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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The only way to make quality new steel from iron ore is to use metallurgical coal in a blast furnace. That is what the Cumbrian mine was going to produce. All of the electric arc furanaces just recycle steel. That’s not a bad thing, steel is infinatly recyclable, but with India, China and others developing the world needs lots of new steel.
Do the greens want to ban new steel production world wide? Of course that’s not going to happen. The price of steel would go through the roof. Banning the Cumbrian coal will achieve absolutely nothing. Those contracts will be fulfilled elsewhere. Britain is now the only major economy that cannot produce its own new steel from ore. We rely on imports for this strategic material.
Even if you think that CO2 is a problem, the amount produced by making steel is very small. To stop oil and coal being used for fuel is one thing, but to stop them being used in industrial processes is stupid beyond belief.
While the brain dead greens celebrate, good jobs have been lost in a poor area that desperately needed them, all for an ideology which has just about become a religion.
Well said!
Ehh … there are no blast furnaces left in the UK. Which means high quality steel has to be imported, most likely (guess of mine) from India or China, thus causing higher CO₂ emissions as the stuff not only needs to be produced but also transported for thousands of miles. But that’s of no concern for fiends of the earth/ UK section. Their task is to destroy as much of Britain as they can. Other problems are for other people to worry about.
Afterthought: Why is this country governed by people who hate it and why are they allowed to jail those who don’t?
That bloody nails it.
They work hard, and do well at university, then they find that their Arts, Humanities and Social Science degrees aren’t the magic wand to an impressive, well paid job.
I think that for now there are a couple in Scunthorpe making special steel, but they will probably be gone soon as well.
They’re supposed to be ‘replaced’ by electric arc furnaces in December 2025 (as announced November last year). Like other Net Zero lunacies, this may not actually happen. But this doesn’t make the plan any less idiotic.
Apparently they are only good for recycling steel. They can’t make it from scratch. I don’t think that they can get the required heat from electricity, but I don’t know.
A religion for the useful idiots but mainly the biggest tax payer looting scam in human history. Eliminating coal and oil means they can pretend so-called ‘renewables’ can fill the gap and Miliband, Stark, Julia King, Dale Vince, Gummer and the rest of the bullshitting parasitic green blob who clearly all have fat financial skin in the game can fill their boots. I’d like to know what Justice Holgate has his money invested in too and who he’s friends with.
Telling quote (from Neil Toru, lawyer for
enemies of mankindobjectsexuals fancying huge inanimate stone ballsfriends of the earth — quite difficult getting these meaningless lablels right …):This mine should never have been given permission in the first place. […] it harms the UK’s international reputation on climate.
That is, all our globalist climate cronies would have been really pissed off if this development had been allowed to go ahead. And for the local people, well,
The UK government now needs to ensure communities right across country aren’t left with choice of high-carbon jobs or no jobs.
[Dr Doug Parr, chief Greenpeace ‘scientist’ in the UK]
they’re f***ed. But with our international reputation now restored, that’s certainly not our problem!
“The judgment found the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account”. Doesn’t this assume that there is an actual impact when this is far from being proven to be the case. The law seems to be based on an assumption rather than established fact which somehow weakens it in my eyes.
That’s a supreme court judgement and it’s not only obviously based on assumptions which aren’t necessarily true (as you already observed) but it also mandates double-counting of these emissions: Whoever uses coal or oil in an industry application is already being held responsible for any CO₂ emissions caused by that.
It is indeed based on an assumption, but we have forced ourselves in law to reduce emissions based on that assumption, and we can be sued right left and centre for breaking that law. —-It is beyond parody but that is where we are now. We have a Political Class that agrees with the WEF and UN that the “lifestyles of the affluent middle class is unsustainable” and who better to have in charge for the purposes of lowering living standards than the insidious Ed Miliband who I thought we had gotten rid of years ago?
We have a Political Class that don’t know what they are doing.
Most of what government does is infrastructure projects, technical, man management, business, outsourcing, and they don’t have the knowledge or experience to perform even adequately in a very international, competitive environment.
There is no law involved here. Just some guy sitting on a ‘court’ created Tony Blair to take over a task so far handled by the house of lords, presumably because stuffing this court with his cronies was easier as ‘that other party’ had no rights to appoint members if it, who’s making obviously nonsensical statements like “oil refineries cause road traffic” (cause and effect inverted) and inventing absurd demands supposedly following from that, specifically, holding operators of oil wells repsonsible for so-called emissions someone else is legally responsible for.
That’s not even legislating from the bench, it’s phantasizing from bench and the solution to this problem is someone standing up and pointing out that this guy isn’t wearing any clothes (in the sense of the well-known supposedly well-dressed emperor) but is just abusing a position created to be abused in this way to issue random political diktats par ordre his most eminent Tonyness he believes people have to obey to. He’ll continue to believe that until someone has the balls to reply to this with “I won’t.”
These people are nothing but a bunch of second-line Canutes who really believe they have to power to stop the tide by issueing paper decrees and who’ll ‘fine’ the tide for as long it doesn’t play ball.
The judgment found the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account.
This judgement amounts to a seriously peverse reverse-subsidy. It intentionally creates a competitive disadvantages for UK businuesse in the UK (and global) market which will economically benefit their overseas competitors.
What kind of crazy policy is this? Why are British institutions seeking to harm British businesses in favour of foreign competitors? Secretly control by a cabal of their most devoted enemies? And not exactly secretly.
You say —Disadvantage the UK and benefit overseas. ——- When you check back over the history of the climate nonsense you see time after time UN and WEF people standing at podiums making pronouncements about wealth. Probably one of the most famous is “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the words wealth de facto by climate policy” —Edenhoffer (UN)
from the start climate has always just been the tool and the very plausible excuse for the political agenda which amounts to Supranational Socialism, as Margaret Thatcher alluded to in her book Statecraft.
We’re being lead by donkeys.
Not donkeys. Donkeys are nice, hard-working, long-suffering and downtrodden, like us proles.
We’re being led by Lampreys, Spiders and Tapeworms, more like.
I will not have you slander spiders like that. Spiders act in the open and kill pests. They have full intent. Spiders are great.
Let’s just be honest and call a spade a spade. Or in this case, a c**t. They’re all c**ts.
Yes I like spiders. Miliband Starmer and Reeves are more like a hyena’s. Every time a wildlife program comes on the telly my wife will say “Oh no here comes the hyenas to kill all the Lion Cubs” Just as Miliband Reeves and Starmer are coming to kill all the pensioners.
“in accepting a claim by West Cumbria Mining (WCM) that the mine would be “net zero” and have no impact on the country’s ability to meet the emissions cuts required under the Climate Change Act 2008, because it was relying on offsetting through purchasing carbon credits from abroad.”
Yet the reality is that the UK government is doing exactly this. We are importing wood chips to burn at Drax. We have exported our prime steel production to China but will import it as if this means anything to world zero targets.
Hypocrisy off the scale and the judges are either thick as planks or corrupt.
I suspect this is somewhat of a ‘fake headline’? The court had no other option as no defence was offered. The headline should indicate that the Govt offered no defence..not that it matters that much. The Britain of past has faded and will continue to fade. Language, culture, art, education, media, journalism, health and justice, all hollowed out into mere hulks of what they once were. It will continue I suspect, one will struggle to recognise the Britain of 2029 compared to today..and I hazard a guess that Deagles population forecast of a UK for 2025 may not be far off the mark given the current UK/USA actions in relation to a country in Eastern Europe, may not be far off the mark…..15 million people…(a 77.1% reduction). How many of Stomer’s cabinet are members of the Fabian Society, ..perhaps basic bread and butter Eugenists
The case was defended by the company which wanted to operate the mine.
The Scientists and Engineers have probably given up.
You can lead a horse to water ….
Banning Coal & Steel Kills Britain
Where do we find these people.
The whole thing is a scam and a money spinner. There is no truth in Net Zero but oh boy is there a lot of money sloshing around. Take Carbon Credits for example, a country can produce as much CO2 as they like providing they pay other countries lots of dosh for Carbon Credits. It doesn’t make the world cleaner, it just makes some people richer.
Closing down mines, nuclear stations, gas stations and converting the best steel producers into tin can recyclers does not make the world cleaner. All that it achieves is shifting clean production across the world to dirty production and then shipping the product all the way back across the world. We make the world a dirtier place and also end up with far inferior steel. It’s the equivalent of throwing your weeds into next doors garden and claiming you made the street a lot tidier.
This is no surprise at all since we are forcing ourselves in law to reduce emissions of CO2. Some would call that “saving the planet” and others would call it dumb. But since nothing we do in this country will have the slightest effect on the planet overall all we can really conclude is that it is DUMB. Even Tony Blair whose government gave us the Climate Change Act in 2008 has said Net Zero will have no effect on global climate.
—–But even if the claims of the IPCC and climate alarmists are remotely true about what is going to happen to climate, which remember is all based on models that have so far all been wrong, then what possible saving of the planet can a small country like the UK achieve by rushing to be Net Zero in only 5 and a quarter years from now (2030), while in the meantime huge countries like China India Malaysia Brazil etc etc are all burning coal and emitting more CO2 than we have produced since the beginning of time? The answer is that what we do here will have no effect. So then we must ask the question “Then Why do it”, and the answer is actually very simple ——It isn’t about the climate and it never was. It is about the UK getting rid of the finite resource of fossil fuels because we were the first country to benefit and become prosperous by using them ——In other words ECO SOCIALISM. This is why your Prime Minister prefers Davos to Westminster. Because he agrees with the UN and WEF that we should lower our living standard by pretending to save the planet.
It may have been a landmark legally but certainly in the UK not a landmark politically. The current government isn’t going to be pushing hydrocarbons whatever happens. If we ever get a sane government again, they will have to repeal the Climate Change Act anyway.
It will need to be in their manifesto, so the Lords will have to allow it to pass!
That’s if the Lords are still there.
Good point
It’s not specifically mentioned in the Reform policy document but it does say “scrap Net Zero”.
But there is zero chance of Reform getting into government
Leading figures of the liberal party will have been convinced of this wrt Labour in the past. Unless the leaders of the conversative and laborious party (both branches) stage a coup, which is theoretically possibly but IMHO, very unlikely, as their uniformed diversity hires aren’t going to be willing to do anything which might endanger themselves, they’re on the way out with a bang most people will experience as a wimper as they’re simply maldapted to the 21st century: They keep fighting 1980s battles against imaginary foes – Coal must overed! Greenpeace to save the planet! Legalize gay sex! etc – and their best (and pretty much only) idea about the internet is “Can’t we shut this bloody thing down again?”
If you don’t learn, you won’t hang around.
I don’t share your optimism but I hope I’m wrong
Re: Greenpeace. Do you remember? You probably don’t.
From Heroic men in tiny boats putting themselve in harms way to Save the Whales! to Shady lawyers in tailored suits splitting legalese hairs to ruin Wales! is quite a downfall.
Oh well, there’s another 400 or so jobs down the pan. Plus the upgrade of the working museum that comprises the Cumbrian Coast railway line, which with the mine had a business case.
Oh, and billions in tax revenue, too, since the coal (which is for steel making, not just burning) was largely for export.
But we’ve got plenty of money now that those pesky old people are going to freeze this winter.
“the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects.”. Er, what climate impact? There’s zero evidence of CO2 driving climate (which, BTW, is an average of weather with 1 data point being 30 years).
Why cannot ordinary plebs launch court action against Milliband’s policies ? Surely we have human rights too ?
I get the sense that people in positions of power only consider their decisions one or maybe two layers deep… Never the 3rd let alone 5th order consequences… Poisoning children with nitrous fumes due to rise in dieseaseals in cities due to the high charging of CO2 through vehicle tax?