Without Reservation

When Hannah Spencer arrives at Westminster on Monday, then will Keir Starmer know who she was? His letter to all Labour MPs does not mention her. It names three people, Angeliki Stogia once, Zack Polanksi once, and George Galloway three times.

Apparently, "The Greens were able to capitalise on an endorsement from George Galloway to win over enough voters to push them over the line." Labour went into the by-election 13,413 votes ahead of Reform UK. It came out of it 1213 votes behind Reform, and 5615 behind the Greens. That was quite some capitalisation on an endorsement from a 71-year-old on the other side of the world. It also explains George and Gayatri's arrest at gunpoint, which has led them to leave the country for the safety of their children. Andy Burnham would have won Gorton and Denton. Except against George. See them both at Makerfield?

George now says that the Greens therefore owe the Workers Party a clear run in the three constituencies where it came second last time, as well as wherever it had councillors by the time of the next General Election. That is complicated by the fact that it has a councillor in Gorton and Denton, but more broadly, if the Prime Minister is to be taken seriously, then it is asking for too little. The Workers Party and the closely allied Independent Left, not least since Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Spencer, deserve clear runs wherever they were either first or second in 2024, and wherever they had councillors in 2029.

Starmer does not really do dignity, but even blaming George manages to maintain more of it than the idea that Muslim women who had been all ready to vote for Matt Goodwin were coerced out of doing so by their husbands who instead  insisted on a white woman with a gay Jewish Leader. "My husband deals with that" is one of those things which women say to men when they want us to go away. Sam Coates must have had it before, and he must have known that a woman reporter would have elicited a very different response.

Hardly mentioned is that the Conservatives dropped from 2,888 to 706 and lost their deposit. But if Muslims were integrated when they voted Labour yet are sectarian now that they do not, then why not anyone else who got uppity? Why not Hindus who stopped voting Conservative? In 2024, the Conservatives' only gain was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Don't go off the reservation, Indians. If Muslims need to know their place, then so do Hindus. So do Jews. So does everyone. But the Muslims are clearly ignoring that nonsense, as must we all. For a start, the result at Gorton and Denton has left Starmer with no political capital to subject us to digital ID and to live facial recognition, or to take away our rights to trial by jury and to appeal from the Magistrates' Court to the Crown Court, or to go to war with Iran.

False Flags and Red Paint

Paul Knaggs gets it, of course:

Does the British state truly lack the capacity to protect a twelve-foot bronze icon in the most watched square mile on earth, or does it simply find the alternative more politically useful?

Shortly after 4:00 a.m. on Friday, 27 February 2026, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was found dripping in red paint. The slogans were unambiguous: “Zionist war criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Globalise the Intifada,” “Never Again is Now.” the fourth face of the plinth was tagged in Dutch: “Groeten uit Den Haag”, Greetings from The Hague.

That last line is not incidental. The Hague is the seat of the International Criminal Court, which in November 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity in Gaza. It is the ICC’s city. The message was pointed, knowing, and international in scope.

By dawn, the Metropolitan Police had arrested a 38-year-old Dutch national at the scene. He had already published a pre-recorded, seven-part Instagram statement under the name Olax Outis, a deliberate pseudonym. In Homer’s Odyssey, Outis means “Nobody”: it is the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops to escape without being identified.

The man chose the alias of someone who disappears. Instead, he walked directly into arrest.

The Dutch group Free the Filton 24 NL claimed responsibility. The reference is to the 24 Palestine Action activists charged over a break-in at an Elbit Systems weapons facility in Filton, near Bristol, in August 2024. Elbit is Israel’s largest arms manufacturer. The activists destroyed drone components they believed were being used in Gaza.

The Question of Timing 

Palestine Action activists Jordan Devlin, Charlotte Head, Zoe Rogers, Samuel Corner, Leona Kamio and Fatema Zainab Rajwani pose for the camera the night before they smashed up an Elbit arms factory in August 2024. 

Here is the detail your morning television did not dwell upon: nine days before the Churchill vandalism, on 18 February 2026, a jury at Woolwich Crown Court acquitted the first six Filton defendants, the “Filton 6” of every charge put to them, including aggravated burglary, which carried a potential life sentence. They had admitted destroying the drones. The jury acquitted them anyway.

In the same fortnight, the High Court ruled that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful. The state’s entire legal architecture, built to crush this movement, was collapsing in open court. Government ministers were furious. The Crown Prosecution Service, within days, announced it would seek a retrial.

And then, nine days after that acquittal, a Dutch activist in a red boiler suit with “I Support Palestine Action” written across his back in large letters walked up to the most photographed monument in Britain and spent an extended period painting it, before being arrested in under two minutes.

We are not asserting the Home Office handed him the paint. We are asking why the door was left open long enough to get a result.

The Panopticon’s Convenient Blind Spot 

Parliament Square is ringed by some of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. The Metropolitan Police’s “ring of steel” around Parliament is a point of institutional pride. The Met states its officers were “on scene within two minutes of being alerted.” Two minutes. Yet the man completed what appears to be an extensive, multi-sided mural before a single officer intercepted him.

The question is not whether the police can respond. Clearly, they can. The question is why pre-emptive monitoring, routine in this specific location, did not flag a man in deep red overalls approaching a Category A monument at 4:00 a.m.

There are three possible answers. The first is institutional incompetence, which those who built the surveillance state around Westminster will find it difficult to argue with a straight face. The second is that the cameras saw, the system logged, and a decision was made to let the act complete itself. The third the most structurally important, is that it does not matter which of the first two is true.

False Flags and Red Paint 

The charge filed is “racially aggravated criminal damage.” This is not a coincidence of phrasing. It is a legal instrument. The “Zionist war criminal” slogan triggers the racial aggravation element; “Globalise the Intifada”, which both the Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police declared a chargeable offence in December 2025, appears on the plinth as if placed for the purpose. 

This man did not merely vandalise a statue. He gift-wrapped a prosecution, a news cycle, and a pretext.

The Home Office called Churchill “a figure of great national pride.” Within hours, the Jewish Leadership Council called the act “disgusting.” The Board of Deputies invoked the Holocaust. Political figures across the spectrum rushed to condemn Palestinian solidarity protesters as a whole, not the individual, not the act, but the movement.

Nine days after the movement had won in court, it was back in the dock of public opinion.

The Verdict 

We are not in the business of conspiracy for its own sake. We are in the business of structural analysis, and the structure here is clear. Whether this individual acted from pure moral conviction, whether he was a “useful idiot” for forces he could not see, or whether the state’s security apparatus made a very deliberate choice about what it would and would not stop, the result is identical.

The paint dries. The arrest is made. The Filton acquittals are buried beneath outrage about Churchill. The High Court’s ruling on Palestine Action is crowded out by photographs of a defaced monument. The government, losing the legal argument, wins the emotional one.

It is not quite the burning of the Reichstag. But it does not need to be. The modern state has learned subtlety. It no longer needs to burn buildings. It needs only to leave a door ajar and wait for someone filled with the righteous passion of indignation or reckless enough to walk through it.

Greetings from The Hague, indeed. The question is whether the message arrived, or whether it was simply repainted into something more useful to those who were already watching.

Not Conducive To The Public Good

I know all the problems with Searchlight, but this, now this is a story:

Restore Britain has admitted a high‑profile American white supremacist as a member, despite the fact he is banned from entering the UK for his extremist views.

Jared Taylor, founder of the neo‑nazi‑aligned American Renaissance, announced on X that he had successfully joined the party.

Banned from Britain

He posted: “I just joined Restore Britain. Apparently you can become a party member without being a British citizen. You can be a member even if you are banned from Britain, as I am!”

His declaration came as Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe claimed the party had surpassed 90,000 members and was on track to reach 100,000 within two weeks of its launch.

Taylor was excluded from the UK in 2015 due to his promotion of neo-nazi views and his longstanding advocacy of white supremacy. The Home Office at the time described his presence in the country as “not conducive to the public good”. 

Back route

Since then, however, he entered the country last year to speak at the Patriotic Alternative annual conference, travelling the ‘back route’ from Ireland.

Despite Searchlight writing that he was making the trip, the Home Office appeared to make no move to find and deport him while he was here.

Then we described in November how he now appeared to be able to travel freely in Europe despite being banned from entering the Schengen area in 2019.

Extensive ties

His organisation, American Renaissance, has for decades acted as a hub for the US far right, hosting conferences attended by neo‑nazis, Ku Klux Klan figures and European identitarian activists.

Taylor himself has repeatedly argued that Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, a claim rooted in discredited eugenics.

Searchlight has previously documented Taylor’s extensive ties to the British far right. He has collaborated with UK extremists, published their work, and platformed them at American Renaissance events.

His writings have circulated widely among British white nationalists, and in the past he has maintained contact with activists linked to the BNP, the London Forum and other hard‑right networks.

More recently, he has been closely linked with Patriotic Alternative, and spoke at their conference last October, along with another restore Britain member, Steve Laws, who is now a leading voice in the ‘Rupert Lowe is our leader’ neo-nazi faction on the far right.

Joining Restore shows how closely Taylor now likes to associate with the young neo-nazi online scene including the likes of Steve Laws.

Flood of nazis

Restore Britain’s decision to allow non‑citizens – including, it appears, individuals barred from entering the country – to join the party raises further questions about the flood of neo-nazis, extreme racists and holocaust deniers into its ranks.

Taylor’s public celebration of his membership will put more pressure on Rupert Lowe, who is already facing the dilemma of what to do about the likes of outright fascists and neo-nazis like Homeland Party refugees Steve Laws, Callum Barker and ‘Zoomer Historian’ Sam Wilkes, given that he has previously criticised Nigel Farage for vetting Reform candidates and members.

Open War

Electoral communications in English and which appealed specifically to Christian solidarity ought to feature the bogeymen of Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi, but each of those is more ambivalent towards Muslims, and towards the most hardline Islamists at that, be that Netanyahu towards the Gulf despots, or Modi towards the Taliban.

Just as Modi will not extradite Sheikh Hasina, the convicted war criminal and aunt of the fugitive Tulip Siddiq MP, so he has used the Taliban to take colonial possession of Afghanistan, the better to squeeze Pakistan. The Durand Line is as meaningless as the Sykes-Picot Line. The P in Pakistan is Punjab, the a is Afghania, the k is Kashmir, the i was added "for ease of pronunciation" (in other words, to sound more Urdu and less Punjabi), the s is Sindh, and the tan is Balochistan. But of those, only Sindh has ever been wholly in Pakistan. Part of Bolchistan is in Afghanistan, while rather more of it is in Iran.

And Afghania is the Pashtun homeland. Most of its area is in Afghanistan, but there remain two and a half times as many Pashtuns in Pakistan, which does not see itself as meddling in Afghanistan. Rather, Pakistan sees its present territory as whatever could be won and held in 1947. Leaving enormous unfinished business in Kashmir, in Punjab, in Balochistan, and in Afghania. It is fundamental to Pakistan that Amritsar, Srinagar, Zahedan and Kandahar and are all naturally and rightfully Pakistani cities. To get the whole of Afghania, then Pakistan would take the whole of Afghanistan. And to get the whole of Afghania, then the Taliban would take the whole of the country where they were ṭālibān, Pakistan. But that would bring its own complications with India. "Keep a bit of India," said Winston Churchill. But it was the Attlee Government that did it. That Government's foreign policy record was rarely as admirable as its record in domestic policy.

The Muslim League initially opposed independence altogether, and it was duly cultivated by the same British authorities that had directly created the Muslim Brotherhood in order to oppose Egyptian independence. The Brotherhood has enjoyed good Foreign Office contacts ever since, and for most of the period since 1947 Britain has at least broadly sided with Pakistan. After all, the British military top brass had enthusiastically supported the creation of Pakistan as a seat for British military bases, and not least for new airbases, in strategically the most important part of the Subcontinent, right where the Great Game had been played out in the nineteenth century.

Pakistan was the first state ever to have been founded specifically for the sake of Islam, and it was hoped that it would become the focus of global Muslim allegiance and aspiration, all the while within the British Commonwealth and retaining the British monarch as Head of State. Pakistan retained the monarchy longer than India, so that, in her time, the late Queen was Queen of Pakistan, having sworn at her Coronation to govern its people (and, indeed, those of apartheid South Africa) "according to their respective laws and customs".

The scholars at Deoband had opposed Partition, arguing that the idea of a "Muslim nation" in India was contrary to the universal mission of Islam. But Partition severed the Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan from the influence of Deoband itself, making them prey to the Pakistani Army in its role of reinforcing the most hardline definition of the country's Islamic identity in order to keep the feud with India going, and thus consolidate the power of the Army. That suited the Americans in the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, just as it had suited the British in earlier times, and just as it had suited them both when the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Administration had enthusiastically supported the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq.

Darul Uloom Deoband, though, is still there, surrounded by Hindus. Nearly 80 years after Partition, the "Muslim nation" is divided almost equally among three countries. Bengal was not even mentioned in the acronym that gave rise to the name of Pakistan, but East Bengal had to be included initially on the balance of populations. No one ever expected all of India's Muslims to move to Pakistan. Indeed, that would have been impossible to manage. But neither of those things was at all germane to Britain's support for its creation.

But No Cigar

As soon as the polls closed at Gorton and Denton, an organisation of which no one had ever heard complained of a practice of which no one had ever heard, and which on the figures cited would have made no difference to this result even if it had really been going on. Just as “Democracy Volunteers” materialised out of thin air seconds after 10 o’clock last night, so too did “family voting”, a new one on the rest of us, and a term that does not occur in the legislation. Nor does the definition of it, “Where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting.” There is an offence only where there is influence over someone else’s vote. And that should have been reported at the time.

Also in the early hours of this morning, the same forces behind that clump of astroturf staged a false flag attack both to discredit that result, and to assist the Government’s appeal against the ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action had been unlawful. Like Marinus van der Lubbe, Olax Outis is Dutch. In the Netherlands, he has repeatedly asked the authorities to euthanise him. He has previously been active in Extinction Rebellion. His vulnerability to the spooks is written all over him, and its source is equally obvious, mirroring the fact that, in relation to the attack on Manchester Central Mosque, Darren Connor has been charged, not only with possession of an offensive weapon, but also with possession of a Class B drug. Guess which one.

As to who might wish to deface a statue of Winston Churchill, the American Old Right has never had much, if any, time for him, but nor did the British New Right when it was still New. Andrew Roberts devoted much of Eminent Churchillians to criticising Churchill’s Indian Summer Premiership of 1951 to 1955 as a period of betrayal on immigration and on relations with the trade unions, by a Government with scarcely a proper Tory in it, effectively a continuation of the Wartime Coalition. Rightly or wrongly, that was the view of the intellectual founders of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. Great Contemporaries was reissued in 2024.

In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini, whom he had called “the greatest living legislator”. Gibraltar is still under British sovereignty only because Labour won the 1945 Election. After Franco had refused to let Hitler use Spain in order to invade Gibraltar and thus seize control of the Strait, Churchill had promised him Gibraltar once the War was safely won. That would have been just another colonial transfer in those days. But Churchill lost at the ballot box. In the meantime, over one thousand Spanish Republicans had fought the Second World War in the British Army. What do Churchill’s noisiest partisans think of that? It ranks with last September, when Konstantin Malofeev and Aleksandr Dugin played host to the Falange Española de las JONS, annual wreath-layers in memory of the Blue Legion.

So much for those who would use Churchill to make the case for continued support of the Ukraine of Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Brigade, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, the Kraken Regiment, and all the rest of them, including the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps. The Ukraine that in Ternopil  has named a football stadium after Roman Shukhevych, on a street named after Stepan Bandera. The Ukraine of Andriy Biletsky, to whom “the mission of Ukraine is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen”. The Ukraine of Pavlo Lapshyn, who is still in His Majesty’s Prison, and who will be there for decades yet, because of his 2013 murder of 82-year-old Mohammed Saleem in Birmingham. Lapshyn went on to put bombs outside three mosques in this country. He belonged, and presumably still does belong, to the Wotanjugend, which is closely allied to the Azov Brigade, being led by its “political ideologist”, Alexey Levkin. In August 2020, Lapshyn pleaded guilty to a count of preparing an explosive substance in his cell. 

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. The truth about the catastrophic humiliation at Dunkirk. The other one, at Singapore, for which Australians and New Zealanders have never forgiven Britain. The Lancastria. The men left behind in France. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War with Japan was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He borrowed the phrase “the Iron Curtain” from Goebbels and used it to mean exactly what Goebbels had meant by it. Broken by the War, the Soviet Union had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, or the Red Army would have carried on marching in the summer of 1945. Still less was the USSR willing or able to cross either the Atlantic or the Pacific.

The electorate was under no illusions while Churchill was still alive. His image was booed and hissed when it appeared on newsreels. He led the Conservative Party into three General Elections, he lost the first two, and he only returned to office on the third occasion with the support of the National Liberals, having lost the popular vote. In the course of that Parliament, he had to be removed by his own party. It comfortably won the subsequent General Election. We have not forgotten the truth about him in the old mining areas. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought. Churchill coined the nickname “Uncle Joe” for Stalin.

Churchill presided over the famine in Bengal. His views on race shocked his younger colleagues even in the Conservative Party of the 1950s. He wanted to transport the Jews to Palestine, since he saw them as not really British. Having deployed the Black and Tans to Ireland, he redeployed them to Palestine in that Zionist cause. The Zionists later expressed their gratitude by plotting to kill him and by murdering his friend, Lord Moyne, as well as sending letter-bombs to the White House of his ally, Harry S. Truman. In the meantime, they had contracted the Haavara Agreement, fought against Britain throughout the Second World War, allied with Fascist Italy, twice sought an alliance with Nazi Germany on the grounds that it was a lesser evil than Britain, hanged the boobytrapped bodies of Sergeants Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice and photographed them, and bombed the King David Hotel. By contrast, before anyone brings him up, Haj Amin al-Husseini was holed up in Berlin with no practical influence in the Middle East, being instead a kind of mascot for the recruitment of Balkan, Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims into the predecessor organisations of those which now controlled Ukraine and of those for which the New Right campaigned during the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In such circles, the great cause of the moment is withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. Yet in May 1948, when the pompously self-styled Congress of Europe assembled in the Hall of Knights in The Hague, then it was Churchill who dubbed “the Voice of Europe” that assembly of politicians who had recently been defeated at the polls, of the representatives of Royal and Noble Houses that had fairly recently been dispossessed at least in political terms, of the likes of Churchill who fell into both categories, and of people whose lives’ work was trying to delude themselves that so did they. In the name of the order that had held sway for a century between the defeat of Napoleon and the First World War, their aim was very explicitly to check the social democracy that was sweeping Western Europe at the time. The material that they produced had that intention, and it has had that effect. It was written into British domestic law by Tony Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement.

The famous dipping of the cranes for Churchill’s coffin occurred only because the London dockers, who despised him, had been paid to do it. Churchill’s cult seems to have begun only once he was dead, or at least so old as to have been politically as good as dead. It never translated into votes. But it is equally true that once the Attlee Government had a record on which to be judged, then it was barely reelected in 1950, and it although it did win the popular vote, it lost office in 1951. For 74 years and counting, the Labour Party has dined out on a mere six years that did not impress the electorate at the time. If Churchill and Attlee were the twin giants of the Golden Age, then that was lost on the voters who lived through it, and who did not think much of either of them.

Sour Charity

Imran Mulla writes:

The UK’s Charity Commission has found “mismanagement” in the administration of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) over a statement attacking the Labour government for a partial arms embargo on Israel.

The CAA is a UK-based charity that describes itself as combating antisemitism through advocacy, legal action and public awareness efforts.

It has faced controversy over allegations that it conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, raising concerns about its impact on political debate regarding Palestinian rights.

In November 2024, The Guardian reported that the regulator was assessing a statement made that September by the CAA in which it criticised the UK government’s decision to suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel as “obscene”.

The statement, apparently since withdrawn from the CAA’s website, said the “British government is broadcasting that western allies should not be supplying Israel with the arms that it needs to fight to save the hostages and defeat Hamas. This is obscene.” 

The regulator’s review followed a complaint in October by Labour MP and former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who accused the CAA of engaging in “highly political and contentious public attacks on the government and individual government ministers”.

McDonnell told Middle East Eye on Thursday: “I have been worried about the activities of the CAA for some time and so I am pleased that the Charity Commission has responded to some of my concerns and taken action against them.

“I am hoping that any others who are offended by this organisation’s behaviour refer their concerns to the Charity Commission.”

In a letter to McDonnell on 29 September last year, not previously reported on and seen by MEE, the Charity Commission said it had “determined that it is appropriate to provide advice and guidance to ensure that the trustees comply with their legal duties and responsibilities and the law”.

The regulator said it was not clear that all the content within the CAA statement “furthered the charity’s objectives” and that the charity’s trustees had not provided “sufficient documentation” relating to the decision to publish the statement.

“The Commission views failing to retain records relating to this decision making as mismanagement in the administration of this charity,” it said.

The regulator said it had issued the CAA with a “remedial Action Plan” requiring trustees to “improve the administration, management and governance of the CAA in light of the concerns raised and our findings set out above”.

Further complaints

The Charity Commission also told McDonnell it had “received further complaints about the charity that were unrelated to your complaint about the article [statement].

“This included a second complaint you shared in April 2025 regarding the manner in which complaints were submitted by the charity about Dr Campbell to his employer Goldsmiths University in 2023.”

In August 2023, Goldsmiths, University of London launched an investigation into Ray Campbell after receiving a complaint from the CAA accusing him of posting antisemitic content on social media.

Campbell, an associate lecturer in theatre and performance at Goldsmiths and a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, was suspended for five months during the investigation.

But in February 2025, Goldsmiths dismissed all allegations against Campbell and apologised, acknowledging that the five-month investigation caused him distress.

The regulator said it had “assessed the additional concerns raised about the charity as part of our case to ensure all the matters of concern were considered”.

MEE also understands that this week McDonnell raised fresh concerns with the Commission over a recent statement by the CAA attacking the High Court for ruling that the government’s ban on direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation was “disproportionate”.

The CAA had said: “It is appalling that a court would be prepared to decriminalise an organisation whose sole purpose is to engage in criminal activity. It demonstrates that law and order has not only broken down in this country, but that the criminal justice system is not fit for purpose.”

It added: “This shocking verdict is only the latest in a long series of injustices that the legal system has permitted against British Jews.”

Jewish Voice for Liberation

In April 2020, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), which last year changed its name to Jewish Voice for Liberation, filed a complaint with the Charity Commission against the CAA, accusing it of acting as a “highly politically partisan organisation which does not deserve charitable status”.

In September 2021, the CAA described JVL as an “antisemitism-denial group” and a “sham Jewish representative organisation” – a characterisation JVL strongly condemned.

JVL submitted another complaint in April 2022 to the Charity Commission, which then said in January 2023 that it was “assessing concerns” about the CAA and that it had opened a regulatory compliance case against the organisation.

In May 2024, the Charity Commission closed the case, saying that JVL “has not demonstrated it has the required legal standing to make such an application”.

But in November, it emerged the regulator was assessing a statement made in September by the CAA criticising the Labour government’s decision to suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel.

Jenny Manson, co-chair of JVL, told MEE: “We at JVL are pleased that the Charity Commission is taking some action against the CAA and it is good to see them explaining their recent decisions to John McDonnell.”

Manson said she and McDonnell had benefited from the advice of British Jewish lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, the founder of Bindman & Partners, who died last November.

McDonnell quoted Bindman’s opinion in his initial letter to the Charity Commission in 2024. He said: “CAA is, according to its website, ‘a volunteer-led charity dedicated to exposing and countering antisemitism through education and zero-tolerant enforcement of the law’.

“There being no evidence of antisemitism by the UK government or others targeted by CAA, the Charity Commission should consider afresh whether the actions of CAA violate its charitable status.”

MEE contacted the CAA for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

How Lowe Can They Go?

On Wednesday, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon switched his endorsement at Gorton and Denton from Reform UK to Advance UK, which yesterday took fewer votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party, so the Outer Right is clearly coming to the end of its latest attempt to enter the parliamentary process. But it will still be active in other ways, as Katherine Denkinson writes:

A well-known white supremacist linked to a neo-Nazi group flagged by the UK Government as a “serious concern” has been volunteering for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain movement since last November, Byline Times can reveal.

Chris Mitchell, the former East of England organiser for the antisemitic far-right group Patriotic Alternative (PA) and a self-described “Nazi-Buddhist”, has been recruiting fellow ethno-nationalists to join Restore Britain since becoming a member of ‘Great Yarmouth First’ – Restore Britain’s flagship local organisation – last November.

His social media profiles have been used to promote his work delivering party leaflets. On Facebook, he has tagged Rupert Lowe in multiple posts, and Lowe has responded and praised him in the comments.

At an outdoor conference held by Great Yarmouth First in mid-February, Mitchell posed for a selfie with Lowe and shared the image on both his Facebook page and Telegram channel. Mitchell claimed he had asked Lowe whether his extreme nationalist views would be a problem and that Lowe told him they would not, as it was a matter of “free speech”. Byline Times reached out to Lowe to verify this claim, but he has not responded.

Neo-Nazi organiser Chris Mitchell (left) with Restore Britain founder Rupert Lowe (right)

Lowe announced in February that he would register Restore Britain as a political party. On X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), the MP has declared that the word “racist” has “lost all meaning” and insisted there is “NOTHING neo-Nazi” about wanting the mass deportation of “illegal immigrants”.

The party’s stated policies include “low tax, small government, secure borders, national pride, Christian principles, free speech and direct democracy”.

The announcement has divided the right. Many who have backed Reform UK see Restore Britain as splitting the vote, while others – including several former Reform councillors – have joined Lowe. But the movement has also attracted several high-profile figures from the organised far right, who see Lowe as their best prospect for mainstreaming ethno-nationalist beliefs.

Mitchell’s White Supremacist Record

Mitchell makes no secret of his political views. On Facebook, he has posted the “14 words” – the most widely used white supremacist slogan in the world, coined by a convicted far-right terrorist, declared that diversity means “white genocide”, and claimed that “Jewish control over our people WILL be coming to an end.”

His followers and supporters, many of whom have ‘liked’ these posts, include other white nationalists, members of the neo-Nazi Patriotic Alternative, and his own mother.

Screenshot from Chris Mitchell’s Facebook posting the 14 words

On 1 December 2025, Mitchell reposted an announcement by Lowe regarding Great Yarmouth First, writing: “… finally something we desperately needed. Sign me up!” Rupert Lowe responded to him directly: “Welcome to the team mate!”.

The Telegram Channel

Mitchell recently renamed his Telegram channel – previously called Patriotic Chats – to Restore Britain War Room. Its avatar was changed to an image of Rupert Lowe pushing a wheelbarrow full of guns, superimposed on a picture of Auschwitz with a sonnenrad – a symbol associated with Nazism – rising behind it.

The group has approximately 160 members, including various members of the neo-Nazi PA as well as former soldier Alek Yerbury, a former PA member who left to found the fascist National Rebirth Party.

Screenshot from Chris Mitchell’s Telegram chat

While Yerbury has criticised Restore Britain for not being extreme enough on Israel, other group members have expressed support for the party, writing that they should back Restore to “get wider reach” and “representation”.

Plans for ‘Groyping’

Elsewhere in the channel, members have made and posted memes depicting Rupert Lowe dressed as Hitler and suggested they resume “groyping” – a tactic popularised by US far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, who along with his followers attended US conservative conferences to present nationalist arguments. The aim is to draw organisers into debates that end up promoting ethno-nationalism.

In the UK, groups such as PA have adopted the same approach on radio station phone-ins and in online comment sections. Mitchell is well-known as a groyper and has posted examples on his TikTok channel, including a secret recording of him asking Rupert Lowe at a 2024 Reform UK conference what his plans were to prevent white Britons from becoming a minority.

Lowe did not answer the question directly but said he “feels for” Mitchell because his home town of Birmingham is “in bad shape”.

On Telegram last week, Mitchell advised followers that Restore supporters “have to hit Reform events and get back on the radio stations… promoting Restore Britain”.

Patriotic Alternative Endorsement

Mark Collett, founder of Patriotic Alternative, told far-right channel Unity News Network that he “really likes” Lowe and believes him to be the “greatest sitting MP since World War Two, including Enoch Powell”.

Repeating the long-held nationalist belief that white people will “be a minority” in the UK within their lifetimes, Collett added that the formation of Restore Britain had created “a lot of happy people” among his friends and a “renewed positivity that maybe we can mainstream our message”.

A Telegram post in which Collett urged members of PA to join Restore Britain was subsequently shared by Mitchell on the Restore Britain War Room channel.

Lowe’s Links to the BasketWeavers Network

Restore Britain has also been promoted online by Mark Houghton and Luca Johnson of the Lotus Eaters podcast. Fellow Lotus Eaters contributor Charlie Downes has been on the campaign trail with Rupert Lowe promoting the party.

Both Johnson and Houghton are members of the BasketWeavers, a secretive far-right group founded by Houghton.

Exposed after a year-long undercover investigation by Hope Not Hate [but don’t let that put you off], the BasketWeavers were revealed as white supremacists dedicated to building a whites-only society and driven by antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Their members include PA contributor Michael Wright (also known as Morgoth), who has recently published a lengthy blog post declaring his own support for Restore Britain.

The growing presence of white nationalists in Restore Britain appears to have had little effect on other supporters of the party. While Lowe has responded to allegations of white supremacist ties with legal threats, his more extreme supporters see him as a way to unite the far right.

Rupert Lowe did not respond to request for comment.