Keir Starmer's Communist Righthand Man

Last week, the Labour government’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, delivered a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, and used the occasion to compare his political opponents Nazis.

Allow me to explain how our policy of Progressive Realism meets this moment. And the role the law, and the international rules-based order plays in our approach. Because our approach is a rejection of the siren song, that can sadly, now be heard in the Palace of Westminster, and in some spectrums of the media, that Britain abandons the constraints of international law in favour of raw power.

The irony is that Hermer’s reference to Carl Schmitt proved the infamous German jurist’s key insights are correct: that there is no such thing as a neutral institution, and that the fundamental Political distinction is between Friends and Enemies.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. […]

Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence. [...]

the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.

And this is exactly the existential Political distinction that Labour and Lord Hermer engage in when comparing their opponents to the Nazis.

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You can read my extensive analysis of Hermer’s speech, and the vindication of Carl Schmitt, here on Substack:

With Schmitt’s name now on the lips of the Labour government, you can put another tally mark up on the board for the impact that the Online Right has had on politics.

Who does Lord Hermer consider political Friends? Laurie Wastell of the Free Speech Union has uncovered his longstanding association with communist groups, such as Searchlight Magazine and HOPE Not Hate:

in 1996, three years after being called to the bar, Hermer was being recommended to join the magazine’s Management Committee. The man who put his name forward was Gerry Gable, Searchlight‘s long-serving Editor, who once stood for election for the Communist Party and in the 1980s produced research for a BBC Panorama documentary that falsely alleged that two Conservative Party members were secret Nazis – after which the BBC lost a libel trial and had to pay damages.

Later, minutes show Lord Hermer missing a meeting in June 1999 and attending one in November that year – alongside a certain Nick Lowles, who was Co-Editor and then Editor of Searchlight between 1999-2011 and in 2004 founded Hope Not Hate.

[Hermer] was still part of Searchlight Research Associates as late as 2016.

[When] Tommy Robinson courted a contempt of court charge at a rally in Trafalgar Square by playing his film SILENCED, a documentary about his legal battle with a Syrian schoolboy whom he was convicted of having libelled. It was Lowles, through Hope Not Hate, who informed the Attorney General’s office that the film had been played at the protest. A contempt of court charge was subsequently brought.

HOPE Not Hate’s Head of Intelligence, Matthew Collins, was a former member of neo-Nazi organisations including the British National Party and Combat 18, before joining the British Communist Party.

At an event in 2013, Collins was filmed saying “Comrades, brothers and sisters, HopeNotHate.co.uk, you are our Red Army!”, standing in front of a Soviet Flag. As mentioned in one of my previous essays, Stalin’s Red Army were responsible for the rape and murder of thousands of civilians in Germany and Poland during the Second World War.

Given his trading in one brand of genocidal socialism for another, I don’t think Collins is a good judge of what constitutes “fascism” or “extremism”.

If any organization had employed a member of the British Union of Fascists, HOPE Not Hate would be quick to condemn them as a Nazi-sympathizing outfit. By their own standards, HOPE Not Hate can be described as a communist outfit — one funded, protected, and promoted by the British state.

A number of Labour MPs also remain trustees of HOPE Not Hate, including Government Whip Anna Turley, Antonia Bance, Gurinder Singh Josan, and Sarah Owen. Owen is vice-chairman of the group’s Parliamentary Group. Labour Baroness Ruth Smeeth was, until July, a director of HOPE Not Hate. Were a Conservative or Reform MP to set up a Parliamentary Group with Nazi sympathisers, they would quite rightly be removed from the Commons. But the same standard doesn’t apply to communists like HOPE Not Hate.

But I suppose this explains why Nick Lowles, Harry Shukman, and the Home Office’s favoured attack-dog have avoided having charges brought against them for spreading falsehoods online which have led to violence during the Southport protests, and for using false government documents to entrap subjects of their bore of a documentary.

I covered HOPE Not Hate’s conspicuous ability to evade the law before, on Substack:

I noted their curious ability to evade consequences on

Dan Wootton

’s show last week:

As the Schmittean maxim goes, autoritas, non veritas, facit legem — authority, not truth, makes law.

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