Burnham’s Hope Not Hate premiership is destined for disaster

Generally, it isn’t a good sign when a new employee is hurriedly deleting his social-media accounts days before he starts. It’s a particularly bad omen when that person is about to take up one of the most important jobs in the country – in Matthew McGregor’s case, the head of political strategy for the UK prime minister. Unluckily for Andy Burnham’s new Svengali, his opponents have kept the receipts.

One of McGregor’s most memorable posts came during the Brexit referendum debate in 2016. ‘Another reason to vote Remain: to tell this racist piece of shit to do one’, he wrote on what was then Twitter, with a picture of Nigel Farage. Other musings lifted from the annals of his X account were less juvenile but no more comforting: last year, he described chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules as ‘too tight’, despite UK debt then being more than 90 per cent of GDP, and called on Ofcom to ‘tighten its rules’ to prevent politicians hosting shows on GB News.

You might be charitable and reply that everyone has said something hastily online that they later come to regret. And, after all, everyone on the Remain side lost their minds after the Brexit referendum, didn’t they? But McGregor’s musings on that ‘racist piece of shit’ who now leads the most popular political party in the UK really only scratch the surface.

McGregor spent three years – from 2018 to 2021 – as the head of campaigns and strategy for Hope Not Hate, a charity that isn’t nearly as innocent as its name suggests. Although it claims to be a non-partisan outfit fighting ‘far-right extremism’, it dedicates a significant chunk of its resources to attacking anyone and anything of a remotely conservative bent. The aim, you have to presume, is to have such people silenced and excluded from public life.

In fact, nearly anyone noteworthy who has expressed a preference for controlled or reduced immigration, or gender-critical views, has found themselves ‘exposed’ as a foul hate-monger in one of its annual ‘State of Hate’ reports. In 2024, Hope Not Hate memorably pointed the bone at Conservative MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg, Iain Duncan-Smith and Miriam Cates for their supposedly poisonous influence on British public life. Last week, Hope Not Hate quietly deleted an article on its website that accused the recently murdered former minister Ann Widdecombe of promoting a ‘dangerous and divisive politics’. Whatever one might think of these politicians, fascists and extremists they are not.

After leaving Hope Not Hate, McGregor joined the board of Reprieve, where he led a campaign to abolish the power of governments to strip the British citizenship of dual nationals. This, like Hope Not Hate, may sound innocent even though it is anything but – a point demonstrated by the fact that many of Reprieve’s ‘clients’ were ISIS brides. As a few people have already pointed out, if Reprieve had its way, it would be impossible to deport Pakistani national Shabir Ahmed, the recently released ringleader of a Rochdale rape gang who was convicted of 30 child sex offences.

Like pretty much everyone near the top of the modern Labour Party, McGregor appears to have been allergic to anything resembling a real job. So we also find him plugging away at activist outfit 38 Degrees. As chief executive, McGregor campaigned heavily against the one good thing Keir Starmer tried (and of course failed) to do during his short premiership – namely, reforming the UK’s bloated, financially ruinous and patently unfair welfare system.

Like all full-time activists, McGregor really, really dislikes Israel. Last year, 38 Degrees drafted a petition and led a campaign demanding Gaza be ‘the first thing on the agenda’ for one of Starmer’s meetings with US president Donald Trump. Of course, this was rightly ignored at the time. But might Burnham’s bizarre mea culpa on Gaza – his only significant foreign policy intervention since the Makerfield by-election – be a taste of more senseless Israel-bashing to come?

With a track record like this, it beggars belief that new prime minister Andy Burnham would touch McGregor with a barge pole. But to think that such a person will help shape the policy of the new government – the ‘brains’ behind the operation – is a deeply troubling prospect. It will surely mean less free speech, less control of the UK’s borders, more welfarism and an even more obsessive focus on the Jewish State.

The rise of Matthew McGregor suggests that life under Burnham could soon resemble what French novelist Michel Houellebecq said about life after Covid: the same, only worse.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.