This article was originally published on Desmog.com and republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Labour is facing pressure after one of its MPs joined forces with a far-right group in attacking the party, DeSmog can reveal.
Over recent months, Graham Stringer – who has been the MP for Blackley, Manchester since 1997 – has been cosying up to individuals and groups involved in spreading radical anti-migrant, anti-abortion, anti-climate views.
In September, Stringer signed an open letter drafted by Great British PAC, a group founded by former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib, who has called for the mass “repatriation” of legally-settled migrants.
The letter said that the Labour government’s decision to hand over the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius is a “deliberate act of strategic self-harm that threatens both British and American security”.
The letter, signed by Stringer, added that the decision was “an act of self-sabotage” and a form of “surrender”.
Meanwhile, a fortnight ago, Stringer spoke at the Battle of Ideas Festival – a right-wing debating forum – and shared a stage with James Orr, a newly-appointed senior advisor to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Orr does not think abortion should be allowed at any stage of foetal development, including pregnancies resulting from rape.
“Labour MPs are losing the whip for resisting savage benefit cuts for the disabled and families in abject poverty but there is tolerance without limit to those who share platforms with the far-right, anti-abortionists and climate change deniers,” said Jolyon Maugham, executive director of the Good Law Project.
“This is a party that has not so much lost its moral compass as wittingly thrown it into an industrial shredder and sold the proceeds for scrap.”
Stringer is a director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – the UK’s foremost climate science denial group. The GWPF has stated that carbon dioxide has been “mercilessly demonised”, when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet” and should be “two or three times” higher than current levels.
The GWPF is run by Conservative peer Craig Mackinlay, while its board members include former Conservative MP John Redwood, and ex-Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. The GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch, is chaired by Tory donor Neil Record, while its board includes Conservative peer David Frost.
Stringer has increasingly been echoing right-wing, anti-Labour talking points in recent months, claiming in an interview with Sky News on 15 October that it’s “pathetic” for the government to be blaming some of the country’s economic problems on Brexit.
The Chagos Letter
The Chagos Letter was organised by Great British PAC, a far-right campaign group whose senior figures have advocated for the mass removal of legally-settled migrants.
The group’s advisory board includes far-right YouTuber Carl Benjamin (also known as Sargon of Akkad). Benjamin has advocated for the mass deportation of migrants, including those with formal legal status, has said that the UK is experiencing a “Muslim takeover”, and has suggested that British-born MP Zarah Sultana should be deported because she’s a “Pakistani Muslim communist”.
In 2016, Benjamin speculated on Twitter about whether he would rape Labour MP Jess Phillips – a post that was investigated by the police in 2019 when Benjamin stood as a UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate in the European elections.
Signatories of the letter included a number of notable voices from the British right and far-right. They included Nick Tenconi, the current leader of UKIP. Tenconi has called for “millions” of people to be deported, including British-born Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, has said that Islamophobia “isn’t a thing”, and that anti-racism campaigners are “democratic terrorists”.
“My government would lock them up or deport them to North Korea,” he claimed.
Other signatories included Reform MP Danny Kruger, former Reform MEPs Alexandra Phillips, John Longworth, and Jonathan Bullock, Heritage Foundation director Nile Gardiner, and Tory politicians Suella Braverman, Steve Baker, Mark Francois, Daniel Hannan, and Grant Shapps. No other Labour MP signed the letter.
Great British PAC’s CEO Claire Bullivant said it was “nonsense” for the group to be labelled far-right and instead described it as “mainstream”.
In a statement to DeSmog, she added: “As for comments made by individual PAC members, supporters, and advisors, we don’t all have to agree on everything.
We’re not a political party, we’re a group of patriots representing people from every party and every walk of life. That diversity of thought is exactly what free speech and democracy are about, and it’s something we champion wholeheartedly.”
Habib formally launched a new party, Advance UK, in September 2025.
The party claims that “mass migration is eroding our culture and destroying our economy”, while Habib has advocated for the “mass repatriation” of migrants who are legally settled in the UK.
In July, far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) announced he would be joining Advance UK. The party has received the backing of far-right tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who is reportedly paying Robinson’s fees for multiple legal cases.
Advance UK’s “college” includes Paul Burgess, the former environment spokesperson for the now-defunct far-right For Britain movement, and Kathryn Gyngell, the founder of anti-climate website TCW Defending Freedom and a former GWPF director.
In a comment to DeSmog, Burgess previously claimed that For Britain was not a far-right party – despite its history of fielding former members of the far-right British National Party as candidates, as well as those that have expressed racist views online. Burgess said that he has never been associated with the BNP, “the motives and aims of which I deplore.”
Advance UK and Habib declined to comment.
Battle of Ideas Festival
Stringer also spoke on several panels at the Battle of Ideas Festival in London on 18 October.
The festival is run by the Academy of Ideas, a group fronted by former Revolutionary Communist Party member Claire Fox and closely associated with the radical right-wing Spiked magazine. Fox became a peer in 2020 following a nomination by former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
In one session, “Who’s afraid of the populist revolt?”, Stringer shared the stage with Reform UK senior advisor James Orr, and Mathias Corvinus Collegium Brussels director Frank Füredi, who co-founded Spiked alongside Fox, who moderated the discussion.
MCC is a Hungarian think tank and lobby group closely tied to Viktor Orbán’s government and funded by the country’s national oil company MOL. Its head of policy Jacob Reynolds is an associate fellow at the Academy of Ideas.
However, there wasn’t universal agreement between the panellists. According to the New Statesman, when Stringer voiced concern about the presence of Nazis in Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), Orr responded: “As far as I know, it’s a group of egghead economists. No doubt along the way they’ve picked up some unsavoury types, but look how they’ve been treated.”
The AfD was officially deemed a “right-wing extremist” organisation by Germany’s domestic intelligence services in June.
Orr, a close friend of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, is a hardline conservative and a critic of Europe’s pro-Ukraine policies. As revealed by DeSmog, Orr accused the West of having “Ukraine brain” at MCC’s festival in August and praised Hungary’s Putin-friendly approach to the war, which he has repeatedly labelled a “regional Slavic conflict”.
The New Statesman also reported that one Battle of Ideas speaker, GB News commentator Charlie Downes, said that Bob Marley was “more British” than former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak “by virtue of having an ethnically British ancestor”.
Downes is the campaign director for Restore Britain, an activist group fronted by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe that has proposed entirely abolishing the asylum system and doubling “the annual departure of legal migrants”.
Festival of Ideas “partners” included the GWPF and GB News, while its “supporters” featured Together – a conspiracy theory group that has campaigned against mandatory vaccinations.
Stringer, the Labour Party, James Orr, and the Academy of Ideas were approached for comment.
