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Latest 11 October 2024

Protest adviser must be removed for conflicts of interest

Lord Walney official portrait - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

We’ve made an official complaint about ‘independent’ protest adviser, Lord Walney, and submitted a dossier of evidence of his conflicts of interest. It’s time for Labour to clean up standards in political life.

Good Law Project has submitted a formal complaint about Lord Walney. The Home Office have said Walney’s post is under review, but we’re submitting a dossier of evidence which we believe shows Walney has conflicts of interest and must be removed from his post. We’re also asking that the House of Lords Commissioner investigate whether Walney has broken the Lords’ Code of Conduct. 

Boris Johnson appointed Walney as an “independent adviser” on political violence and disruption in November 2020, to investigate an “increase in activity and prominence amongst far-right, far-left and other political groups”. But when he published his report in May, Walney claimed that “too little attention” has been paid to what he called “serious forms of violence, intimidation, and incitement of hatred on the extreme left”. He then focused his report on non-violent groups working on issues around Palestine and the climate crisis, despite holding paid positions furthering the interests of arms manufacturers and fossil fuels. 

The House of Lords code of conduct is clear: members must not “seek by parliamentary means to confer an exclusive benefit on an outside organisation or person in which they have a financial interest”. But Walney chaired the Purpose Defence Coalition, sponsored by Italian arms manufacturer Leonardo – a business which has faced action from campaign groups after supplying military goods to Israel. Despite his duty to “act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit”, Walney cites one of these groups, Palestine Action, repeatedly in his report and regularly on social media, even calling them “Hamas’s little helpers”.  

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His draconian recommendations – including suggestions that people should have to pay to protest, and that legal protections around protest should be removed – put Walney at the centre of media attention. And as riots swept the country this summer, his report gave him a platform to speak up in the ongoing debate. But instead of making sure the government was ready for a surge of violent activity on the far right, Walney had been focussed on progressive activities affecting his commercial interests.

With trust in politics at a record low, it is all the more important that any conflict of interest is resolved “at once, and in favour of the public interest” as the code of conduct demands. It’s time for Labour to root out those who could be undermining our democracy to line their own pockets.

  • Add your name to tell the government you demand better from our politicians. 

Read the letter to the House of Lords here
Read the letter to the Home Office here
Read the letter to the Prime Minister here

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