More on that NGO Monitor report on the pro-Palestine marches that have been disfiguring our cities since October 7th 2023, and the groups behind them (previously). Limor Simhony Philpott at Spiked:
Britain’s pro-Gaza marches have been sold to the public as a grassroots movement – a spontaneous outpouring of conscience by ordinary people appalled by war. A new report from the think tank NGO Monitor tells a very different story.
It turns out that Britain’s largest protest movement is not nearly as spontaneous or grassroots as it looks. Instead, a small number of well-organised groups, motivated by a common loathing of Israel, have spent years building the infrastructure that now drives much of Britain’s pro-Palestine activism. As soon as Hamas launched its attack on 7 October 2023, the activists were ready to hit the streets.
The report maps 40 organisations at the centre of the protests. Eleven are linked, or have leaders who are linked, to extremist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime. Ten of the organisations are charities, eight are companies, nine are hybrids and 13 – nearly a third – have no formal legal structure at all. Nineteen receive UK government money, via the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office or Gift Aid, while at least 11 take money from other governments, too.
None of this is illegal. But it does mean that large, continuous flows of money – foreign and domestic, public and private – are moving into organisations that face none of the disclosure duties we would impose on a political party taking a fraction of these sums.
Of the 40 organisations, NGO Monitor has identified six as the protests’ principal organisers. Five of these have little or partial financial transparency and just as many have reported links to extremist or terror groups. One of the least transparent organisations is the Muslim Association of Britain, which has been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood – a hardline Islamist movement banned in most Middle Eastern nations.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is the group most associated with the marches. Despite what many people think, the PSC is not a charity. It is a registered company and therefore doesn’t have to say where its money comes from. In 2025, the PSC reported an income of £3.8million, which it insists came ‘almost entirely’ from members and donors. Perhaps it did. But the public has no way of checking, and the PSC has ensured we can’t.
A handful of organisations do carry full charitable status. Some of these, like the Islamic Human Rights Commission, have received roughly £458,500 in Gift Aid (a form of public subsidy) since 2020 – despite its well-known links to the Iranian regime. Lord Walney, the UK government’s former independent adviser on political violence, warns that this opaque system is ripe for foreign manipulation, including by proscribed terror groups.
The groups behind the marches have flexed their muscle in recent years. They lobby parliament, mobilise hundreds of thousands of people and dominate Britain’s streets. Yet they are regulated as though they were a collection of harmless charities and campaign groups, rather than some of the most powerful activist networks in the country. Britain has built an elaborate regulatory system for politics, but forgotten that politics no longer happens only in parliament.
It’s unfortunate but not surprising that so many Islamic groups are behind the Gaza marches and the whole pro-Palestinian movement. The tragedy is that so many on the “progressive” left are right there with them, cheering on with their mindless “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” chants.
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