Hope Not Hate – the ‘charity’ built on deceit: Part Two
by Karen Harradine, TCW:
This is the second part of Karen Harradine’s investigation into the activist ‘charity’ Hope Not Hate whose mission is to expose ‘far right extremism’. In the first part she laid bare HNH’s own (extreme) political bias. Today she examines HNH’s funding and its funders’ agendas.
HOW IS it that one small charity has come to have so much influence as to how politics are defined and who is branded as unacceptable? How is it that Hope Not Hate (HNH) has come to be the arbiter of what constitutes or defines ‘far right’ that the MSM and even centre-right political parties comply with? Does it simply reflect the energy of their ‘research’ activity and thought policing that seems very like smearing and shaming campaigns? Does HNH reflect the agenda and politics of their wealthy funders who encourage this?
HNH’s website has little information about their backers. An EU Commission entry for the charity says it is ‘self-funded by parochial money, charitable trust(s), Trade Union funding and individual donations’. An FOI request arranged by What Do They Know however showed that an associated company, Hope Not Hate Educational Ltd (previously known as Searchlight Educational Trust) received government funding of £66,000 in 2012 from the Department for Communities and Local Government. And the 2020 Annual Report of HNH Charitable Trust (HNHCT) shows it received funding from the Home Office Counter Extremism Unit which gave it three grants totalling £75,401 in 2019, and a further £12,500 in 2020.
The Charity Commission website which holds HNH’s past five annual financial reports shows that in 2022, HNHCT received £792,000, of which £715,000 came from donations, grants and legacies, from which a grant of £625,000 was made to HNH Ltd to ‘support its work in accordance with the key objectives of the Charitable Trust.’
HNH Ltd is classed as a small company under UK company law. Its directors legally chose not to publish an income and expenditure statement on the Companies House website which means little financial information is available. We can see where grant money comes into HNHCT but we can’t see the details of how it is spent as this information is held by HNH Ltd. In 2022, the average number of employees for HNHCT was seven, and the total employment costs were £132,205. In 2021, two staff members were paid a total of £140,098. No staff member is named other than Nick Lowles, its chief executive and founding director.
HNH has managed to secure a range of highly ‘progressive’ backers with clear ideological and political objectives.
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