More Disturbing Revelations Emerge About Our Attorney General
Skeletons, skeletons, skeletons...
Thanks to a tip-off, more deeply troubling evidence has emerged about Attorney General Lord Richard Hermer—specifically his long-standing ties to hardline, pro-censorship, far-left campaign groups.
It comes after news that Hermer not only compared those who want to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to 1930s Nazis, but also personally signed off on the prosecution of non-violent Southport protestors.
That includes Lucy Connolly, who received a harsher prison sentence than a convicted rapist—whose “unduly lenient” punishment Hermer refused to review.
Not only this, but it was revealed as a former private barrister, he represented ISIS bride Shamima Begum, 9/11 plotter Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and Rangzieb Ahmed, a senior al-Qaeda operative linked to the 7/7 London bombings.
He also acted in a high-profile challenge to Boris Johnson’s no-deal Brexit and helped “anti-racist” Caribbean campaigners draft reparation demands from Britain.
Turns out, as the Daily Sceptic’s Laurie Wastell discovered, while a student at the University of Manchester, Hermer wasn’t just politically active. He was a "dedicated anti-fascist" who worked closely with the magazine Searchlight, a group known for its extreme-left affiliations and activism.
According to Searchlight itself, Hermer not only attended meetings but later provided legal advice and even became a patron.
Want to guess who attended such meetings?
Nick Lowles, then Searchlight's Co-Editor and now CEO of Hope Not Hate.
In fact, the organisations are so closely linked that it appears some of Searchlight's registered entities have since been rebranded under Hope Not Hate.
This matters—because last July, after Tommy Robinson publicly aired his documentary Silenced in Trafalgar Square, Hope Not Hate made direct contact with the Attorney General’s office. Lowles even posted on X:
“The Attorney General’s office have been made aware of Tommy Robinson screening a film he was banned from showing. Such a flagrant disregard for the law could well see him facing the maximum two-year sentence. Only himself to blame.”
Hermer’s team and the authorities responded swiftly, charging Robinson with contempt of court, which indeed landed him with an 18-month sentence.
He was released days ago, after removing the documentary from his X profile.
The link between Hermer and Lowles takes on further significance considering the authorities’ prosecution of certain political commentators last year.
Consider this: when Lowles spread false claims that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid in Middlesbrough during the Southport unrest, police seemingly took no action against him.
Compare that to the case of Bernadette Spofforth, who was arrested after falsely speculating online that then Southport child-murder suspect had a Middle Eastern name—Ali-Al-Shakati.
She was arrested partly under Section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023, which criminalises knowingly sending false messages intended to cause “non-trivial psychological harm or physical harm to a likely audience”.
In a statement, Cheshire Police tied her “malicious and inaccurate communications” to violent disorder—despite having no concrete proof anyone acted on her post. They simply assumed. (Her post neither called for violence).
And yet Lowles’ post was too followed by violence in Middlesbrough—where he claimed the acid attack had taken place. Footage showed men appearing to be of Middle Eastern descent assaulting men appearing to be of Anglo-Saxon descent.
It begs the question: could the lack of police and CPS action against Lowles have anything to do with the fact that his former “anti-fascist” associate now holds one of the most powerful offices in the country?
As Attorney General, Hermer oversees the Crown Prosecution Service—giving him the authority to block certain prosecutions or refer cases to the Court of Appeals if he believes certain sentences are too lenient.
Note, this isn’t some passing association to Searchlight, Hope Not Hate, and Lowles.
Hermer once sat on Searchlight’s Management Committee—the same time that he struck up that fateful friendship with Starmer. One that eventually saw him donate to Starmer’s leadership campaign in 2019.
In return, Starmer elevated him to the House of Lords in July 2024—making Hermer Attorney General, despite him never having served in either chamber of Parliament, something not done in over a century.
Some questioned whether ‘pay for play’ was at work, particularly given this sequence of events.
But be in no doubt, this guy has rubbed shoulders with some of the country's most hardline “anti-fascist”—some say outright communist—censors, it appears, for the better part of his career.
After all, these are the same organisations that issue ‘book ban lists’ to pressure retailers into blacklisting authors. They publish articles sanitising the grooming/r*pe gang scandal by calling it a “so-called” issue and accuse “racists in the media” of bringing attention to the scandal to “bash Muslims”.
What might enrage readers even more: all while doing this, Hope Note Hate have received government funds, with the Home Office giving them grants of £50,000 and £141,380 in 2019-2020 to “brief multiple departments… on emerging trends of hate in the UK”.
They already had access, and now their man, it seems, has the ability to influence the British "justice system" directly.
No wonder he doesn't seem to care about citizens being jailed and/or prosecuted for online posts. That's Searchlight’s and Hope Not Hate's MO.
You must read Laurie Wastell’s original exposè—brilliant work from him.
Do you really believe our best days lie ahead?
Will you keep watching as our politicians and broadcasters push for yet more surveillance, censorship, and control?
If you want to push back—if not today, maybe someday—supporting independent journalism can, genuinely, make a real impact.
In the past year, The Stark Naked Brief reached over 100 million people on X. Sometimes, all it takes is one post—one uncomfortable truth—to wake someone up and put another dent in the system.
A few years ago during an interview and was asked; if given power, which one law would he choose to enact?
'The European Union (Please Can We Come Back?) Act 2020,' was his reply.
He and Sir Keir go way back. They met as barristers at the fashionable Left-wing chambers Doughty Street, where Hermer was the future PM's junior on a string of 'human rights' cases.
When Hermer became a QC, in 2009, Sir Keir gave the speech at the drinks reception. And in 2019, when he stood for the Labour leadership, Hermer gave £5,000 to his campaign funds.
Take the controversy that erupted this week when it emerged that Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Fein, is in line for a taxpayer-funded compensation after the Starmer administration decided to repeal a law that has blocked him from claiming damages for being interned in the 1970s.
Awkwardly, the same Gerry Adams just happens to have been a recent client of Lord Hermer, who represented him in November 2023, when he was sued by victims of the IRA. At a High Court hearing, Lord Hermer had argued that parts of the case ought to be struck out on the grounds of 'procedural breaches and irregularities', along with the contention that the Provisional IRA was an 'unincorporated association' which was 'incapable in law of being sued'. Lord Hermer earned a reported £30,000 representing Mr Adams. Now, just over a year later, he's Attorney General in a Government which has taken a highly contentious decision likely to materially benefit the Sinn Fein grandee. And appearing before MPs this week, Lord Hermer also refused to say whether he'd advised Sir Keir on the matter, saying he 'can't remember'.
Consider the ongoing ructions over the future of the Chagos Islands, a British sovereign territory which Sir Keir is seeking to hand over to Mauritius, a country 1,300 miles away which counts itself as one of China's strategic allies.
The deal is likely to cost UK taxpayers about £9 billion and Lord Hermer's paw prints are all over it. Not least given his personal view (recently expressed on his Matrix Chambers podcast) that 'one can't begin to understand the British colonial project without appreciation for how racism impacted almost every element of it'. In a speech last October, the Attorney General defended it as 'honouring our obligations under international law,' suggesting that Britain somehow has an 'obligation' to surrender the island – even though critics point out that an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the matter was not legally binding. Awkwardly, one group which now stands to benefit from the whole thing are his old mates at Matrix Chambers, who just so happen to have been representing the Mauritians. Their founder Phillipe Sands KC, who is heavily involved in the matter, has dubbed Britain's decision to cede the islands 'a special day for Mauritius, for Chagossians, for international law'. Sands is at the centre of what one might call a 'Starmerian nexus'. He's a close personal friend of Sir Keir (they watch Arsenal together) and a longstanding chum of Lord Hermer, whose name has over the years appeared alongside his on a string of public letters making Left-leaning contributions to a string of topical debates.
After July's Southport riots, which were sparked by the fatal stabbing of three girls at a holiday club, he advised the Government that it would be lawful to charge social media users with stirring up racial hatred, resulting in some contentious prison sentences.
Meanwhile in October, it emerged that Lord Hermer had intervened after the Metropolitan police refused to provide the singer Taylor Swift with an escort to Wembley Stadium, where she was playing a series of concerts attended by VIPs. He told the force that providing the escort would be legal. At least five Cabinet Ministers, including the Prime Minister, had been given free tickets to the gigs.
Then there is the case of Shamima Begum, the schoolgirl who left the UK in 2015 to join Isis in Syria but has been trying for several years to return to the UK. Lord Hermer acted for her at the Supreme Court in 2020, arguing that she faces 'unfairness upon unfairness' in her battle to have her citizenship restored. 'She is no longer entitled to be protected by the state, and risks exposure to irregular treatment, such as being targeted by drone strikes, the consequences of which may be fatal,' he said.
In 2019, he was the chosen barrister of pressure group Liberty, which took Boris Johnson to court in an effort to prevent him breaching the Benn Act, a piece of legislation designed by Sir Keir's Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn, which required the PM to delay Britain's departure from the EU if he couldn't reach an exit deal by a certain date.
And in 2021, he represented a group of MPs who went to the High Court seeking to force the Johnson government to order a public inquiry into claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
After eschewing radical politics for the law – to the relief, he once said, of his parents Ian and Judith – he was called to the bar in 1993 and moved to London to work at Doughty Street, the human rights chambers Sir Keir had helped set up in the early 1990s, which then prospered under the Blair government.
He and his wife Caren Gestetner, a former solicitor at Mishcon de Reya who left to study 'gender, policy and inequalities' at LSE (and now runs a charity which carries out 'gender audits' of primary schools designed to combat sexism), attend a synagogue in north-west London.
In 2023, he advised Labour to oppose a bill by Michael Gove designed to prevent public bodies from boycotting Israel, saying it would have 'a profoundly detrimental impact on the UK's ability to protect and promote human rights overseas'.
Then came that public letter following the October 7 attacks, in which he and other signatories stated: 'The Israeli government is led by a coalition of far-Right parties whose common goal is the formal annexation of the West Bank and the extension of a one-state reality of unequal rights over more than five million Palestinians under occupation.'
This man is despicable
"giving him the authority to block certain prosecutions"
This shouldn't even be a power. No 'Attorney General' should have the power to interfere with and block the process of justice. It basically makes him de facto judge, with no jury, a tyrant who can let off criminals scot free. If a prosecution was already proceeding, it means both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (full of able-bodied prosecutors) had already deemed an individual to have broken a law with sufficient evidence to prosecute; they don't need some tyrant AG telling them 'actually, no, you can't prosecute this criminal'.
Strip him of that power. He's unelected. If you want to invent the concept of pardons, delegate that to a directly elected body that runs independent of government cronyism. Giving it over to one man is asking for personal abuse of power.