You would think that a group called ‘Hope not Hate’ would have a lot of important things to talk about at the moment. It could look at how the threat of Islamist extremism is corrupting our democracy, for instance. It might raise the alarm about the MPs unwilling to vote with their conscience when it comes to Gaza because they are ‘terrified’. Or point to Mike Freer, who after years of death threats was recently forced to resign as an MP. Hope not Hate might also have investigated the appalling ‘hate marches’ we’ve seen since 7 October, which brought anti-Semitic slogans and chants of ‘jihad’ to the streets of London – or the people with links to Hamas that have helped organise them. There’s certainly been no shortage of hate in Britain this past year.

So when Hope not Hate announced ‘This is BIG’ on Thursday, the self-professed campaign to ‘defend, champion and promote democracy and the rule of law’ could conceivably have been talking about any of these outrages. Instead, Hope not Hate had something far juicier to reveal, something that would really have the chattering classes reaching for their smelling salts. It turns out a right-leaning millionaire, according to its ground-breaking new investigation, sometimes likes tweets criticising immigration.

Hope not Hate looked at the Twitter / X account of Sir Paul Marshall, the multi-millionaire owner of UnHerd and majority shareholder in GB News. They found – shock horror – that he had liked tweets expressing various right-wing views: criticising Sadiq Khan; praising Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and generally being negative about Islam and mass migration into Europe.

Marshall’s ‘shocking’, ‘extreme tweets’, complained Hope not Hate researcher Gregory Davis, suggests ‘that he holds a deeply disturbing view of modern Britain.’ Davis says that this is a particularly ‘alarming prospect’ given that the media mogul ‘is believed to be preparing a bid to buy The Telegraph and The Spectator’. Marshall, for what it’s worth, commented that the posts he had liked were ‘a small and unrepresentative sample of over 5,000 posts’ which ‘does not represent his views’.

This rather pathetic ‘investigation’ – a collaboration with Global’s News Agents podcast – consisted simply of trawling through his Twitter likes and reposts. It didn’t even find any tweets he’d written himself, as the investigation suggests – and it goes without saying that liking or retweeting an article or video does not necessarily mean that someone endorses it.

The bigger problem though is that Hope not Hate’s censorious handwringing about right-wing extremism also actively undermines Britain’s efforts to tackle Islamism, which has long been known to be the far bigger threat.

This was made abundantly clear by last year’s Shawcross Review into Prevent, which found that the government counter-extremism programme was neglecting to focus on Islamist extremism, instead having a disproportionate focus on extremism on the right. Part of the reason, it seems, was that the Prevent programme had been advised by left-wing activist groups, including Hope not Hate.

Sir William Shawcross noted that officials had been shown material from a 2020 Hope not Hate report, supposedly on the ‘Extreme Right-Wing’, that ‘included pro-Brexit and centre-right commentators’, such as Rod Liddle, Melanie Philips and Douglas Murray, whom it accused of ‘mainstreaming’ far-right ideas. This was a running theme, with Prevent’s approach to right-wing extremism being ‘so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation’. All in all, he concluded, ‘Prevent has a double standard when dealing with the Extreme Right-Wing and Islamism’.

One year on from his report, Shawcross says that Prevent is still failing to get to grips with Islamism. While MI5 data shows that 75 per cent of its caseload is focused on Islamist threats, the latest figures for referrals to the Prevent programme showed just 11 per cent related to Islamist terrorism. Clearly, the proportion of Prevent referrals are significantly at odds with the relative threats posed by Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorism. Shawcross is clear about why: ‘One of the reasons why there is sometimes a reluctance to address the Islamist threat is that people are frightened of being called Islamophobic or racist’, he told the Telegraph this week. ‘It’s become a hugely effective form of censorship.’

Such taboos have long been behind our political class’s craven approach to Islamist terror. It will be to Britain’s eternal shame that after the death of David Amess, butchered in his constituency surgery by Islamist Ali Harbi Ali, our political response was channelled away from that thorny, vital issue and towards the triviality of ‘online safety’. The likes of Hope not Hate, who shamelessly bleat about tweets while parliament is bullied by Islamist threats, are a big reason why that happens.