Andy Burnham’s new head of political strategy is a trustee of a charity that campaigns to repatriate Isis brides and abolish citizenship stripping, The Spectator can reveal. Matthew McGregor was today announced as one of the latest additions to Burnham’s incoming top team in Downing Street. He is currently chief executive of the activist organisation 38 Degrees and previously served as director of campaigns and communications at Hope Not Hate.
Notably, McGregor also joined the board of the charity Reprieve in April 2022. The organisation aggressively lobbies the UK government to abolish citizenship stripping, which it describes as ‘brutal and harmful’. Its website reads: ‘This UK policy is fundamentally racist – only people with foreign ties can have their citizenship taken away. Research indicates that the power has been used almost exclusively against British Muslims mainly of South Asian, Middle-Eastern, and African heritage.’
Reprieve boasts of ‘fighting to help our clients’ in north-east Syria to ‘regain their citizenship’. The charity also aims to ‘challenge the toxic narrative that women detained in Syria are “ISIS brides”’. Its passion for abolishing citizenship stripping appears somewhat at odds with Burnham’s declaration that ‘all possible options’ should be on the table to deport the notorious grooming-gang ringleader Shabir Ahmed to Pakistan.
Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel told The Spectator:
Isis brides like Shamima Begum have no place on our streets. It is alarming that someone so senior in Burnham’s operation doesn’t see that.Burnham must tell the public if he will seek to bring terrorists into our country.
Meanwhile, 38 Degrees actively campaigns to ‘Get Palantir out of our NHS’, to ‘welcome’ larger numbers of refugees and to prevent the construction of data centres crucial to supporting Britain’s booming AI industry.
Alongside McGregor, Burnham has hired Hayden Munro, a former campaign director for Jacinda Ardern, as political director. Graeme Cooke, a close ally of the Makerfield MP’s chief of staff, James Purnell, will become director of the No. 10 Policy Unit. Sources believe around 70 per cent of No. 10 Spads will retain their jobs. Some senior aides to Sir Keir Starmer, however, will leave Downing Street alongside him.
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