by Emma Schubart, UnHerd
Andy Burnham’s first major appointment as he prepares to become prime minister offers an unmistakable sign of the ideological direction he intends to take. Matthew McGregor, who was reportedly appointed this week as the new Director of Political Strategy in No. 10 Downing Street, served as Hope Not Hate’s Director of Campaigns and Communications from 2018 to 2021, and remained a listed director of the organisation until April 2022. Team Burnham’s briefing to journalists preferred to stress McGregor’s stint on Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, a role that lasted little more than a year, rather than dwell on the campaign group where he worked for almost four years.
That is a telling omission. Hope Not Hate presents itself as a scrupulously non-partisan charity fighting extremism. But in practice, it functions as a Labour-aligned campaign operation, and its record during McGregor’s tenure and since bears that out.
During last month’s Makerfield by-election, the group’s charitable trust faced a Charity Commission complaint from Nigel Farage, who alleged that its funds had bankrolled leaflets attacking the Reform UK candidate. The Commission dismissed that complaint, but Farage has since escalated it to the Electoral Commission, claiming separately that Hope Not Hate Limited, the group’s campaigning arm, breached spending limits. Whatever the regulators conclude, the group itself is not embarrassed about its role. Hope Not Hate credited its own supporters, not Burnham’s campaign, with the fact that “Robert Kenyon is not the new MP for Makerfield.”
That intervention was not ordinary political campaigning. It reflected Hope Not Hate’s broader strategy of placing a mainstream democratic party in the same conceptual universe as violent extremism. Its 2026 State of Hate report positioned Reform UK within a sprawling “far-Right” taxonomy alongside chapters on Holocaust denial and Nazi terrorism, and opened with a fundraising appeal to “Donate to Stop Reform UK”. This seemed to blur the line between monitoring genuine extremists and pathologising millions of British voters.
Read also: Left-wing group deletes article calling Widdecombe ‘homophobic’ by Ruby Cline, Telegraph
Everything You Wanted to Know About Hope Not Hate* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) by Michael Reiners