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 decision not to charge Nick Lowles is bizarre and definitely has all the aroma of two tier politically motivated justice. That Allison Pearson warranted the heavy hand of the law and Lowles zilch demonstrates all we need to know about impartial application of the law
All I can say is that Hope not hate appears to have the same phrase book as War is peace, Slavery is freedom. In other words they are the very opposite of the name on the tin
Hate not Hope.
Peace in Europe is war!
Left Wing Lawyers Hate Britain
I think all Lefties hate their countries and yearn for a Far Left communo-fascist one world government that can be remote and remove them from all blame and authority. We saw how the EU did this here and has given us nothing but pygmies in government and Parliament.
Excellent detective work, Laurie Wastell, on the past life of this Lord of the Realm and lawyerly henchman of the Enemy Within.
Now please turn your sleuthing skills to the past lawyerly life of the Man Himself in Person, Sir Two-Tier.
SO Hermer is actually Two Tier’s subconscious voice , what a thorough traitorous Barsteward, .
Radical past?
Doesn’t that include every member of Starmer’s cabinet?
We are led by Communists it is blatantly obvious
Why do the choices always have to be between Hitler or Stalin? The communists pushing their agendas are no better ethically or morally than the fascists.There are 100’s of millions of us that want nothing to do with either. We just want common sense governess, equal treatment under the law, fair taxes, Governments not run by extremist nut jobs from either end of the political spectrum. So one while one side is uncovering the ills of the other, they are ignoring the ills their own ideology creates.
Makes you wonder if the Wall coming down in 1991 was a good idea!
In East Germany they regret it and would love to rebuild it to keep out western Far Left fascism.
Shortly after Berlin wall came down in 1989, Helmut Kohl (CDU, chancellor of the FRG) held a speech in Berlin where he mentioned the possibility of German reunification. This was rudely rejected by Walter Momper (SPD), then the so-called governing mayor of West-Berlin, with the words (quoted from memory)
Warum quatschen sie denn jetzt von „Wiedervereinigung“, das will doch hier überhaupt niemand hören!
[Why are you blathering about “reunification” now, despite nobody here wants to listen to that?]
At the earliest opportunity, Momper’s party had formed an East-German branch ‘cunningly’ named SDP so that nobody would notice that it was really the same party and they had loved to keep two German states and thus, have twice the amount of government positions at their disposal. The SED (former state party) quickly transmogrified itself into the PDS¹ which is meanwhile (current name Die Linke, The Left) a force to reckon with on the German left and behind-the-scenes responsible for much of the leftward lurch of Germany under Angela Merkel, former MfS² informer and daugher of a family who voluntarily immigrated into the GDR from the FRG.
We should maybe have kept the wall to keep the communists out. But on the other hand, we were (and are) all Germans and not just pawns of parties named with some combination of the letters S, D, and P (and Ö).
¹ This means for a short while we had the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Social-Democratic Party (SDP) and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). These are obviously all completely different.
² Ministry for Security of the State, the Stasi.
Additional bit of information: The name SPD goes back to the 19th century and by that time, democractic didn’t have the positive meaning it has gained meanwhile. Originally, it mean dedicated to overthrowing the established political order¹ in order to replace it with some kind of people’s republic.
¹ Constitutional monarchy.
People getting shot by soldiers (or torn to pieces by mines) for trying to escape from a state imprisoning them is quite obviously such an ideal state of affairs that no one could ever want to change it .
Why do you believe you could chose Hitler in the unlikely event you would want that?
In 1939, Germany and the USSR jointly invaded Poland. This caused England and France to declare war on Germany but not on the USSR they ultimately married while handing Poland over as wedding gift (plus everything in Europe eastward of the current German eastern border and westward of the current Russian western border). Hence, you (so to say) quite voluntarily chose Stalin and that’s why you’re still haunted by his political heirs today. The communists never kept their intentions to take over all of the world in order to remake it in their own image secret.
I do enjoy a good demolition job. Excellent work.
The conclusion that Hermer is clearly another traitor is unavoidable.
““if Western societies objectify women by sexualising them then it’s no wonder that some Muslims have fallen into temptation”……..Well they’re already sexual so that is BS for a start.
What he meant to say is allow them to walk around stark naked (for Muslim standards) in public, marking this a the oldest rapist’s excuse in the world: She was really asking for it! She wore a miniskirt and I just couldn’t control myself!
I think I have an idea or two what to do with people who suffer from this overcome by an immoral alien culture-problem and it would have to do something with avoiding avoidable exposure by reducing intercultural mixing by wide¹ spatial separation.
¹ About 4967 miles, the distance between London and Karachi.
If this was happening in Germany, there would be no reason to write an article about it as that’s probably the biography of almost all SPD, Die Linke and Green Party politicians and a sizeable subset of the CDU/CSU and FDP as well.
The likes of Hope Not Hate are going to be looking very sad soon….as the USAID money spigot has run dry…..
If Harmer is looking for more work representing prisoners whose human rights are being abused then, perhaps, he might like to take up the case of Tommy Robinson.
It is quite clear that Robinsons treatment is not prison as it should be but is Cruel and Unusual punishment. This is obviously contrary to the Human Rights legislation, and I am amazed that the Attorney General has not taken any action against the Justice dept, or whoever is responsible. In fact we should crowd fund action against both He and the PM for this failure to act, the failure is clearly political in nature, and Britain often acts against other Countries for such violations in the UN. Elon and Trump may well mention it in the UN, putting Britain in the Piriah state category!
It should be noted that Hope not Hate is one of the bete noise of the Trump administration and Musk, so any Gov’t association with it doesn’t do us any favours.
PS shouldn’t it be “Hope not – HATE” ?