Did HOPE Not Hate Break the Law in Their New Documentary?

How did Harry Shukman procure a fake passport to pose as "Christopher Charles Morton" when filming the subjects of Undercover: Exposing the Far Right?

On Monday the 21st of October, 2024, Channel 4 aired a new documentary by self-styled “antifascist” activist group, HOPE Not Hate, titled Undercover: Exposing the Far Right. It was appallingly boring, so if you’d rather get the fact-checked cliff notes version, I produced a thread on it on X, which you can read here.

During the process of filming the documentary, one of HOPE Not Hate’s employees, Harry Shukman, posed as alias “Christopher Charles Morton” to prospective targets. He attended Britain First events; posed as a donor to Simone & Malcolm Collins’ pronatalist efforts; and went to a sparsely-attended conference in Croatia, a rally in Poland, and dinner in Greece.

He did so with the assistance of this: a fake passport.

I have received permission to share this with you from one of the targets of HOPE Not Hate’s series of smear pieces on their blog. I have redacted information, in case this was a fake, procured via illicit means, and which therefore shares information with someone else’s real government-issued documentation.

But the very existence of this document raises a lot of questions.

1. How did HOPE Not Hate procure this convincing forgery of a government document?

2. During this documentary, Shukman travelled to Poland, Greece, and Croatia.

   Did he use this passport to do so?

3. Did HOPE Not Hate exchange money with a third party to produce this document?

   Would this constitute a crime under the Identity Documents Act 2010?

4. Or, did HOPE Not Hate have undisclosed assistance from a government department or intelligence agency in gaining this fake passport to deceive members of the public?

5. To date, none of the subjects of HOPE Not Hate's undercover investigation series have been charged with a crime. So, if there was state involvement here: what would be the justification for doing so?

I have reported this to the Met Police and Action Fraud. They have yet to respond. But I hope that the qualified authorities follow up on this and ask HOPE Not Hate these questions.

I covered this story on Wednesday’s episode of Tomlinson Talks on LotusEaters.com:

Your subscription ensures that my show continues, that the lights stay on at LotusEaters.com, and that I can continue to produce investigative reports like this.

Who is Harry Shukman?

Harry Shukman was a freelance journalist, with bylines in The Tab, The Times, and Unherd, before he joined HOPE Not Hate. The activist group had previously used his outlet, The Scout, as a source in an article on For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters. He, too, cited HOPE Not Hate’s head of research Matthew Collins in an article for his Substack, ‘The Fence’.

For those who don’t know who Matthew Collins is: he was a former member of the National Front, the British National Party, and Combat 18 — before trading one brand of genocidal socialism for another, and joining both the Communist Party of Britain and HOPE Not Hate.

This is according to Collins’ own Facebook posts, and footage of Collins at a meeting in 2013, praising the murderers and rapists of Stalin’s Red Army.

On Monday, before the film aired, Shukman was invited onto LBC, to be interviewed by James O’Brien. During the interview, Shukman claimed that a majority of both Prevent referrals and terrorism convictions in this country are for “the Far Right.”

Unsurprisingly, James O’Brien let this nugget of misinformation go unchallenged.

As my colleague Josh Ferme calculated, Islamic terror attacks account for 96.97% of terror-related fatalities since 2005. Given the fact that you cannot convict a successful suicide bomber, it’s very difficult to prosecute these perpetrators.

As for Shukman’s claims about Prevent referrals: William Shawcross wrote the following in his 2023 review of the Prevent programme.

‘It is clear that Prevent is out of kilter with the rest of the counter terrorism system, and the UK terrorism threat picture. Islamist extremism represents the primary terrorist threat to this country – consistently accounting for the majority of terrorist attack plots both carried out and thwarted by the intelligence services.[footnote 1] At present, 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations are Islamist while 10% are extreme right-wing. The fact that only 22% of Prevent referrals for the year 2020 to 2021 concerned Islamism suggests a loss of focus and failure to identify warning signs. This misalignment has been partly driven by a sharp uptick of ‘mixed, unclear, or unstable’ referrals, which constituted over half of Prevent referrals for the year 2020 to 2021. Mental health and neurodevelopmental issues, as well as personal and domestic difficulties are often factors in such referrals.’

‘It is worth restating that Islamist terrorism is currently the largest terrorist threat facing the United Kingdom. In the years since the 2017 Westminster Bridge attack, the vast majority of realised and foiled plots have been Islamist in nature. At present, 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations are Islamist while 10% are extreme right-wing.’

So, Shukman is factually wrong, and Prevent has neglected to monitor the predominant threat of Islamism because of an ideological obsession with a phantom “Far Right.”

One horrific case was the murder of Sir David Amess MP. As was detailed in a harrowing interview with his daughter Katie detailed in The Times this week:

Amess, who had been an MP in Essex for 38 years, was killed at his constituency surgery in a frenzied knife attack by Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old who ascribed his actions to the terrorist organisation Islamic State (Isis).

Ali had been reported to Prevent, the Home Office’s deradicalisation scheme, in 2014, but had only one meeting before his case was closed. In the years afterwards, in his bedroom in north London, he spiralled into a dark internet underworld, determined to plot a “lone wolf” attack and settling on killing an MP because members of parliament were “easy, accessible and numerous”. Amess was singled out for his voting record on Syria. […]

Ali, with a knife in his rucksack, was going to murder Amess in the name of Isis — a plan seven years in the making — expecting to be killed himself by police soon after and “martyred”.

Ali immediately confessed and the murder was designated a terrorist attack. “If I thought I’d done something wrong I wouldn’t have done it,” he told police. […]

In January 2015, when he was 18, Ali was visited by a Prevent officer, the first of two intended meetings. “I just knew to nod my head and say yes and they would leave me alone afterwards, and they did,” he said at the murder trial. The second meeting never happened and his case was closed in 2016, after which all involvement with police ceased. Until now, the public has not known why.

“The police told us they didn’t follow up with him due to an admin error,” said Katie. According to the coroner’s report this July, seen by The Sunday Times, in which he summarises the internal Prevent review, Ali’s six-month review of his case was “missed” and then a 12-month review revealed “nothing of concern”.

“He was reported. People were trying to help us. And so why was he allowed to just go on and do whatever he wanted for seven years? What happened to my dad should not have been an admin error,” said his daughter.

So, thanks to the advice of the likes of HOPE Not Hate, the UK Home Office has focused myopically on fighting a “Far Right” threat which (thankfully) has failed to materialise and claim lives at numbers anything like those by Islamic terrorists.

Their same brand of Blake Slate politics, which proposes that all wrongdoing by criminals is the fault of material inequalities, education, and prejudice by others is driving the Labour government’s decision to release thousands of violent offenders to make room for “Far Right” rioters like Peter Lynch: a 61-year-old grandfather serving two years and eight months for shouting at police officers during summer’s riots, who killed himself in prison.

The Home Office have been paying HOPE Not Hate’s bills for years. Thanks to reporting by Charlotte Gill and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, we know HOPE Not Hate received grants of £141,380 and £50,000 in 2019-2020. That’s the money of British taxpayers being spent on an activist organisation which smears law-abiding members of the public (like myself) as racists, anti-Semites, and “Far Right”.

Their film was produced with assistance from the British Film Institute — which receives ‘Government Grant in Aid’ from the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport and the Department for Education every year.

HOPE Not Hate also received payments of £240,000 (2022/2023), £275,000 (2019/2020), and £60,000 (2015/2016) from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation — a total of £585,000 in eight years. Between 2020 and 2023, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation itself received £1.36 million in government grants.

HOPE Not Hate received these subsidies as part of the Hamlyn Foundation’s Migration Fund: established to create “a UK network of young migrant leaders,” and a “network of leaders and organisations within towns who will respond to local needs and pressure points and share learning to enable rapid response to provocative elements.” The grants were subheaded “More and Better: Inclusive Towns”, and the “Hopeful Towns Network”. In other words, money was given to HOPE Not Hate to mobilise large crowds in towns and cities to counteract public opposition to mass immigration and multiculturalism.

Were HOPE Not Hate involved in the admitted “hoax” which led to antiracist activists on the front page of multiple newspapers during the Southport riots? I say “hoax”, because that’s what Nick Lowles himself admitted to spreading the day after “a hundred Far Right rallies” failed to materialise.

Curiously, Lowles has not been arrested, questioned, or charged for wasting police time, or for endangering those who showed up to counter-protest, expecting to meet mobs of violent “Far Right” hooligans.

Lowles was also not arrested when he also spread false information about “the Far Right” committing acid attacks on Muslim women in Middlesbrough during the civil unrest following the Southport Massacre in August.

Labour MP Josh Fenton-Glynn amplified this post.

Neither have been reprimanded for spreading false information online, despite this being cited by Muslim counterdemonstrators — on the same weekend that masked Muslim men in Birmingham slashed the tires on a Sky News van, attacked a pub, and lacerated a man’s liver — as the reason they showed up. In fact, Middlesbrough Police had to release a statement, saying this report was untrue, to quell online speculation and real-world outrage:

We are aware of commentary online regarding alleged acid attacks in Middlesbrough today.

Cleveland Police has not, to date, received any formal complaint from any victim or anyone on their behalf.

We did receive limited information from a third party earlier this evening regarding a possible incident in central Middlesbrough,

The caller was unfortunately unable to provide exact details of the location, nature of the incident, registration number of any vehicle, or description of any occupants, nevertheless officers did attend the area - with nothing being found and no victim coming forward.

Why has Lowles not been arrested and questioned for a potential breach of the Online Safety Act 2023, which reads:

PART 10 [:] Communications offences

False and threatening communications offences

179 False communications offence

(1)A person commits an offence if—

(a)the person sends a message (see section 182),

(b)the message conveys information that the person knows to be false,

(c)at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and

(d)the person has no reasonable excuse for sending the message.

What insulates Shukman and Lowles from consequences?

Do HOPE Not Hate Work With the Intelligence Services?

Some have alleged that HOPE Not Hate work with domestic and international intelligence agencies — MI5 and MI6.

My friend Charles Cornish-Dale, the man behind X account Raw Egg Nationalist, was doxxed by HOPE Not Hate earlier this year. He says that ‘I don’t think HOPE Not Hate turned up my identity on their own.’ As such, he sent a subject access request to HOPE Not Hate to procure all information it has about him. As a registered charity, they are meant to legally comply. HOPE Not Hate did not comply with the 28-day demand; so Charles sent an email to the Information Commissioner's Office, who ruled in his favour, and sent an email to HOPE Not Hate, telling them they have another 28 days to comply. They didn’t, and were subsequently informed that they had 14 days before being in breach of the law.

That was at the start of October. They still have not responded. They now have seven days to do so — as of last week.

In an essay for American Mind, Dale explained how he took a trip to his local farm shop one day, and the owner handed to him an email from Katherine Long of Business Insider, who was asking if someone matching his description, connected to the Raw Egg nationalist persona, shopped there. Not long after this, the HOPE Not Hate article (the “egg-spose”, as they called it) was published. Dale compares the two events, to discuss how disreputable journalists obfuscate information procured through illicit means — or through state contacts.

Like the Business Insider doxx that almost was, Hope Not Hate’s eggsposé is an obvious parallel construction. A parallel construction, if you don’t know, is what law enforcement and journalists do when they want to hide their sources. Let’s say you’re a journalist and you obtained a crucial piece of evidence by illegal means. Perhaps you contacted a farm-shop owner and got them to break data-protection laws and reveal customer data (even trying to solicit this is a crime, I might add). So what do you do? You make up a plausible story to explain how you got that evidence legally. An anonymous tip off, a social-media post of a distinctive-looking cat you were able to trace—anything. What’s great about parallel construction is that, with a decent amount of care, nobody can gainsay you, and, for the most part, if you’re the right person exposing the wrong person, nobody who matters will gainsay you anyway, because they’re just glad that nasty person got their comeuppance and don’t care how it happened. [...]

So how did Hope Not Hate find out who I am? [...]

How about the American or British government? How about both? I’m not joking. [...]

I looked a little deeper into Katherine Long. By which I mean, I went on her LinkedIn profile. Ivy League Grad. Check. Seven-month internship at the State Department. Check. USAID posting in Tajikistan. Check. Specialist in Central Asian languages (fluent in Farsi and Tajik). Check. I got no further with her than that, but it was enough to convince me that she is, at the very least, a suitable candidate for an intelligence contact in the media. Put another way, she glows. [...]

Then there’s Hope Not Hate, and again a little digging goes a long way. The group is ostensibly a charity, and therefore a non-governmental organization, but its links to the British government are no secret. Hope Note Hate receives significant amounts of money from the public purse. [...] In the trustees’ report for 2019, it states that in that year Hope Note Hate “briefed multiple departments in the Home Office on emerging trends in UK hate, as well as briefing the Home Affairs Committee and presented a keynote at a Home Office conference on online hate in Derby.” [...]

Jason Reza Jorjani has alleged Hope Not Hate is a direct front for British intelligence, at home and abroad (i.e. for MI5 and MI6). In 2017, Jorjani was caught in an undercover sting, in a New York bar, by a Swedish Antifa activist working for Hope Not Hate. Jorjani lost his teaching job at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and subsequently sued the university. He maintains that the sting was at the behest of British intelligence, after he left the Alt-Right Corporation in the immediate fallout after Charlottesville.

It’s a claim that demands a lot of evidence. I have attempted, in my capacity as a researcher, to investigate and interrogate what little that suggests connections between HOPE Not Hate — specifically Harry Shukman — and state intelligence services.

According to the fake CV provided by Shukman to the source which gave me the passport photo, his alias, “Christopher Morton”, graduated from the University of Manchester in 2013. However, the University of Manchester publish its graduations annually, and a Ctrl + F search brings up neither Morton nor Shukman’s names.

Shukman scrubbed his online presence shortly before posing as Morton. He had an Instagram account active as recent as June 2023, with the username @shukkers12 – https://www.instagram.com/shukkers12 – which has since been removed. A Facebook account, hshukman, and a Twitter/X account, @hshukman, has also been removed. (More on that later.)

But the remnants of his public profile show that Shukman graduated with an undergraduate degree from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, and an MA in Terrorism, Security and Society from King’s College, London.

On page 15 of the 2023 report, ‘CANARIES IN THE COALMINE: Building Resilience to Online Misinformation among Young People in the UK’, published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, his bio reads:

Harry Shukman is a freelance journalist and writes Scout, a blog about conspiracy theories and far-right extremism. He is a former news reporter at The Times and recently finished a master’s degree in Terrorism, Security and Society at King’s College London.

Just as with Katherine Long’s career history, Shukman’s background would make him a prime candidate for any agency interested in counterterrorism, overseas intelligence operations, and just about any foreign policy venture the British government has conducted in the aftermath of 9/11.

What’s curious is that his father, David Shukman, was employed at the BBC for a 38 year period — from 1983 to 2021. In 2002, while Diplomatic Correspondent for the BBC, David Shukman authored an inaccurate article which wrongly alleged a shareholder in a Congolese diamond mine, owned by Oryx Natural Resources, was the same individual as an al-Qaida associate jailed for his involvement in the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Africa. Oryx sued the BBC, with the case settled for a sum of >£500,000.

In a report in The Guardian, we learned that this false information was fed to David via a source who procured it from… MI6.

As BBC News celebrates its ratings boost in the wake of September 11, a troublesome hangover from the same terrible event is refusing to go away. The Oryx affair - the blunder that led to the incorrect identification of an African diamond mine shareholder as an al-Qaida fundraiser - is eating away at the consciences of news executives.

After the disastrous broadcast on October 31, the BBC sought to establish what went wrong. Now, having admitted the error, efforts are concentrated on minimising the extent of damages. The BBC has concluded that the affair was a catastrophic, but rare, failure of journalistic first principles rather than an endemic problem in the news division. A dramatic story, fed by murky secret service propaganda, provided the kind of scoop that was so desperately sought.

The report wrongly alleged that a shareholder in a Congolese diamond mine, owned by Oryx Natural Resources, was the same individual as an al-Qaida associate jailed for his involvement in the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Africa. No response was included in the report from Oryx. On the day of transmission, an email was sent asking for a comment; Oryx attempted, but failed, to make contact. The company could have disproved the BBC story.

One key question is why the BBC was so sure of its story. The basis of the report was supplied by Brian Johnson-Thomas, a freelance journalist - billed on screen as an intelligence expert - who is said to have good connections with the security services. It was taken on by respected diplomatic correspondent David Shukman, with the backing of editor Mark Popescu.

A theory is that Johnson-Thomas's MI6 sources were at least not questioned by Shukman's contacts in the Foreign Office. An interview with FO minister Peter Hain was included in the report, in which he explained the government's concerns that profits from "conflict diamonds" were being channelled to al-Qaida. While he did not mention Oryx, ministers were keen to underscore the global threat of terror to justify military action in Afghanistan.

The theory goes some way to explaining - if not excusing - the BBC's readiness to run its story without a response from Oryx. An investigation by Mark Damazer, deputy director of news, was recently concluded. The Guardian understands that his report does not lay blame: it was simply a fact-finding mission. But it is widely expected that Shukman and Popescu will eventually shoulder the responsibility.

So, Shukman’s father has sources with connections to MI6, and personally has sources within the foreign office. Was there anyone at either government department involved in Shukman procuring the false passport?

What’s even stranger is that his grandfather, Oxford University academic Harold Shukman, was an MI6 spy. According to his Wikipedia page, Harold was born in London to Jewish immigrants who left Tsarist Russia. He then developed a lifelong fixation with communism — conducting his PhD thesis at Oxford on the Polish socialist party, the Jewish Labour Bund, and publishing and translating numerous books on Soviet communism.

His son, David’s brother, Henry Shukman, wrote about his father in his book One Blade of Grass:

My father, a historian in Russian studies at Oxford University, was offered a fellowship in Helsinki and took his family with him.

From Helsinki, Russia was less than a day away by boat, across the Gulf of Finland. It was the Cold War, and when a message came through from Cambridge Circus that my father was to travel to Leningrad on urgent business, he didn’t hesitate. Although he was a quiet Oxford man, like many Russianists at that time he also did occasional work for “the Circus”—namely, MI6. He was a part-time spy.

Mum and Dad went together. They disappeared across the water into the Soviet wastes, leaving the kids in the care of a Finnish au pair.

So, Shukman has two generations of connections to MI6. This arouses suspicion — but does not prove the allegations made by others on the internet that HOPE Not Hate is an outfit for the intelligence services.

But Shukman isn’t the only HOPE Not Hate employee with intelligence connections. Labour Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, former MP Ruth Smeeth, was a director, of HOPE Not Hate Limited until recently, on 11 July 2024. (Just after the general election, when Labour became the ruling party.)

During the Wikileaks saga, it was revealed that a communiqué sent from the US embassy on April 24, 2009, marked ‘confidential’ and ‘not for foreign eyes’, listed Smeeth as of interest to US intelligence services:

“Ruth Smeeth (strictly protect) told us April 20 that Brown had intended to announce the elections on May 12, and hold them after a very short (matter of weeks) campaign season.”

The communiqué concerned rumours that then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown had planned to go to the country to announce a general election when Labour rose in the opinion polls after the G20 summit in London. It was called off after Damian McBride had sent emails to Labour aides containing unfounded allegations about the personal lives of senior Conservative MPs, and was forced to resign. Smeeth was the source of the intelligence. Why was this domestic matter of such high priority to American intelligence services? Is Smeeth still marked as an asset to “strictly protect”?

Although Smeeth is not on the board anymore, HOPE Not Hate is embedded into the Labour government. Government Whip Anna Turley is both a director and a member of its board of trustees. Labour MP and TUC communications director Antonia Bance is its campaigning organisation director. The chairman of its trustee board is newly elected Labour MP Gurinder Singh Josan. And Labour MP Sarah Owen is vice-chairman of the group’s Parliamentary Group. Made up only of Labour MPs. Owen invited HOPE Not Hate to Parliament at the height of the riots — when Nick Lowles was busy spreading misinformation that endangered lives.

We may never know the extent to which HOPE Not Hate receives government assistance in its continued efforts to defame members of the public.

I hope the relevant authorities will follow up on my reports, and provide answers as to how Shukman procured the fake passport.

As for Shukman? Well, he’s back on X — and he follows me.

I did ask him to comment on how he got the fake passport. He has yet to reply. Something tells me his handlers have told him to stay quiet.

It would be much better for the country as a whole if that vow of silence were to remain permanent.