Conservative Party
Palestine Protesters Vow to Keep Marching Despite Fresh Clampdown Threats, as Muslim Council Blasts Islamophobic Rhetoric
Pro-Palestine groups and human rights campaigners have vowed to oppose “growing attacks” against the right to protest in the UK, as politicians and parts of the press ramp up the rhetoric against the Gaza ceasefire demonstrations taking place weekly across the country.
On Tuesday night, Home Secretary James Cleverly suggested pro-ceasefire marchers should stop protesting, telling the Times that they’ve “made their point” and are “not really saying anything new”.
And some Government-linked figures are now pushing for a fresh raft of anti-protest laws – including Lord Woodcock (Baron Walney), the UK Government’s adviser on political violence and disruption.
This week, he claimed that the “aggressive intimidation of MPs” by so-called “mobs” was being “mistaken” for an “expression of democracy” as he called for an ‘exclusion zone’ to be placed outside of Parliament to restrict protest, in the name of protecting MPs.
There have also been calls to ban political messages being projected onto Parliament, as happened last week when activists projected the contested slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” onto the Palace of Westminster.
"Overwhelmingly Peaceful"
At a press conference on Wednesday, Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal hit back at the calls for fresh clampdowns, and said peaceful protesters were being wrongly tarred as extremists.
He pointed to a mass lobby event last week, which saw 3,000 people “stand in line for four hours to speak to their MPs.” Another 80,000 people wrote to their MPs to back an immediate ceasefire.
“It was presented as a suspicious act by Islamist extremists seeking to threaten and intimidate MPs. This narrative is now being used to suggest that special measures need to be introduced…banning or restricting the rights to protest outside MPs’ offices, council chambers, and parliament itself.
“We do not accept in any way shape or form that there is something problematic with peaceful protests. outside entities offices, council chambers of Parliament,” Jamal added.
And the PSC director asserted that the official marches have been “overwhelmingly peaceful”, and attended by a wide range of communities.
“As to the narrative that they are making the streets unsafe for Jewish people, it ignores the fact that at each of these marches there are 1,000s of Jewish people marching in an organised Jewish bloc. All of them feel safe marching. And all of them, by the way, proudly chant the Palestinian slogan of liberation ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’” Jamal said.
The chant has been criticised as antisemitic by some for the suggestion that it could suggest the abolition or destruction of the state of Israel from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean, a claim PSC and Stop the War Coalition strongly deny.
Chris Nineham, national officer for the Stop the War Coalition – a co-organiser of the protests – said that despite the “extraordinary level of hysteria” the protests have been “overwhelmingly peaceful”.
“It's the biggest cycle of protests we’ve seen…But there has been a tiny number of arrests. At the last demonstration, there were a total of 12 arrests and on average, the number of arrests is three times less than the number of arrests in an average year at Glastonbury, per person involved. The number of arrests is less than the average Premier League football match per person involved.
“The overwhelming majority of these arrests are for wearing an [offensive] t-shirt, having a placard, or chanting a slogan that the police rejected. None of it is necessarily illegal…The overwhelming majority of arrests don't lead to charges as far as we can tell.
“There is not a single example on any of our demonstrations of any violent incident towards a bystander of any kind, whether a politician or anyone else. There is simply no case to be made that these demonstrations are threatening, disorderly, violent in any way.
"The argument that they are is a complete fantasy. It's a fiction dreamed up…largely in these corridors of power and then amplified by sections of the media,” Nineham told press.
Over-Policing Claims
The Gaza protests have faced intense scrutiny from the political Right, with former Home Secretary Suella Braverman going as far as to push for a ban on a November demonstration.
Nineham said the police remained under intense pressure to clamp down on their protests: “Since [November] they have tried to stop his marching into the centres of power. At least twice, we've had a strong attempt to stop us marching towards Downing Street and Parliament.”
He claimed police had rolled out an “unprecedented” number of restriction orders – so-called Section 12, 14 and 60 orders which place limits on protests.
“[They] have been deployed against all of the [Gaza] demonstrations…[They] haven't been applied to comparable mass protests over trade union issues, austerity issues, or actually over the Iraq war, the wars in Libya or Ukraine.
“There's been a level of aggression in policing, a kind of over-policing that’s been exceptional as well. The police say they use record numbers of officers, and they mobilise record numbers [against our] protests.
“Just to give you some indication, they tell us there are about 1700-1800 police officers for most of these demonstrations. At Pride on an average year, there's 150 officers that are deployed, which is an event maybe half the size of our average protest.”
Nineham alleged that police themselves have said repeatedly to demonstrators that they are under “huge pressure” from politicians.
“This whole movement is being attacked, we believe as a way of deflecting from the central problem, which is that the overwhelming majority of people in this country want to see a ceasefire, and our Government refuses to back that demand.”
Asked by Byline Times whether he expects Sir Keir Starmer to repeal anti-protest laws if elected this year, host John McDonnell MP said: “Across the Labour and trade union movement, there's a real anxiety now about the way in which fundamental human rights are under attack by this Government."
“There will be a general view within the whole of the movement that what we need to do is reassert our civil liberties. That may well result in some of the legislation we’ve seen so far being repealed," the Labour left-winger added.
Yasmine Adam, head of politics at the Muslim Council of Britain told the conference she believed much of the rhetoric against the Gaza protests was driven by Islamophobia, with peaceful Muslims presented as extremists. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters have been tainted as "mob" by senior Conservatives and some commentators.
Ased if she believes Labour and the Conservatives are institutionally Islamophobic, she said: “Yes.” PM Sunak and most ministers refuse to use the word "Islamophobic", instead using the phrase "anti-Muslim hate".
Amid concerns over MPs’ safety, Yasmine Adam pointed to an alleged failure to address safety concerns from pro-Palestine MPs. Labour’s Zarah Sultana has “faced huge numbers of threats because of her outspokenness on Palestine,” she said.
“[Yet] Keir Starmer has refused to raise those concerns when talking about MPs’ safety for example. When Zarah Sultana asked at PMQs for an end to the genocide, the PM’s reply was [basically] ‘she should ask Hamas and the Houthis to stop the killing’.
“If that's not Islamophobic, I don't really know what it is. It's so widespread and normalised that it’s second nature to these parties.”
On Wednesday, the Government announced a £31m package to provide extra security measures for MPs.
Non-profit monitoring group Tell Mama documented 2,010 Islamophobic incidents between 7 October and 7 February, the BBC reported last week, marking a sharp rise from the 600 it recorded for the same period the year before.
All the organisers said they were committed to continuing the protests, at least until there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
The press conference came as the courts considered a claim by Liberty and other human rights groups today challenging the legality of recent anti-protest legislation.
Government Responds
Asked by Byline Times if the Government was putting pressure on the police to clamp down on Gaza protests, the PM's spokesman said: "No, we obviously do completely continue to enshrine the operational independence of the police."
The official spokesman claimed that a Government-organised meeting this Wednesday of the PM and the National Police Chiefs Council was "normal".
"The Prime minister and Home Secretary have regularly met with police chiefs to talk about the issues that communities people [have]...This afternoon's roundtable will also address the additional funding that we're providing to protect our democratic processes and institutions."
He denied that pressure would be applied to police chiefs to take a tougher line on Gaza protests, saying: "No, there will be a discussion consistent with our approach...It's entirely routine and normal...to talk to the police about the operational challenges that they face, but also the concerns that people in this country face."
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‘People in Ashfield are Sick of Hearing Our Community Mentioned Every Time Lee Anderson Makes a Prejudiced Comment’
The ex-mining town of Sutton-in-Ashfield was often a tough place to grow up – particularly if, like me, you came from a South Asian background.
Racism was an ever-present issue in my childhood. But I noticed as I grew up that it became less prevalent as the area, and country, became more diverse and tolerant. In my adulthood, the majority of people in Ashfield would treat me just like anyone else.
Since the election of Lee Anderson in 2019, I have witnessed a reversal of the progress on racism.
Anderson – who has had the Conservative whip suspended after claiming that London's Muslim Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has allowed "Islamists" to take over the city – has a long history of prejudice.
This includes blocking travellers from using a park. Being an active member of a Facebook group that supports George Soros conspiracy theories. Boycotting the England men's football team as they took the knee to raise awareness of racial injustice.
In fact, a quick search online of 'Lee Anderson racism’ will bring up a plethora of news stories and incidents from both his time as a Labour councillor and as a Conservative MP. One such incident, when he told asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France” brought back memories of people telling me to “go back to where you came from”.
What has made it worse is the deafening silence from the Conservative Party.
Rather than being reprimanded for such comments, Anderson was rewarded with the role of Deputy Chair. By doing this, Rishi Sunak gave racists and Islamophobes in this country a sense of vindication. It is something that strikes fear into people like me, who understand the devastating effects racism can have.
There has also been a vocal backlash against Anderson within the constituency, which has been heartening.
I have found great solace in various highly active Facebook groups that constantly call out his rhetoric for what it is. More recently, we have set up the Stand up for Ashfield campaign, which is part of the MP Watch network, to hold Lee Anderson to account and fight for a better Ashfield. People here are sick of hearing our community mentioned every time Lee Anderson is in the news for another controversial statement.
Anderson's comments about Sadiq Khan came in a week in which former Home Secretary Suella Braverman claimed the UK was run by "Islamists"; and when ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss stood silent as Tommy Robinson was described as a "hero" by far-right activist Steve Bannon.
Lee Anderson has refused to apologise for his comments. He has since described his words as “clumsy” – but they were not “clumsy”. They were targeted and specific. He intentionally set out to cause division and stoke hatred, as he has done consistently since becoming an MP.
At times of heightened tension around issues of racism, I always put myself in the shoes of a 10-year-old version of me going to school. How will I be treated in class? Will the racist rhetoric trickle down yet again? Will I have racist abuse hurled at me on my way home?
Rishi Sunak must expel Lee Anderson and those others who have weaponised racism in the Conservative Party. I have experienced first-hand how devastating it can be to grow up in an area facing racist abuse. I thought those times were in the past. But it feels as if coming from an ethnic minority background is becoming increasingly dangerous in Britain today.
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The ex-mining town of Sutton-in-Ashfield was often a tough place to grow up – particularly if, like me, you came from a South Asian background.
Racism was an ever-present issue in my childhood. But I noticed as I grew up that it became less prevalent as the area, and country, became more diverse and tolerant. In my adulthood, the majority of people in Ashfield would treat me just like anyone else.
Since the election of Lee Anderson in 2019, I have witnessed a reversal of the progress on racism.
Anderson – who has had the Conservative whip suspended after claiming that London's Muslim Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has allowed "Islamists" to take over the city – has a long history of prejudice.
This includes blocking travellers from using a park. Being an active member of a Facebook group that supports George Soros conspiracy theories. Boycotting the England men's football team as they took the knee to raise awareness of racial injustice.
Lee Anderson’s claims that the Muslim Mayor of London has handed the city to Islamists is another unsurprising example of the political culture the Conservative Party has normalised, writes Hardeep Matharu
Hardeep Matharu
In fact, a quick search online of 'Lee Anderson racism’ will bring up a plethora of news stories and incidents from both his time as a Labour councillor and as a Conservative MP. One such incident, when he told asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France” brought back memories of people telling me to “go back to where you came from”.
What has made it worse is the deafening silence from the Conservative Party.
Rather than being reprimanded for such comments, Anderson was rewarded with the role of Deputy Chair. By doing this, Rishi Sunak gave racists and Islamophobes in this country a sense of vindication. It is something that strikes fear into people like me, who understand the devastating effects racism can have.
There has also been a vocal backlash against Anderson within the constituency, which has been heartening.
I have found great solace in various highly active Facebook groups that constantly call out his rhetoric for what it is. More recently, we have set up the Stand up for Ashfield campaign, which is part of the MP Watch network, to hold Lee Anderson to account and fight for a better Ashfield. People here are sick of hearing our community mentioned every time Lee Anderson is in the news for another controversial statement.
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Anderson's comments about Sadiq Khan came in a week in which former Home Secretary Suella Braverman claimed the UK was run by "Islamists"; and when ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss stood silent as Tommy Robinson was described as a "hero" by far-right activist Steve Bannon.
Lee Anderson has refused to apologise for his comments. He has since described his words as “clumsy” – but they were not “clumsy”. They were targeted and specific. He intentionally set out to cause division and stoke hatred, as he has done consistently since becoming an MP.
At times of heightened tension around issues of racism, I always put myself in the shoes of a 10-year-old version of me going to school. How will I be treated in class? Will the racist rhetoric trickle down yet again? Will I have racist abuse hurled at me on my way home?
Rishi Sunak must expel Lee Anderson and those others who have weaponised racism in the Conservative Party. I have experienced first-hand how devastating it can be to grow up in an area facing racist abuse. I thought those times were in the past. But it feels as if coming from an ethnic minority background is becoming increasingly dangerous in Britain today.
‘The “Dangerous Muslim” Trope is Being Weaponised to Avoid Scrutiny’
It’s not about the women and children being massacred in Gaza, it’s about Lindsey Hoyle and UK's elected representatives feeling scared. Somehow the House of Commons Speaker turned a motion by the Scottish National Party calling for a ceasefire in Gaza into a debate on who runs the country. According to former Home Secretary, Suella Braveman it is the “Islamists”.
It is a far-right trope that effectively defines Muslims in Britain as a 'Trojan Horse’. Braverman and her acolytes are now puffing out their chests, determined to face down this phantom menace to the democracy which they themselves have so readily undermined.
Lee Anderson turned his fire on London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, who he opined was being controlled by Islamists. Khan’s Muslimness has so offended Conservatives both in Britain and across the pond that, every few years, they accuse him of being in cahoots with undesirables. In their eyes, he is now nothing more than a puppet.
Braverman and Anderson have been joined by William Shawcross, the former extremism tsar who lamented that the Government had ignored the recommendations from his review of the counter-terrorism Prevent Strategy – a strategy considered by critics to be a mechanism to criminalise religious and political beliefs.
Shawcross cited the safety of the public, which he claimed is now at increased risk in the UK due to the war in Gaza. Official police statistics show that the arrest rate for the millions of people who have marched since October is lower than the Glastonbury Festival – a fact not reported in any mainstream media outlet.
Both in its timing and execution, the campaign by those against Palestine employed its 'dangerous Muslims' card in a manner that has left journalists on right-wing radio stations aghast at how possibly “orchestrated” it is.
Academic Ben Whitham has called it a well-crafted “racist tradition”. As he posts, “politicians and journalists have worked hard over many years to perpetuate the idea that British Muslims represent a fifth column and secret cabal plotting to 'Islamicise’ the UK”.
The lives of Palestinians are now a political game, whereby those supporting the idea that they should not be murdered and maimed are cast as the 'baddies’. This isn’t about the safety of MPs. Turning themselves into victims of a phantom threat is really a panic about their moral culpability in supporting the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza – aided and abetted by the media class.
This nexus was at work again this week in the spike in online articles and broadcast mentions of the word 'Islamist’ . The use of the word and its associated terms suggests that detractors don’t hate Muslims per se, it’s just the really, really bad ones they’re concerned about.
Yet time and again, 'Islamist’ is used when reporting on any issue in which Muslim voices are raised, leading to debates on safety and extremism.
Democracy is great, we are told, because alongside other things, it encourages citizens to voice their concerns on issues they feel strongly about. But if you do this as a Muslim, there’s a high chance you will be labelled an Islamist; an extremist; and, in the case of Palestine, an antisemite.
As a new study on the media’s use of language when reporting on Muslims concludes, Islamism is “represented as being totalitarian and as such is incompatible with democracy and other modernist values”.
The Government has made no secret of its disdain for Muslims for many years.
The Prime Minister and his Deputy can’t bring themselves to use the word “Islamophobia”. Conservative MP Paul Scully joined the chorus when he claimed particular areas of Britain with large ethnic minority populations are no-go zones, citing the heavily Muslim-populated Tower Hamlets in east London and Sparkhill in Birmingham. Again, 'no-go zones’ is a suspiciously coded phrase which most likely means areas people like Scully don’t like visiting as opposed to anyone actually being denied entry. The last time a newspaper printed such lies the press regulator ruled against the Daily Mail and forced it to publish a correction.
The tropes now being launched against Britain’s Muslims are no longer obscure fringe talking points –they are being thrust into the mainstream by Conservative politicians and the right-wing media, irate at seeing mass protests in support of the Palestinian people. The Telegraph, a pillar of Britain’s right-wing media long hostile to any Muslim protest, front-paged the absurd allegation that Islamists were now running the country.
The next time a frustrated Brit has to endure cancelled trains or can’t get a GP appointment, or an entire council goes bankrupt as many are predicted to do, remember: it’s the Muslims who have done that.
More concerning is the fact that the kind of rhetoric that was routinely found on the pages of right-wing publications now has a broadcast presence, on the likes of GB News and TalkTV.
This is not mere 'news’ but polemic against British citizens. At a time where much of the population continues to face the challenges of a fall in living standards and the destruction of institutions, there are few if any solutions being offered to them.
Instead, they are being served an enemy.
‘A Nationalist Uprising’: Islamophobia and the Bannonisation of British Politics
For how much longer is the former Trump campaign manager and co-founder of Cambridge Analytica going to be allowed to subvert our politics and stoke division in our communities?
Sharing a platform with Liz Truss at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last week, and talking about the forthcoming Rochdale by-election, Steve Bannon described Tommy Robinson as a “hero” and Truss – the shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history – appeared to agree with him. “That is correct,” she said.
This is not the first time Bannon has praised the founder of the English Defence League, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Four years ago, while Robinson was serving a 13-month prison sentence for contempt of court, Bannon called him “the backbone” of the UK. But it is the first time such a senior Conservative has endorsed him.
Deputy Conservative Prime Minister Oliver Dowden attempted to make excuses for Truss this weekend, saying she might not have heard Bannon correctly. But even if Truss, who is still a Conservative MP, didn’t understand she was supporting a multiply-convicted British criminal and subversive activist, she should have known that she was sharing a stage with a multiply-convicted American criminal and subversive activist – Steve Bannon himself.
Bannon, as Grant Stern first revealed in this newspaper five years ago, was investigated and indicted for fraudulently using funds raised for his ‘Build the Wall’ US-Mexico barrier project in 2020. Outgoing President Donald Trump granted a last-minute pardon for his federal offences in 2021, but Bannon still faces state-level charges in a trial in New York later this year. He was also found guilty of two charges of criminal contempt for his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
This is where Bannon’s role in both American and US democracy really matters: his vociferous attempts to destroy it on both sides of the Atlantic.
At CPAC, sharing a stage with right-wing activist Jack Posobiec, Bannon agreed that he wanted to “overthrow” democracy because they “didn’t get all the way on January 6”.
Bannon also revealed that he has similar designs on the UK. He urged Truss to join forces with the Reform Party, headed by Richard Tice, and told a Mirror reporter that his old friend Nigel Farage would be installed as prime minister as a part of a “nationalist uprising”.
While this intervention may have taken some by surprise, it is merely the culmination of over a decade during which Bannon has attempted to subvert British politics. Given that history, what can we expect next?
‘My Weapons’
A large part of Steve Bannon’s impact on politics on both sides of the Atlantic is his use of social media and digital campaigning to change the culture of debate – the very frame of reference and facts we use to debate politics. He has referred to this ‘information warfare’ as “flooding the zone with shit”, and the combination of disinformation and digital targeting as “his weapons”.
Cultivating these tactics goes back to 2013, when Bannon allied with the billionaire hedge fund owner Robert Mercer to run the Breitbart publications and co-found the now-defunct data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica involved in the great Facebook hack and micro-targeting scandal. The company was a spin-off of a strategic military outfit, SCL, which was used to deradicalise civilians and insurgents in combat zones.
The British element in Bannon’s campaign can be traced to his long friendship with Farage – although the ‘Cambridge’ in Cambridge Analytica has more specific roots.
In 2013, Bannon attended the 10th anniversary conference of the Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF) at Churchill College, Cambridge University, just as he was setting up his new company.
Churchill College, Cambridge, December 2013. The YBF 10th anniversary conference with (left to right) Raheem Kassam, Steve Bannon and Harry Cole. Photo: Facebook
An offshoot of the Young America’s Foundation, the YBF was founded by lawyer Donal Blaney (currently in a legal dispute with this newspaper acting on behalf of GB News presenter Dan Wootton). Both the YBF, and its American counterpart, appear to have been funded by the Mercer Family – which also backed Cambridge Analytica and Bannon’s Breitbart.
By this point, the YBF had become a centre of right-wing US-style Republican thinking and antipathy towards the EU. Its co-founder was (the now ennobled) Daniel Hannan, a leading Brexiter and Conservative MEP. On its advisory board was Matthew Elliott, who helped set up the Tufton Street network of opaquely funded libertarian think tanks, and was the chief executive of the official Vote Leave campaign during the Brexit Referendum (he has also been elevated to the House of Lords).
Speakers at the YBF’s 10th anniversary event included Paul Staines of the Guido Fawkes site; and Douglas Murray who spoke on jihad, Islamism, Israel, and the ‘War on Terror’. Bannon shared a platform with Harry Cole, then head of news at Guido Fawkes, and Raheem Kassam to discuss digital campaigning. Kassam went on to both edit the London edition of Breitbart and act as Farage’s aide for the next few years (he went on to co-host Bannon’s War Room podcast).
Also present was the then executive director of the YBF, Matthew Richardson, who was also reported to be Mercer’s legal representative in the UK at the time. He went on to become the secretary of Farage’s UKIP and signed a deal with Bannon in the run-up to the EU Referendum so that Cambridge Analytica could process UKIP data for the targeting of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, fronted by Farage. (Richardson now works with Rebekah Mercer and helped set up their social media site, Parler).
Email released by former Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser on the UKIP data handed over to Leave EU's Andy Wigmore by former YBF Chief Executive Matthew Richardson.
The YBF would be closed two years later, amid allegations of sexual misconduct and bullying around the suicide of the young activist Elliott Johnson.
Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t last much longer. According to its former head of research, Chris Wylie, the company set up a temporary office in the English university town around the time of the YBF conference at Churchill College. Soon, it was working with Cambridge academics to establish a research project to psychologically profile voters – which would end up illegally harvesting the personal data (and even personal messages) of up to 87 million Facebook users to be used for political targeting.
Though many argue about the impact of psychometric targeting and online messaging, both the Brexit and Trump votes were swung by small margins. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive Alexander Nix boasted that digital targeting was the key to the success in both results. Though it did not use Cambridge Analytica directly, the Vote Leave campaign used the company’s Canadian offshoot, AIQ, and its Project Ripon database to target swing voters with billions of online ads – often unlawfully paid for – in the last days before the EU Referendum.
When Carole Cadwalladr revealed the Facebook hack and Cambridge Analytica’s role in Brexit and Trump in the Observer in 2018, it wiped billions off the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company, and Cambridge Analytica was closed and its offices raided by law enforcement.
But Steve Bannon had already left Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica by then – and had even bigger fish to fry.
Russia and Islamophobia
Like his friend, Nigel Farage, Bannon is keen to talk of the need to protect Europe’s ‘Judaeo-Christian’ culture (as if that had not been one of pogroms and the Holocaust), while marginalising or monstering the third branch of the three great Abrahamic religions: Islam.
His embracing of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy – that Europe is being overrun by Muslim ‘invaders’ – has infected the worldview of many right-wing parties across the continent. This includes elements of the UK’s Conservative Party, which have been unafraid to advance these fearmongering narratives.
The latest example is the former Conservative vice-chair Lee Anderson’s recent comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan handing the city to “Islamists”, echoed by former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in the wake of public protests in London over the Israel-Hamas War.
Activating xenophobia, particularly around Islam, was one of the key themes used by both leave campaigns during the EU Referendum in 2016 when, triggered by Russian military activity in war-torn Syria, hundreds of thousands of refugees started fleeing to Europe. Then Prime Minister David Cameron accused Vladimir Putin of deliberately “weaponising” refugees to destabilise Europe.
Farage’s Leave.EU campaign used its notorious ‘Breaking Point’ poster to spread fear about ‘invading’ Muslim migrants, while recycling Russian fake news about Muslim violence in its online ads. Meanwhile, the Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, wasn’t much better, falsely suggesting that 80 million Turks were about to swamp Britain and the EU.
Johnson also deployed Islamophobic tropes to set the tone for his ousting of Theresa May and taking over the leadership of the Conservatives in the summer of 2019 – inspired by Steve Bannon.
Appointed Foreign Secretary after failing to beat May for the leadership, Johnson first struck up a personal relationship with Bannon in late 2016, when Trump’s campaign manager was made his head of staff in the White House. In early 2017, Johnson’s Foreign Office invited Cambridge Analytica executives to election briefings on its use of data in Trump’s successful campaign.
Both men were reported to have been in regular contact throughout the next two years, during which Bannon also advised Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
When Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in 2018, Bannon claimed to have consulted him on moves to oust Theresa May. One of Johnson’s first was to write a Telegraph column comparing Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letter-boxes” – a provocation very much in line with Bannon’s Breitbart strategy of sectarian division to activate a hard-right racist base.
Around the time he was commending Tommy Robinson as the “backbone” of Britain, Bannon also claimed that Johnson would be “a great prime minister”.
Soon, Johnson picked up another one of Bannon’s favourite Breitbart themes saying, in a rare intervention in Parliament in 2019, that there was “a plot by the deep state to frustrate Brexit”. The ‘deep state’ catch-all conspiracy also chimes with the ‘Great Replacement’ – that elites are deliberately using migration as a weapon (it was echoed by Liz Truss in her appearance at CPAC last week).
But working in the shadows behind all of this is a genuine deep state – one which has weaponised migrants to fuel fear and division: the security system of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
During both the Brexit Referendum and Trump’s election campaign, Russian intelligence agencies were funding and promoting the same causes as Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that there was an element of collusion between them.
Cambridge Analytica had many links to the Russian state-controlled Lukoil company. It worked extensively with St Petersburg University, around the corner from the notorious Internet Research Agency, owned by the late oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which spent $50 million targeting US and UK voters. One of Cambridge Analytica’s consultants, Sam Patten, set up a company with a Russian intelligence agent. And crucial voter data on US swing states was passed on to the GRU, the same Russian military intelligence agency that supported Prigozhin.
Though Cambridge Analytica has now been shut down, and Prigozhin died in a plane crash after defying Putin last year, there is little doubt that these propaganda practices and Russian support for them live on in new forms.
Though Putin’s imperial expansionist intent has been revealed by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he is now able to weaponise the conflict in Gaza for much the same purposes as he did with Syria – to promote xenophobia and the recurrent racist trope of the ‘Muslim hordes’ taking over Europe.
Unlike Syria a decade ago, there is no direct evidence of Russian involvement in Hamas’ horrific assault on Israel on 7 October last year – though the Kremlin does have close ties with Hamas’ main backers in Iran. But there is little doubt that the distraction from his invasion of Ukraine suits Putin’s purposes.
Given Bannon’s reliance on figures like Tommy Robinson, and the use of hate and Islamophobia to achieve a desired ‘nationalist uprising’, it should be no surprise, even if it is a shock, that unscrupulous senior Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss will go along with him not only to promote Trump in the forthcoming US elections, but also again to stoke division and mistrust in Britain.
If he succeeds in any way, this will foster a darker, dangerous form of right-wing Conservatism in this country – a tragic, toxic legacy for us all.
Scottish Green Minister Brands Lee Anderson and Conservative Right ‘School Bullies Who Love Punching Down’
A Co-Leader of the Scottish Green Party, serving in the Scottish Government, has hit out at Conservative “school bullies” who “can't see a marginalised, vulnerable minority without instinctively wanting to punch down”.
Patrick Harvie MSP – the first openly bisexual leader of a UK political party – made the comments to Byline Times in a meeting of UK Green Party leaders in London on Monday.
It came after Lee Anderson lost the Conservative whip over the weekend for his claims that Islamists had "got control" of London through its Muslim Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Responding, Harvie said: “Clearly for some on the right, it feels as though they haven't emotionally moved on from being school bullies, and they can't see a marginalised, vulnerable minority without instinctively wanting to punch down.
“There are others who simply see this as an opportunistic agenda: to try and divide people against one another and as a way to court controversy [or] shallow popularity.”
Harvie alleged that there is a double standard about how politicians and the press treat antisemitism and Islamophobia.
“It doesn't take a genius to imagine how they would respond if somebody on another part of the political spectrum had talked about Jewish people as having some sort of conspiratorial influence," he told Byline Times.
"That would be immediately condemned as antisemitism, and rightly so… Islamophobia needs to be acknowledged and then condemned in the same way,."
He named individuals like Anderson and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, alongside ex-Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick and quickly ousted Prime Minister Liz Truss as showing “ just how extreme they’re willing to go”.
All of them have courted the hard-right over the past year, some with an eye to securing the leadership of the party. Liz Truss spoke at a pro-Trump conference in the US last week, staying silent while former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon praised English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson as a hero.
Braverman has made similar comments to Anderson in claiming that Islamists now run the country, though she did not name an individual as being responsible as Anderson did with Sadiq Khan.
Jenrick has been accused of deliberately inflaming tensions after claiming immigration threatens to “cannibalise” the compassion of the British public.
Harvie told Byline Times that "we've got a much bigger problem than just political parties" and that there also needs to be a "proper discussion in the UK about media regulation".
Asked what that might look like, the Glasgow MSP said it could involve a “fit and proper person test” to ensure that those who owned UK media outlets were responsible individuals.
“We’ve seen pretty blatant examples of explicit, far-right rhetoric from the likes of GB News for example. [Take] the fact that Ofcom are failing to regulate the promotion of outright conspiracy theories, and lies… as though freedom of speech is about the freedom to tell lies.
“Freedom of speech is precious and that's why we can't allow it to be subverted and to suddenly have the freedom to denigrate minorities of vulnerable people. So, we've got a much bigger problem than just political parties."
The same applies to social media firms, which he said had been “taken over by toxic forces” – referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of X (formerly Twitter).
Last August, a man was arrested and charged after using homophobic rhetoric when challenging him. Harvie told Byline Times: “[Social media hate is] not just something about people's worries, it spills over into real life.
“We've seen the case of Brianna Ghey for example – a court judgement found transphobia was one of the motivating factors... Trolling people on social media [is not] just a laugh. It [creates] real world harm, and that's going to continue to get worse if we don't get to grips with the problem.”
Asked if he feels safe as a politician in Scotland, amid mounting fears over the attacks on political representatives, he added: “Relatively. I question that more than I used to.”
Harvie spoke at the event to promote the Greens ahead of this year's general election, in which his colleagues in England are hoping to increase their number of seats, from one to three or four.
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‘The Normalisation of Politically Expedient Racism: Rishi Sunak Cannot Call Out Something He Has Been Complicit In’
The Prime Minister’s response to claims by his party’s former vice-chair that the Muslim Mayor of London has let the city been taken over by “Islamists” has been to refuse to acknowledge the racism of his comments. Instead, he repeated a well-worn statement: that the UK is the “most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world”.
These words do nothing to address how and why Conservative politicians have normalised a political culture in which racist dog-whistle politics is still seen as acceptable. Not reasoned discussions about extremism – but emotionally-charged and racially-activating comments designed to provoke controversy, hate and division.
Rishi Sunak won’t say whether he believes Lee Anderson, who lost the Conservative whip following his claims about Labour’s Sadiq Khan, was driven by racism in making the remarks.
But he has pointed to how proud he was to become the UK’s first Asian Prime Minister and how this had occurred without it being of note.
“That’s because we have a way of doing these things, of respecting everyone, and at the same time ensuring that everyone integrates into our community and subscribes to a common set of British values,” he added. And that’s why… racism or prejudice of any kind is completely unacceptable.”
These are the same vague lines we hear every time issues of race become a ‘flashpoint’; when underlying realities briefly catch the attention of politicians and media outlets usually only too willing to refuse to engage.
But claims about Britain’s ‘better nature’ do nothing to address a political culture in which issues such as Islamophobia are seen as a way to advance political capital – and specifically how the Conservative Party has been at the forefront of its normalisation.
Conservative peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi – the first Muslim to serve as a Cabinet minister in David Cameron’s Government – has spoken many times in recent years of how she doesn’t recognise the elements of her party taking this route. For her, Anderson’s comments showed how the Conservative Party sees Muslims as “fair game” and “convenient electoral campaign fodder”.
Anderson's comments are also indicative of a deeper, perhaps narrow but emboldened, current within the party that has never been afraid to vocalise such sentiments – from the very top.
It was the former Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, who wrote of “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and Muslim women looking like “bank robbers” and “letterboxes”.
His Vote Leave campaign, which Johnson led with Michael Gove, claimed Turkey would soon be joining the EU and was unafraid of peddling a xenophobic and anti-immigration message during the Brexit Referendum.
Accusations of institutional Islamophobia in the Conservatives – including most recently by the vice-chair of the influential 1922 Committee, Nusrat Ghani – remain unscrutinised, even if dismissed by the party.
At the top of Sunak's priorities is the controversial Rwanda scheme, ruled unlawful by the UK’s Supreme Court, which was initiated by former Home Secretary Priti Patel (a policy one seasoned and senior Brexit-supporting Conservative MP told me was “the concentration camp scheme”).
Patel’s successor at the Home Office Suella Braverman – who Sunak was happy to bring back into government when he became Prime Minister – has made a number of inflammatory statements during her tenure and since, including falsely claiming that child grooming gangs in the UK are “almost all British-Pakistani” (despite the Home Office’s own research finding that the majority of offenders are white).
These are just a few examples, from the Conservative Party itself, which have contributed to a culture in which Lee Anderson had no qualms about claiming that the London Mayor has handed the cities to Islamists.
Then there are the elements within the party only too willing to stand alongside the likes of Nigel Farage and his friend, alt-right strategist Steve Bannon – who has baselessly ‘predicted’ that there will be a nationalist uprising in Britain to install Farage as Prime Minister.
Whether these dog whistles are sounded for political capital with the public at large, with Conservative Party members in the country, for reasons of leadership ambitions, or in the myopia of a ‘culture war’ perpetuated by politicians and media outlets far detached from the actual views of the vast majority of people in this country, the effect is the same: the normalisation of the weaponisation of hate.
In 2021, Peter Jukes and I spoke to former Conservative Attorney General Dominic Grieve on Byline TV about how such a culture was being normalised by his party under Boris Johnson, who had expelled him and a number of 'One Nation' Conservatives.
“If you are pandering to people’s prejudices, because it is a way of getting short-term fixes, to your lack of policy and your being a shambles, it’s inevitably going to take you down this road,” he said.
“As an MP, people come in [to see you] and feel angry or unhappy or upset and want change. And, generally speaking, the Conservative Party has seen itself as absorbing this, by acting as a check and moderator.
“If you decide to no longer be a moderator, because it suits your short-term agenda, to cover-up for the shambles, then that’s the route down which you’re going to be pushed.”
Downing Street is today be briefing that “we don’t tolerate any anti-Muslim hatred in any form” – once again ignoring how it has normalised a political culture in which anti-Muslim dog whistles have been tolerated for far too long.
The truth is that strategically deployed racism has long been seen as a political tool. Rishi Sunak, as our first Asian Prime Minister of a party that has normalised its use, cannot call out something he has been complicit in.
Conservative Mayoral Candidate Susan Hall’s Council is Hiking Tax by the Maximum Legal Amount – But She’s Skipping the Vote
The council that London Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall sits on is set to hike council tax by the maximum legal amount.
At a Harrow Council meeting tonight (Thursday), the majority Conservative council is in line to put up council tax by the maximum 5%, raking in an extra £7.69m for the local authority’s coffers.
Susan Hall sits on the council and chairs the planning committee. She told Byline Times she would not be attending the vote - the first full council meeting she’s missed in 18 years, according to the mayoral hopeful. She would not comment further.
Hall has frequently attacked Sadiq Khan for putting up council tax at a Greater London Authority level, as have Conservatives across the capital.
Hall is also in line for a bumper 35% increase in her councillor allowance. Her large increase is because she chairs the licensing committee, which Byline Times understands meets just once a year. Her ‘special responsibility allowance’ is currently £2,500 a year, but is set to rise to £4,382.
A Labour source said: “I’m sure she would practise what she preaches” and oppose the council tax rise.
The councillor allowance hikes are backed by the opposition Labour group.
Speaking to Byline Times, Cllr Susan Hall AM said: “I’m not going to comment on [council] tax...It’s the first meeting I’ve missed in 18 years. I can be forgiven for missing one.”
On the councillor allowance hike, Hall added: “I've got thoughts on that, of course I do, it's just who I share them with.”
She discussed the “dislike” for Sadiq Khan on the doorstep, particularly in outer London over the expanded Ultra Low Emissions Zone charge for the most polluting vehicles.
Hall said: “I’ve never seen anything like it. [On ULEZ] lots have finance on cars that don’t comply. You scrap it and still owe the money. The price of second hand cars has gone up hugely. ULEZ is a lot of money paid by some of the poorest people.”
Council tax is also a regressive charge, with hikes typically hitting the poorest hardest.
In a budget document ahead of the meeting, Harrow council officials write: “Harrow remains one of the lowest funded Councils both within London and nationally. The Council does not benefit from large reserves compared with other London Boroughs and is at the lower end of the lower quartile for reserve balances held.
“Over the last 10 years, up to 2024/25, the Council’s revenue support grant has reduced from £50.5m to £2.2m. The Council does receive other grant funding to support services, in 2023/24 this totalled £375m. However, these grants are all ring fenced to areas of activity and cannot be used to support the core budget, for example the Dedicated Schools Grant of £152m.
“The Council does not receive specific funding to meet demographic growth and demand led pressures. In addition, inflation has increased significantly creating unfunded budget pressures.
“For many years Council Tax has been increased to just below the referendum limits and full use has been made of the Adults Social Care Precept, both of which were in line with central government expectations.
“The impact of this is that the Council is heavily reliant on Council Tax to fund its core services. In 2023/24 78% of the Council’s net revenue budget of £196.4m is funded from Council Tax.”
The Conservative council budget note also complains that the cost of the 2023/24 pay rise for staff is £7.2m, and “therefore this left very little funding available for other demand pressures that have emerged in adult services, and other inflationary pressures.”
Councillor allowances however allowances appear to be rising above inflation.
The budget council tax hike can be viewed here.
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‘Fighting the Enlightenment?’: What Do Danny Kruger’s New Conservatives Really Want?
Conservative MP Danny Kruger has been described as “one of parliament’s leading thinkers”. He was described that way by whoever wrote the dust jacket to his book Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation (Forum, 2023).
Kruger leads the New Conservatives, one of the many factions chewing on the liver of the Conservative Party. He helped lead the right-wing “rebellion” against the government’s Rwanda bill, and could shape the fate of Rishi Sunak and what comes next. But what does Danny Kruger think, and what do his New Conservatives want?
In Covenant, Kruger argues that the UK has forgotten three pillars of society: Home, meaning family; Neighbourhood, meaning one’s local community; and Nation, meaning one’s country of residence. These bonds have been diluted (Kruger likes his metaphors faint) by material and ideological changes, resulting in general strife and decline.
Kruger describes this as a conflict between the (capital “O”) Order and the (capital “I”) Idea. The Order is the “traditional normative dispositions” which “reflect the truth of things”, while the Idea is “a religion of individual self-creation that unpicks the connecting fibres of society and ruins the person”: “In replacing the Order with the Idea we replace the centrality of relationships with the centrality of the self.”
What follows is a familiar attack on the excesses of liberalism. Kruger dislikes the word “woke” (“too trivial, too mocking for such a powerful and resourceful enemy”), but embraces the term “culture war”. What makes him novel in a UK context is to make this case in explicitly religious terms.
Fighting the Enlightenment
“The culture war”, Kruger writes, “is a religious conflict about the right gods to worship. […] It is a battle for the strongholds of society itself”. Here Kruger echoes US reactionary Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech declaring “a cultural war for the soul of America”. (Buchanan rather tellingly painted the culture war as a successor to the Cold War against “godless” socialism – a point to keep in mind.)
As this suggests, Kruger is more reactionary than your typical Tory MP. He believes things started going wrong in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, the “exaggerated rationalism” of which was the first rebellion against the Order. This led to something worse: the Idea, which, “having killed liberalism from within, has animated its carcass with a different philosophy, and this zombified monster now rules instead”.
Here’s the first big problem. Kruger portrays this modern, post-Enlightenment Left as a surrogate religion – a cult of the individual, with the arrogance to believe humans are infallible. But if humans are fallible (as we surely are), how can he claim to know that the traditional Christian Order “represents the truth of things”?
Throughout the book, Kruger makes grand assertions like this – “We were born to worship: This is our essence, as primary as our existence” – without providing a shred of evidence to support them. He assumes what he needs to prove, and writes as if Christianity is outside the realm of man-made ideas.
You can’t really attack the “woke” Left for resembling a religion if you think the secular Enlightenment is the problem to begin with. Not, that is, unless you argue that modern Leftism is a false god, which would simply be a call to replace one set of pieties with another. Thus Kruger robs his critique of its potential sting, and fires an arrow directly into his own foot.
Second, Kruger fails to name his enemy except in abstract terms (“the Idea”). The book oddly has few if any quotes from the modern progressives it attacks, relying instead on second-hand accounts from the Left’s critics. He does quote some radical thinkers from the 20th century – Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Simone De Beauvoir – all of whom are long-dead, and whose influence he comically overstates. (Example: “Sartre’s essay was published in 1946. It was not until 2020 that his principles became an official doctrine.”)
In Kruger’s telling, the West was led astray by these writers, whose ideas transformed society and shaped our modern world. This is not so much bad history as a ‘Just-So Story’, and with about as much explanatory value. It’s Paradise Lost, with Sartre in the role of Lucifer.
Cardinal Sins
What are Kruger’s pieties? The MP for Devizes argues (at length) that “marriage is the safest and best place for sex”. He calls transgender rights “the latest attempt to attribute evil to creation”. He frets about new tech and AI, (or “robots”), asking: “Will the machines belong to the Order, or to the Idea?”
Then there’s this: “the dissolution of families also leads, just as naturally, to the great disaster that is impending in the West: the deliberate killing of the old, the ill and the disabled.” Kruger is referring to euthanasia, or assisted suicide, which he considers central to the progressive scheme:
“Death is the externality of the Idea. When we live for ourselves, others must die. If we think we are good and creation is bad, we end up killing people. Instead of a pleasure dome, we make a hecatomb, a mass sacrifice of human life to the gods of our culture. This is the deathworks.”
It’s curious that Kruger gets so animated about this. For one thing, euthanasia has been illegal in the UK since 1961. For another, Kruger writes that he feels “ashamed” of voting for Covid restrictions when the alternative would have been more deaths among the old and the infirm.
Despite the alleged scale of the threat posed by the Idea, Kruger’s proposals are incredibly weak: compulsory council work, insurance-based parental leave, and so on. On economics, Kruger writes that “a free market [...] depends on the proper moral orientation of businesspeople” – in other words, nice capitalists. If only we were to create a “more purposeful commercial sector”, Kruger writes, we could “realise the conservative vision of a low-tax, light-regulation economy”. Perhaps we could arrange for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos et al to be visited by three ghosts…
There are other contradictions. Why, for example, does he not extend his argument about family, neighbourhood, and country to international communities like the European Union? Kruger was an active Leave campaigner and recently named Brexit as “the great standing achievement of our time in office”.
On the national question, Kruger again veers into dark fantasy. As he writes in the book: “The ‘enemy’ for Brexiteers was and is the anti-identity of globalism, the doctrine of international allegiance that has infected not just the EU but progressive elites across the world, and in the UK especially.”
At last year’s Tory conference, Kruger opined that “the penny is dropping among people in Westminster that the Government doesn’t run the government”. He went on to warn of a “huge movement” to create “a world government that will have power to dictate to national governments what they should do in anticipation of another pandemic.” This isn’t a modest plea for a return to “traditional values”. It’s the worldview of the radical Right, in its most internet-crazed conspiracy theory form.
Material Realities
Let’s bring Kruger down to earth. Before entering parliament, he was a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank run by the Legatum Group, the UAE-based investment firm behind GB News. The Legatum crowd has mastered the art of preaching national populism while being funded by millionaires based in Dubai. Anti-globalism is a funny business.
Kruger spoke at the launch of Legatum’s churchy Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) project last year, which is led by self-help culture warrior Jordan Peterson. Kruger’s New Conservatives (a limited company) received £50,000 from Legatum in December.
And the hits keep coming. Since joining Parliament in 2019, Kruger has worked as a senior advisor to Boris Johnson – surely the embodiment of godless individualism, and not a great one for the sanctity of marriage. During the pandemic, Kruger defended Johnson aide Dominic Cummings (an “old friend”) over his breaking of lockdown rules, on the grounds that he was doing what was best for his family.
In the 2022 Tory leadership race, Kruger endorsed Suella Braverman to be Prime Minister. Last month, Kruger was one of only 11 MPs to follow through with their threat to vote against the government’s Rwanda bill – though not exactly on Christian grounds. As he explained, “It still allows for migrants’ lawyers to claim that their removal to Rwanda would breach their human rights”. Did I mention that Kruger describes his new covenant as “the politics of love”?
Kruger has warned that the Tories face “obliteration” in the next general election, which given the polls hardly counts as a prophecy. Whatever happens, he and his Legatum backers will be there to pick up the pieces and will continue their holy war against the Left.
David Meller: Exploring the Political Nexus Behind the Michael Gove Ally Given Controversial £164 million PPE Deals
As David Meller toasted the New Year at the beginning of 2018, he surely felt he could do no wrong.
The successful businessman was not only very rich, with a £22 million home in the heart of Mayfair, another place in the hills of Los Angeles, a chauffeur-driven Range Rover, and a jet-set lifestyle which took him around the world to schmooze on the yachts of even wealthier friends.
He had also, through his work in business, education, sport, and thanks to regular donations to the Conservative Party, built up a vast nexus of political contacts.
They included not only the Education Secretary Michael Gove, for whom Mr Meller ran a leadership campaign, and future Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi. Meller had even hosted a peace summit for the warring advisors of Conservative giants Prime Minister Theresa May and her predecessor David Cameron.
As a result, Meller had been awarded a place on the Department for Education’s (DfE) board of directors by Gove himself, and Ms May had made him a CBE in her 2018 New Year’s honours list for ‘services to education’.
But within three weeks it had all come crashing down, after the men-only President's Club, of which he was co-chairman, became mired in a sexual harassment controversy.
Forced to quit the DfE board, although allowed to keep his CBE, Meller’s political career seemed over.
But somehow, it wasn’t.
Having quietly maintained his links behind the scenes at Westminster, Meller stayed close to Gove. So close, it turned out, that Gove allegedly referred Meller’s beauty company, Meller Designs, to the ‘VIP Lane’ at the height of the pandemic. It had, as a result, been awarded six large Government contracts to supply £164 million of PPE.
It was a transaction that has since caused Gove and the Government an ongoing headache as it battles widespread allegations of ‘cronyism’ - heightened after Meller was last year elevated to the UK’s prestigious Board of Trade by Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, who Gove was a friend and ‘mentor’ to.
This week the Guardian reported that Gove had failed to register that he had been entertained by Meller in VIP corporate hospitality at a football match four months after Gove’s referral in May 2020, which Gove claimed was an “oversight”.
Now a court case Meller has brought against a former business associate, reported exclusively by Byline Times earlier this month, is likely to cause the Government further headaches - particularly in a General Election year.
The commercial litigation case has seen Meller admit to a “penchant to...delete emails…after they had been actioned…in the usual course of business,” including through the period he negotiated over PPE with the Government.
It also heard Meller had done several multi-million-pound property deals without bothering to put contracts in place, instead allegedly agreeing to one worth around £1.4 million in association with his super-rich financier friend Michael Sherwood via a single WhatsApp message, and that he tended not to work from a computer or laptop.
Meller is also said to have allowed his son, Jonathan, to conduct business on his behalf, despite Meller Jnr not yet being 30 at the time to which the litigation relates.
But then, it could be argued, Meller’s not your usual multi-millionaire businessman.
‘Fuelled by Struggle with Dyslexia’
Born in 1959 to German refugees, Meller attended a comprehensive school, earned four O-levels, and "struggled with dyslexia".
Aside from giving him the drive to make money, and lots of it (Meller once owned a six-storey Victorian townhouse in Mayfair that he sold in 2015 to the Qatari ruling family for more than £40 million), it was an experience that first fuelled his interest in education, which would in time lead to his long-standing friendship with Gove.
In 1987 Meller and his older brother, Charles, took over as joint chief executives of Julius A. Meller Ltd of London, a "diversified manufacturing company" set up in 1913 by his grandfather and later run by his father.
The business would later be renamed Meller Designs, a Bedford-based “cosmetics and luxury goods” company through which he brokered the PPE contracts, and which he ran with Charles alongside a range of other companies.
It is not known when and how Meller came to meet Mr Sherwood, the controversial and incredibly rich Goldman Sachs executive with whom he struck up an ongoing business relationship and whose joint dealings are currently being scrutinised in court, but they joined the board of Watford Football Club together in November 1999, before departing the same week in January 2004.
The pair oversaw a turbulent time at Vicarage Road. Badly hit by relegation from the Premiership in 2000 and a disastrous season of extravagant spending under former coach Gianluca Vialli, the club struggled financially. The Hornets lost £10.3 million in 2003 and only avoided administration in 2002 by getting their players and senior staff to agree to a 12 per cent wage deferral.
Between July 2003 and March 2005, Meller and Sherwood, along with another former Watford director, personally paid the circa £300,000 wages of striker Danny Webber, after he signed from Manchester United. With the trio entitled to around 60 percent of any future transfer fee, Webber was sold in June 2005 to Sheffield United for £500,000, which would have seen them share a profit after their investment of around £20,000, or £6,666 each
The Meller family involvement in sport did not end there. Meller’s son, Jonathan, with whom Meller is a majority shareholder in an investment company, was later involved in a small football agency, which has not filed accounts since its inception in 2019.
Despite a lack of boardroom success, Meller’s time at Watford did allow him to make an impact on the world of education, as he and Sherwood “drove forward” the club’s sponsorship of the Harefield Academy, a £24 million school in Uxbridge, West London. Given the green light in early 2004 by then Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, it opened in 2008, and would later educate England and Man United star Jadon Sancho.
In 2009, Meller’s passion for education saw him set up the Meller Educational Trust, which makes grants to education organisations, and ran four schools and a university technical college. That year he began funding the Conservatives, and he has since donated around £60,000 to Tory MPs - including £3,250 to Gove - and the central party.
In 2011 Meller was made a trustee and director of the Conservative-leaning think tank Policy Exchange, which was founded in 2002 by Gove, and Tory grandee Francis Maude.
Two years later Meller became the "main backer" of a new school in Elstree, Herts, founded to train students for “back of house” jobs in television, film and theatre, for which he was named in the Evening Standard's list of London's most influential people.
It is likely to have been around this period in the early 2010s that Meller came into regular contact with Gove, who as Education Secretary was a passionate supporter of academies, and Dominic Cummings, then Gove’s special advisor, who would later go on to become the Chief Adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the pandemic.
In June 2013 Meller was rewarded by Gove with a place on the Department for Education board as a non-executive member, where he “advise[d] on strategy, operations and the deliverability of policy” while “scrutinising (DfE) delivery and performance”.
Meller also, in 2014, began serving as co-chair of the National Apprenticeship Ambassador Network and the Apprenticeship Delivery Board, alongside future Conservative minister Nadim Zahawi. The role saw him report to Skills minister Robert Halfon MP, who would in 2015 become deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and received £1,843 from Meller to pay for lawyers in the Mark Clark bullying episode. (An investigation by the law firm Clifford Chance costing £2m identified 13 alleged victims of Clarke, who was appointed by the Conservative Party to run its RoadTrip2015 general election campaign.)
Having sold his Mayfair mansion to the Qataris, Meller bought an apartment close by in December 2016 for £22 million, his star on the rise, and by 2017, he was very much at the heart of London politics – joining social mobility charity the Mayor’s Fund for London as a trustee in June – as well as having become a major player in the Conservative Party.
After he helped run Michael Gove’s brief and unsuccessful 2016 leadership campaign, in October 2017 Meller hosted a dinner at his home between some of PM Theresa May’s and David Cameron’s closest allies, organised to “bury differences and agree on policies to get the Government back on track”.
Meller - who was reported at the time by The Sunday Times as being “prepared to fund a new organisation to devise policies that can help… restore the party’s fortunes” – was rewarded for his loyalty to the Conservatives by Ms May, who handed him a CBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours list for “services to education”.
“I’m thrilled and really proud,” Meller said at the time. “It was a complete surprise, I was over the moon. My heart missed a beat. Obviously, the work I do in apprenticeships and education, I get a real kick out of it.”
Fall and Rise
But Meller’s ascent through the world of politics collapsed weeks later in January 2018 when the Presidents Club, for which he was co-chairman, was exposed by the Financial Times for not preventing the sexual harassment of its female hosts.
The scandal centred around its “secretive” black-tie dinner, compèred by comedian David Walliams and which hosted a number of high-profile figures, including Meller’s former colleague Mr Zahawi. Zahawi had that month been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Education and was a guest on Meller’s table, along with then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Richard (now Lord) Harrington, Labour life peer and lobbyist Lord Johnathan Mendelsohn, and several leading British financiers and businessmen.
Jonathan Meller, himself a Presidents Club committee member, was on a table sponsored by one of his businesses, alongside West Ham United’s porn baron owner David Sullivan.
There is no suggestion the allegations related to Meller or his son, Zahawi, Mr Harrington, Mr Sullivan, or Mr Mendelsohn, although Mendelsohn was asked to step down from his front-bench role in the wake of the storm, despite publicly decrying what had occurred that night.
Following a clamour of outrage, Meller resigned from the DfE’s board, the apprenticeship delivery board, and the Mayor's Fund for London. He did, however, keep his CBE title, of which he is said to be fond, and often refers to himself by.
While the scandal might have meant curtains for most in public life, Meller somehow managed to cling on to his links to the Government, and most notably Gove, which paid off - and how - come the pandemic.
In August 2020, the Sunday Times revealed Meller Designs had been given a number of contracts to provide coveralls, gloves, respirator masks and hand sanitiser.
Pointing to Meller’s links to Gove – who in his post as the Cabinet Office Minister in charge of Government procurement, had a duty to ensure that all contracts were awarded “based on value for money… achieved through competition” – it said that in May 2020, the Government ordered £65m worth of Type IIR masks, from Meller Designs, the equivalent of 168 million face coverings.
With the order successfully fulfilled, a Meller Designs spokesman said at the time: “We are extremely proud of the role we played at the height of the crisis and managed to secure more than 150 million items of PPE.”
But the following month, in September 2020, Byline Times revealed Meller Designs had been awarded two contracts worth a total of £81.8 million – taking its overall Government earnings during the Coronavirus crisis to more than £148 million.
In November 2021, it was reported that Gove had referred Meller Designs to the Government’s ‘VIP lane’.
The now-infamous fast-track system was put in place for friends and donors of the Conservative Party to get PPE contracts at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, with the National Audit Office later finding that companies referred as potential PPE suppliers by Government ministers, MPs or NHS bosses were 10 times more likely to secure contracts.
While the Cabinet Office told Byline Times that "ministers had no involvement in these procurement decisions”, it added: "Potential suppliers often passed on offers of PPE to…ministers – and these offers were then passed onto professional procurement specialists for assessment, with due diligence carried out on all companies in advance of procurement and every company subjected to the same checks."
Gove is not believed to have made any further statement regarding his apparent involvement in referring Meller Designs to the scheme. He did not respond to any of the questions put to him regarding his long-standing relationship with Meller, including whether it was still ongoing, his thoughts on Meller’s “remarkable” business practices, or the PPE contracts arrangement.
Last December The Good Law Project uncovered internal Government documents that showed that in three contracts with Meller Designs, the Government paid between 1.2 and 2.2 times the average unit price. The average price for medical gowns was £5.87 but the gowns bought from Meller Designs cost £12.64. About £8.46m worth of the equipment supplied by Meller Designs was also found to be not used in an NHS setting.
A spokesperson for Meller Designs said then: “We are extremely proud of the role we played at the height of the Covid-19 crisis and managed to secure more than 100m items of PPE – including masks, sanitiser, coveralls and gloves direct from the manufacturers – at a time when they were most needed. This PPE was used in hospitals and by emergency services throughout the country.”
It is not clear why the amount of PPE Meller Designs said it had supplied had dropped from 150 million pieces in August 2020 to 100 million last December. The Cabinet Office refused to comment, directing us instead to Meller Designs. (Meller did not return our request for comment on this matter or any of the other matters reported in this article, and nor did Sherwood.)
Meller, though, still very much in with the Conservative Party, was again rewarded by the Government last September when he became one of 13 people appointed by Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch to the new-look Board of Trade, an influential body which advises the Government on policy.
The Department for Business and Trade told Byline Times that advisers are “appointed because of their expertise in trade and economic matters and to help inform our future thinking on international trade”.
Referring directly to Meller the department said he was “a businessman with relevant experience that we believe will be valuable to the Board of Trade”, and that “all advisers must undergo and pass due diligence processes prior to their appointment, including David Meller.”
“It is a basic principle that people, including public figures, should be allowed to take up work and public appointments for which they are qualified when there is no legal reason to obstruct that,” it added. Badenoch did not reply to Byline Times' requests for comment.
At the time of his appointment – which the Department for Business and Trade has confirmed to this newspaper was a “direct…appointment” of Ms Badenoch, who was until recently extremely close to Gove – Anneliese Dodds, Labour Party chairwoman, said it smacked of cronyism.
She said: “The message from the Conservative Government remains clear: give tens of thousands of pounds to the Tories and you’ll be catapulted into positions of power and rewarded with lucrative contracts.”
David Meller, currently back at the top of the business and political world, appears to be the embodiment of that very message. How, in a General Election year, Meller’s ongoing links to Gove and the Government, his role in the continuing PPE saga, and now a self-inflicted court battle - with the case to be heard in November - might impact all that remains to be seen.
Rishi Sunak Says His ‘Plan is Working’ But Voters Don’t Believe Him
Three quarters of voters do not believe Rishi Sunak's claim that his "plan is working" for fixing the UK economy, findings from a damning new poll for Byline Times suggest.
The British economy entered recession at the end of last year, according to official figures published earlier this week.
The figures revealed that the UK has gone through its longest period without economic growth per capita since the 1950s.
In the wake of two massive by-election defeats on Friday morning, the Prime Minister again insisted to reporters that “our plan is working” and he can “give everyone the peace of mind that there is a better future for them and their families”.
However, a new poll conducted this week for this paper by pollsters We Think found that 73% of all those surveyed do not agree that the Prime Minister's plan is working, with even one-in-three Conservative voters disagreeing with his claim.
The poll also suggests that voters have little faith in the ability of the Prime Minister to provide the “better future” for them and their families that he promised this morning.
Asked which of the two main parties would be most likely to make them personally financially better off, just 26% of those surveyed picked the Conservatives, compared to 48% who picked Labour instead.
Both Sunak and Starmer Seen as Flip-Floppers
The findings come after a tumultuous week for the Labour Party following revelations about antisemitic comments made by its candidate in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. Keir Starmer was accused of failing to act quickly enough in the wake of the revelations, before ultimately disowning his candidate.
However, while the Conservatives have sought to use the row as further evidence that Starmer is a “flip-flopper”, our poll reveals that voters are actually marginally more likely to see the Prime Minister in these terms than the Labour leader.
Asked whether they saw Sunak as more of a flip-flopper that decisive, 64% of voters picked the former over the latter. This is actually slightly more than the 61% who said the same of the Labour leader.
Voters were more split on the subject of Starmer’s decision to abandon his £28 billion green growth plan, with 54% saying it was the right decision compared to 46% who disagreed.
Three Worst Prime Minister of Modern Times
We Think also asked for the public’s overall view of recent Prime Ministers since Margaret Thatcher and the findings suggest that voters’ are least enamoured with the most recent occupants of Downing Street.
Among all those surveyed Liz Truss came top with 34% saying she was the worst PM of all those listed, followed by Boris Johnson on 22% and Rishi Sunak on 13%. The three most recent PMs were followed by Thatcher on 10%, Tony Blair on 8%, Theresa May on 6%, Gordon Brown on 4% and David Cameron on 3%.
Asked which was the best of the listed Prime Ministers, Thatcher came top with 24%, followed by Tony Blair on 21%. However, despite being picked as the second worst prime minister, Boris Johnson was also listed as the overall third best by those surveyed, showing how polarised opinions are about the former PM.