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Institutions

Hope Not Hate's Ever-Widening Net

6 min read
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The Desk

Hope Not Hate used to hunt Nazis. Now it is compiling dossiers on a mainstream political party’s donor club, a loose network of anti-migrant protesters who hold picnics in country parks, and — on its current trajectory — anyone to the right of Nick Lowles. The mission creep is the story, and the money behind it is on the public record.

Two fresh pieces this week show where the machine has pointed itself now.

From extremists to Reform’s champagne set

Last week HNH published an investigation of George Jones, who the Financial Times reported ran Reform UK’s Patrons’ Club — the group for donors who give more than £1,000, who last month drank champagne and canapés at a Belgravia club.

HNH’s case, published on its own site, is that Jones sat on the committee of the Traditional Britain Group in the 2010s, and appeared at a BNP event as a teenager applauding Nick Griffin. Its own article concedes the key mitigation in the same breath it deploys the smear: Jones’s lawyers told the FT it would be “misleading and unfair” to describe him as a BNP supporter, and that he “explored a range of ideas as part of his intellectual development” as a teenager. Reform says he is no longer in the voluntary Patrons’ Club role and is not a party employee.

Whether you find that exculpatory or convenient, notice what has changed. The organisation that once monitored Combat 18 and National Action is now running the rule over who donates to a mainstream party and where they hold their fundraising drinks. That is not counter-extremism. That is opposition research against a political rival, dressed in the language of anti-fascism.

The ‘Patriot Platform’ files

The second piece, published a day earlier, targets the “Patriot Platform” — a network assembled by Daniel Thomas, known as Danny Tommo, which held its first meeting in July at a nature reserve in Basingstoke. HNH’s central charge is that several of the men in the group have criminal records, including violence against women.

To be clear about the status of what follows: these are conviction claims made in HNH’s reporting, which cites local court coverage (KentOnline, KentLive) and a police statement. We have not independently pulled every court record tonight. HNH alleges that Kevin Jones pleaded guilty in 2018 to dangerous driving, wounding and assault and was jailed for three years and four months; that Adrian Clark received a suspended sentence in 2018 after admitting actual bodily harm; and that Alby Brannan pleaded guilty in 2024 to violent disorder for throwing fireworks at a hotel housing asylum seekers in Aldershot.

If those convictions hold up — and on the KentOnline and Hampshire Police record they appear to — then HNH has documented something real, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A man convicted of violence against women has no business being “handpicked” as a community “patriot”, and the people who recruit him deserve the scrutiny. Our own reporting has never disputed that HNH’s work has at times produced genuine convictions, including the seven-year sentence for Andrew McIntyre after the 2024 riots, where HNH’s research team briefed the police.

But notice the gradient here, too. A vigilante-adjacent group of a few dozen men holding photoshoots in a park is being treated with the same institutional machinery once reserved for organised neo-Nazi infrastructure. The scope keeps widening. That is a choice, not a necessity.

Who pays for the widening net

And the choice is funded. We have already documented — in our own filing-based report — how the machine is built:

So the widening net — Reform’s donor club, the park-protest “Patriot Platform”, the endless dossiers — is paid for by a tax-efficient charity with no staff, channelling four-fifths of its income into a campaigning company, funded in its largest single tranche by a vehicle built so donors never have to be named.

The people running this machine will tell you they are the transparent ones, the accountable ones, the ones standing between Britain and the darkness. The filings say otherwise. The charity that pays for the dossiers is a shell. The company that publishes them is the point. And the donor at the top of the list is, by design, invisible.

Follow the money. It explains who gets hunted next.

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