Hope Not Hate is up to its usual tricks in the Denton and Gorton by-election, keeping Britain safe from fascists. In this case, the local Brownshirt is not the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, who implicitly compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a social media post on Holocaust Memorial Day last year. No, it’s the Reform UK candidate, Matt Goodwin. According to this ‘non-partisan’ thinktank– that’s how it describes itself – Goodwin is a ‘far-right provocateur’ who, if elected ‘will become one of the most extreme MPs in the House of Commons, perhaps second only to Rupert Lowe’.
Hope Not Hate has form in this regard. During the 2024 general election, it announced it would campaign against ‘any candidates who cross our Red Lines’, who all turned out pretty much to be Conservative incumbents. The MPs who crossed the ‘Red Lines’ – ‘racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred, transphobia’ – included Steve Baker, Miriam Cates, Craig Mackinley, Sally-Ann Hart and Karl McCartney. Only one of the ten most prominent MPs the organisation targeted retained their seat.
So what, you might think. Hope Not Hate is hardly the only left-wing campaign group that masquerades as being above the political fray. But here’s the thing: in 2019-20, it received £141,380 of taxpayers’ money, handed to it by a Conservative government. Hold your horses, says Nick Lowles, the chief exec. That money was given to an organisation called Hope Not Hate Charit-able Trust, a separate legal entity to Hope Not Hate Limited. Although you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow, because in 2022 the charity awarded a grant worth more than half a million to its namesake and a similar amount the following year. This prompted the Charity Commission to raise regulatory concerns, forcing the grant–giving arm to change its name to Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and recruit three independent trustees.
I have a dog in this fight. A couple of weeks ago, Hope Not Hate called for my ‘association with Epstein’s circle’ to be ‘scrutinised’ because I sent a couple of emails to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 and 2002, long before Jeffrey Epstein was accused of being a paedophile. That attempt to smear me was quite bold because it has since emerged that a ‘political organiser’ for Hope Not Hate, a former Labour councillor called Liron Velleman, pleaded guilty to child sexual offences last year. According to the BBC, he sent a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl online a video of his penis and asked to see pictures of her in her underwear.
I’m not the only Spectator contributor to be targeted by this ‘non-sectarian’ lobby group. In his 2023 review of Prevent, Sir William Shawcross revealed that counter-extremism officials were shown material from a Hope Not Hate dossier on Britain’s ‘extreme right-wing’ that identified Rod Liddle, Melanie Phillips and Douglas Murray as journalists guilty of ‘mainstreaming’ far-right ideas. Douglas later revealed that after he wrote something criticising the organisation, it got in touch and offered to remove his name from its latest hit-list if he took down his piece.
I’m not the only Spectator columnist to be targeted by this ‘non-sectarian’ lobby group
Not that its transparent animus towards anyone to the right of Ed Miliband has stopped Hope Not Hate embedding itself in Whitehall. Nick Lowles was a member of the Home Office’s Commission for Countering Extremism and has given evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee on far-right terrorism and testified to various Home Office departments about trends in ‘online hate’. In 2022, Liron Velleman appeared as a witness on behalf of the group before a parliamentary committee scrutinising the Online Safety Bill, warning about the risks of anonymity on the internet. He should know, I guess.
Since the 2024 general election, Hope Not Hate has become even more enmeshed with the Labour party, with one of its former directors, Baroness Anderson, becoming a government whip. Another minister with close ties to the organisation is Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, who became friends with Nick Lowles when they both worked with Searchlight, an ‘anti-fascist’ group which Hope Not Hate emerged from.
Holier-than-thou lefties like Jolyon Maugham often complain about the ‘Tufton Street mafia’, a reference to centre-right thinktanks. They claim these sinister organisations should be more transparent about who their donors are. But none of them can hold a candle to Hope Not Hate when it comes to wielding influence in the corridors of power. It’s time we learned more about who funds it – apart from the taxpayer, of course.
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