Whether it’s defending the likes of Gerry Adams and Shamima Begum, supporting slavery reparations, or his role in the ludicrous, dangerous surrender of the Chagos Islands, Richard, Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, seems the epitome of an evangelical human rights lawyer who can be relied on to side with so-called ‘international law’ against Britain’s national interest.
Yet while much of the recent opprobrium for the handpicked Starmer ally has focused on his dubious past clients and the apparent conflicts of interest resulting from them, attention has so far slid over his activities adjacent to his professional life: namely, his longstanding association with radical ‘anti-fascist’ Searchlight Magazine, and its former Editor, Nick Lowles, now CEO of Leftist campaign group Hope Not Hate.
So just how closely involved has Hermer been with these crusading organisations? Hermer “was an active and dedicated anti-fascist working closely with Searchlight” during his student days at Manchester, according to a Searchlight blog post celebrating his appointment last year.
This youthful far-Left politics is apparently not something Hermer wants widely known. In a recent interview with the House magazine, he details his career in student politics as chair of the students’ union and a National Executive member of the National Union of Students, but omits entirely his association with Searchlight. In reality, as the below Searchlight clipping shows, he might never have achieved the NUS role were it not for his being a Searchlight member and its campaign on his behalf.
No doubt understanding its association with Hermer raises eyebrows, Searchlight proceeds to downplay his involvement since leaving university. “Later in his career, Richard also helped Searchlight with occasional legal advice and was a patron of Searchlight Research Associates,” is all we learn. Though it can’t help but add: “We are proud to count him amongst our friends.”
Yet the Daily Sceptic has seen documents that show his involvement in Searchlight continued long after his student days, well into his career as a lawyer. So much so that in 1996, three years after being called to the bar, Hermer was being recommended to join the magazine’s Management Committee. The man who put his name forward was Gerry Gable, Searchlight‘s long-serving Editor, who once stood for election for the Communist Party and in the 1980s produced research for a BBC Panorama documentary that falsely alleged that two Conservative Party members were secret Nazis – after which the BBC lost a libel trial and had to pay damages.
Later, minutes show Lord Hermer missing a meeting in June 1999 and attending one in November that year – alongside a certain Nick Lowles, who was Co-Editor and then Editor of Searchlight between 1999-2011 and in 2004 founded Hope Not Hate.
It is unclear when (or whether) Hermer’s tenure on the Management Committee ends, but suffice to say his post-university involvement with Searchlight clearly went well beyond “occasional legal advice”. He was still part of Searchlight Research Associates as late as 2016.
(I come by these documents via Notes from the Borderland a “Left/Green… para-political investigative magazine”, whose complaints about Searchlight are long-running and legion. In particular, it alleges a link with MI5, citing a 1977 memo showing Gerry Gable preparing reports on other journalists for London Weekend Television with the assistance of propaganda input by MI5, as reported in the New Statesman in 1980. And while I cannot speak to its veracity, readers may be interested to read an extensive investigation it has carried out into the 1999 Soho nail-bombing, which killed three and was an important justification for the 2000 Terrorism Act, and which, it alleges, Searchlight had information about which could have led to its being avoided. NFB’s BlueSky handle can be found here.)
For our purposes, it is Hermer’s relationship with Lowles and Searchlight that is of particular significance.
Lord Hermer was instrumental to Keir Starmer’s authoritarian crackdown on speech during last summer’s unrest. It was he, reports the Telegraph, “who advised Sir Keir that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred online”, an offence which warrants significantly more prison time than offences under s127 of the Communications Act – up to seven years – and was used to charge the likes of Jamie Michael, so obviously not guilty that a jury took only 17 minutes to acquit him of the charge earlier this month.
One of the ongoing questions about Lowles is why he was never similarly charged for his tweet during the disorder spreading misinformation about an alleged acid attack against a Muslim woman – a story which was swiftly being repeated by Muslim groups on the streets, some of which would go on to visit sectarian violence on random white passersby.
The Attorney General’s office is not involved in charging decisions, its press office assures me. But one wonders whether Lowles’s willingness to spread inflammatory rumours – at a time of mass hysteria about online speech, not least from the likes of Hope Not Hate itself, which has blamed unrest on the “rapid spread of mis- and dis-information” – owes something to his knowledge that he has lawyer friends in high places. Probably not.
Certainly, it’s clear that after their time working together at Searchlight, Mr Lowles still has the Attorney General’s ear. Shortly before the Southport attack, Tommy Robinson courted a contempt of court charge at a rally in Trafalgar Square by playing his film SILENCED, a documentary about his legal battle with a Syrian schoolboy whom he was convicted of having libelled. It was Lowles, through Hope Not Hate, who informed the Attorney General’s office that the film had been played at the protest. A contempt of court charge was subsequently brought.
Whatever one thinks of Robinson, what many will be asking is why the Attorney General’s office is apparently receiving and acting on tip-offs from a far-Left campaigning organisation whose boss he used to work with. Indeed, given Searchlight and Hope Not Hate have little short of an obsession with Tommy Robinson, having published hundreds of articles about him going back years, one has to wonder whether this played any role in Hermer’s decision-making. To wit, did Hermer’s “dedicated anti-fascist” politics play a part in his encouragement of the authoritarian post-Southport crackdown? It is certainly head-spinning to imagine that someone associated for so long with a radical Leftist agenda is the highest law officer in the land.
Yet it isn’t just Hermer’s relationship with Lowles that is at issue here. For those who travel under the banner of ‘anti-fascism’ in Britain, a frequent preoccupation is attempting to minimise the attention paid to the issue of grooming gangs, for fear of giving succour to the ‘far-Right’. As I wrote here last month, for instance, Unite Against Fascism was among several groups to have campaigned with success to have a 2004 Channel 4 documentary showing grooming gangs in Bradford pulled from the airwaves.
It is perhaps little wonder then that today Searchlight continues in this mould. Mentions of grooming gangs are rather few and far between on its website. But in the wake of the media coverage of the issue last month, a grim article appeared by senior Searchlight researcher Amir Mohammed titled: “I’ll tell you who most despises so-called ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ – honest-to-goodness Muslims.”
In the course of a lengthy ethno-narcissist rant, Mohammed refers to the “so-called ‘grooming gangs’ scandal”, as if to suggest that it doesn’t exist. And he attributes recent attention given to the scandal to a desire to “bash Muslims”, accusing “racists in the media” of “bringing this issue to the fore”. After libelling GB News owner Paul Marshall as “a racist”, Mohammed then asks: “What has he, or any of his media fellow travellers, done to help the young women at the wrong end of this horror story? Nothing. They produce their hateful headlines but have nothing positive to contribute.” Apparently, not only is it Muslims that care the most about the victims of the grooming gangs, but no one else actually cares at all.
Perhaps he should speak for himself. GB News, for instance, as well as its important reporting helping to force local inquiries, has raised over £400,000 for the Maggie Oliver Foundation for grooming gang survivors – “I am just blown away,” says Oliver, the police whistleblower and tireless campaigner. If Mr Mohammed bothered to follow any of the coverage, he’d know that in GB News’s Charlie Peters’s reporting on this issue, it is the sentiments of victims and survivors that are unfailingly emphasised. Survivors in fact tell him that they are delighted with the surge in attention being at last being given to their cause.
Later, having talked up the “family values at the core of [his] community”, Mohammed even ventures into victim-blaming the abused girls. While supposedly arguing that blaming the “loose moral values of a liberal society” for the grooming gangs, as some Muslims do, would be a mistake, he nevertheless adds that it’s “partly true” that “if Western societies objectify women by sexualising them then it’s no wonder that some Muslims have fallen into temptation”.
Hermer did not write this himself, of course. But some will wonder whether he might he agree with much of it. After all, it’s from an organisation that he was a “dedicated” activist for, that he played a leading role in during his career as a lawyer, whose “research” he was later a patron of, and which continues to count him as a “friend”.
At last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, trying to deny that the rogue’s gallery of Britain’s enemies Hermer has defended as a lawyer spoke to his errant “motives”, Sir Keir insisted that “lawyers do not necessarily agree with their clients”. Even if some are prepared to accept this excuse, it requires the cab-rank rule to do an enormous amount of lifting. Yet it cannot be made about his association with Searchlight Magazine, which was voluntary activism outside his legal practice. Just as he was building his legal career at Doughty Street Chambers in the 1990s, during which time he struck up a lifelong friendship with Sir Keir Starmer, he was moonlighting as a senior anti-fascist activist on Searchlight’s Management Committee.
In the view of Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, Hermer’s “far-Left political views” represent “a risk to our country’s security”. His association with Searchlight is hardly reassuring in that regard.
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