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https://spectator.com/article/why-is-hope-not-hate-out-to-get-me/

So what, you might think. Hope Not Hate is hardly the only left-wing campaign group that masquerades as being above the political fray. But here’s the thing: in 2019-20, it received £141,380 of taxpayers’ money, handed to it by a Conservative government. Hold your horses, says Nick Lowles, the chief exec. That money was given to an organisation called Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust, a separate legal entity to Hope Not Hate Limited. Although you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow, because in 2022 the charity awarded a grant worth more than half a million to its namesake and a similar amount the following year. This prompted the Charity Commission to raise regulatory concerns, forcing the grant–giving arm to change its name to Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust and recruit three independent trustees.

I have a dog in this fight. A couple of weeks ago, Hope Not Hate called for my ‘association with Epstein’s circle’ to be ‘scrutinised’ because I sent a couple of emails to Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 and 2002, long before Jeffrey Epstein was accused of being a paedophile. That attempt to smear me was quite bold because it has since emerged that a ‘political organiser’ for Hope Not Hate, a former Labour councillor called Liron Velleman, pleaded guilty to child sexual offences last year. According to the BBC, he sent a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl online a video of his penis and asked to see pictures of her in her underwear.

https://spectator.com/article/why-is-hope-not-hate-out-to-get-me/