Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist
For a brief time, Naz Shah was in my good books. Earlier this week the MP for Bradford West said she will vote against her fellow Yorkshirewoman Kim Leadbeater’s dangerous Assisted Dying Bill. Even Leadbeater herself is now publicly admitting what we all suspect: that the bill will make fear of being a social burden a ‘legitimate reason’ for requesting doctor-assisted suicide. Bizarrely, she seems to view this as a neutral development.
I am sure this has nothing to do with what’s in the water up in lovely West Yorkshire, but Shah herself hardly has a squeaky clean record. In 2017 she retweeted and liked a post that read:“Exactly Areeq, those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity,” perhaps failing to detect the obvious bait from what was blatantly a parody account of Owen Jones, likely run by someone with the polar opposite views to the uber-progressive columnist.
Shah later reportedly undid the retweet and unliked the post, with her spokesperson telling The Sun that the incident “was a genuine accident” that was “rectified within minutes”. This, I am less certain about. Liking something in error is easy to do on most social media platforms, but liking and retweeting something accidentally is much less likely.
Shah was previously suspended from Labour in 2016 over 2014 Facebook posts that suggested Israel should be “relocated” to the USA- which she also apologised for. (The irony that her own party’s government has fast-tracked people through the courts for interacting with the odd off-colour social media post is not lost on me).
Shah also criticised the erstwhile Conservative government for not re-engaging with the Muslim Council of Britain. Gordon Brown’s administration was the first to sever ties with the body in 2009 after its then deputy general secretary co-signed a declaration that advocated Muslims partaking in “jihad” against the state of Israel. She was photographed as recently as this week with Zara Mohammed, its current Secretary-General, as part of an ‘Islamophobia Awareness Month’ event.
It seems Shah’s indelicate record has made its way across the pond. Earlier this month, US Congressman Brian Mast launched an effort to block her from entering the US, citing her alleged ties to “Hamas-linked” groups operating in the UK. Shah had been set to give the keynote address at a D.C. conference organized by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
Among other complaints Mast noted that Shah had, in 2021, addressed a panel organised by the NGO Palestine Return Centre. Majed Al-Zeer, its Director, was recently designated a Global Terrorist by the U.S for links to Hamas. Al-Zeer is close to senior Hamas officials, including the terror group’s late chairman Ismail Haniyeh.
Regardless of the complexities of some of Mast’s claims, that a senior US politician views at least one of our governing party’s MPs as a national security risk in relation to alleged Islamist ties must be heralded as a wake-up call. Yet the fact Mast’s protest made zero headlines in the UK suggests it will be regarded otherwise. It is unclear whether she attended the event, but there is no trace of her keynote speech on her own or MPAC’s social media profiles.
I recently attended a press trip to Hungary, a state that, despite tumultuous years of Nazi and Communist rule-alongside a post-WW1 severance from the Habsburg Empire, less of such nonsense if permitted. I visited a ministry that probes dicey NGOs-such as the ones Shah has been linked to. Would the UK benefit from a similar, public-facing department?
Firstly, they would do well to stop funding them, at the very least. While the groups Shah was linked to have not received money from the public purse, other extremist figures and bodies have. As my fellow columnist Poppy Coburn lamented last year, charities battling the Tory Home Office’s plan to process asylum seekers in a third location have cost the taxpayer more than £203 million.
The social contract is not broken, so much as it has been flipped inside out so its unsightly seams are on full display. It seems unlikely that Labour would be so flippant about funding right-wing operators, so whoever eventually replaces them-if they are conservative with a big or a small C- will have a mammoth project on their hands.
Given the dire straits British conservatives find themselves in, it may be worth occasionally looking afar for inspiration. Take Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO) for example. The dramatically-titled office, which became operational this February, has broad authority to request information and data from subjects under investigation, as well as from state and local government bodies. It can access, inspect, and make copies of relevant documents and data. In June 2024 it launched probes into progressive organizations such as Transparency International Hungary and the investigative journalism outlet Atlatszo.hu.
Hungary’s SPO is biased with who and what it probes. When I sat through a detailed briefing with a staff member of the Department, for every ten mentions of George Soros and the US State Department, there were zero of Beijing’s meddlings, despite the fact it has been Budapest’s largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) since 2020.
The office has not, as much of the progressive media lines on it implies, forced any dubious anti-government NGOs to cease operations, but has documented foreign funding and misinformation campaigns of several. One such association is now being separately legally probed for illicit use of political campaign funds.
No doubt The Guardian would be teetering with excitement if a conservative-leaning group had been put under the quash (Cambridge Analytica anyone?). Violent extremist groups themselves are one thing, but the leviathan of NGOs and charities masquerading as neutral expert bodies is another, less obvious issue. Hungary has no such Islamist issue, and thus its state’s focus is different, but its ideas could still help Britain.
Naturally, Hungarian politics operate rather differently from British ones, and perhaps such a body would do better if enacted behind the scenes in Westminster, so a future conservative-minded administration (Tory or not) would be able to discern which bodies were worthy of support, and which were oppositional to its aims.
While the UK’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS), requires registration of arrangements with foreign entities, that domestic problematica such as extremist mosques continue to receive tax- ayer funding, we surely need a wider strategy to tackle issues at home and abroad.
NGOs play an important role in campaigning and holding political authorities to account, but this ought not render them above criticism, or, when they actively promote violence and terrorism, legal recourse.
