Andy Burnham’s first major appointment as he prepares to become prime minister offers an unmistakable sign of the ideological direction he intends to take. Matthew McGregor, who was reportedly appointed this week as the new Director of Political Strategy in No. 10 Downing Street, served as Hope Not Hate’s Director of Campaigns and Communications from 2018 to 2021, and remained a listed director of the organization until April 2022. Team Burnham’s briefing to journalists preferred to stress McGregor’s stint on Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, a role that lasted little more than a year, rather than dwell on the campaign group where he worked for almost four years.

That is a telling omission. Hope Not Hate presents itself as a scrupulously non-partisan charity fighting extremism. But in practice, it functions as a Labour-aligned campaign operation, and its record during McGregor’s tenure and since bears that out.

During last month’s Makerfield by-election, the group’s charitable trust faced a Charity Commission complaint from Nigel Farage, who alleged that its funds had bankrolled leaflets attacking the Reform UK candidate. The Commission dismissed that complaint, but Farage has since escalated it to the Electoral Commission, claiming separately that Hope Not Hate Limited, the group’s campaigning arm, breached spending limits. Whatever the regulators conclude, the group itself is not embarrassed about its role. Hope Not Hate credited its own supporters, not Burnham’s campaign, with the fact that “Robert Kenyon is not the new MP for Makerfield.”

That intervention was not ordinary political campaigning. It reflected Hope Not Hate’s broader strategy of placing a mainstream democratic party in the same conceptual universe as violent extremism. Its 2026 State of Hate report positioned Reform UK within a sprawling “far-Right” taxonomy alongside chapters on Holocaust denial and Nazi terrorism, and opened with a fundraising appeal to “Donate to Stop Reform UK”. This seemed to blur the line between monitoring genuine extremists and pathologizing millions of British voters.

In this context, McGregor’s understanding of extremism appears dangerously warped. In April 2022, he joined the board of Reprieve, a legal charity that campaigns for the repatriation of British Isis brides and the abolition of citizenship-stripping powers. The charity has branded these powers as  “fundamentally racist” because they fall mainly on British Muslims of South Asian, Middle Eastern and African descent.

That framing is remarkable. It treats a precise national-security tool, used in exceptional cases against individuals who joined a terror movement which is committed to the violent destruction of the UK and its allies, as indistinguishable from ordinary racial discrimination. This is a troubling ideological pedigree for someone now advising a soon-to-be prime minister on the very questions of citizenship, extremism and national security that Reprieve has sought to recast through a racial lens.

Burnham’s government needs to understand something quickly: Labour’s 2024 win was not a mandate for radical ideological transformation. It won 411 seats with less than 34% of the vote. The Conservatives and Reform, between them, received 38%. The first-past-the-post system converted a divided Right into an overwhelming Labour majority; it did not reveal a country suddenly committed to progressive politics.

Burnham promises national renewal. That project will collapse if his strategists brand opposition to mass immigration or dissent from progressive orthodoxies as forms of “hate”. Public patience with ideological experimentation is already wearing thin. If Labour mistakes its electoral victory as permission to impose a cultural agenda that most voters never endorsed, it will quickly discover that a majority in Westminster is not the same as the consent of the country.