed to prevent harassment — have been cited by conservative groups like the A.D.F. to declare a free-speech crisis in Britain.
In a statement on Wednesday, Lorcán Price, a lawyer for the A.D.F. who has been at the center of the group’s efforts in Britain, said the organization was “nonpartisan” and had “engaged” with lawmakers from “all major U.K. parties.”
“We would be very glad to meet with the Labour government to discuss what steps it should urgently take to address the free-speech crisis in the U.K., which is of great concern to many people in this country,” Mr. Price said.
Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter on the International desk. She is based in London, where she focuses on abuses of power, national security and crime, and social injustices.
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values.
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