In recent months, Declassified UK has examined two organisations that I have worked for. For the first article, I was a source, but for the more recent article, I was not, and I will start with that one, adding some detail for the record.

Baraka/Breakthrough

In July, Declassified published two stories about a media agency, Breakthrough Media – now known as Zinc – and its role in the British government’s surveillance apparatus. In one article, the Ladbroke Grove charity Baraka Community Association was given as an example of the way Breakthrough used grassroots organisations to try to “deradicalize young British Muslims.”

I was an employee at Baraka in 2018 when Breakthrough started redesigning the charity’s website, although the decision to work with the agency pre-dated my employment there. I had volunteered with Baraka sporadically since 2012, taking classes; mentoring; doing some fundraising; writing updates for the website and generally anything that required help with language. I was not a decision maker at any point and was never asked whether I thought the charity should be signed up to the Prevent Strategy or work with Breakthrough Media.

Some people have now accused me of “spying” following Declassified’s publication of the article, titled Grenfell Survivors May Have Been Monitored By Counter-Terror Scheme. Sources, supposedly from within Baraka, told Declassified, “I believe there was some surveillance going on” and said that Breakthrough staff were “interested generally in what is happening locally,” giving the example of wanting to know if young people were showing any inclination to join ISIS in Iraq or Syria.

The sources do not claim that Baraka undertook surveillance, saying “that is not something we would ever do.”

But the article explains that, via Breakthrough Media, the Home Office was a joint data controller, giving it “overall control of the personal data being processed” on the Baraka website.

I understand that Baraka will be putting out a statement to explain the extent of their knowledge of what the relationship with Breakthrough/the Home Office meant. For me, although I had instinctive reservations about receiving pro bono services from the government, it seemed that we could take advantage of their support without having to give up much, if any, of our independence. Once I was employed at Baraka after the Grenfell Tower fire, I was not minded to toe the line with any of the suggestions that came from Breakthrough regarding website content. Our content wasn’t their business; they were there to create a website and that’s all; that was my approach.

Regarding data and what Breakthrough (and therefore the Home Office) were accessing, I didn’t have knowledge of this and even if I had paid closer attention at the time, would not have known that “data controller” is an unusual or sinister designation for a web developer.

Context

It is important to put Baraka’s relationship with Breakthrough (and Prevent) in its historical context. One of those accusing me of spying claims that potential terrorism was “never a serious issue in north Ken.”

How wrong can you be? By late 2014, six children from the same school, Holland Park, had reportedly died in the service of ISIS. Holland Park was, at that time, the main secondary school for North Kensington youths. This only changed after the opening of Kensington Academy in late 2014.

At that time, the pressure on all charities to go along with the Prevent agenda was immense. A decade on, it is still unusual if a charity delivering services to young people is not signed on to Prevent, with a statutory duty to report certain concerns to the state. For a small, cash-strapped charity like Baraka, working with the Somali community, at that time the most maligned minority community in London, they will have felt very little choice but to go along with Prevent.

Prevent was administered locally by councils, so Baraka was dealing with a tri-borough Prevent setup, under which they were provided funding to run a parenting programme from 2016. It was through this project, run by sessional staff with Baraka receiving no income for staffing or other core costs, that the charity developed a positive relationship with the local Prevent team. This led to the team offering to arrange support for Baraka to upgrade its website via Breakthrough Media.

At this time, despite working with hundreds of children every year, Baraka only had funding for one part-time member of staff. The work was done by the Director, mainly outside his paid hours, and by volunteers. Baraka encouraged its older members (17+) to develop leadership skills by mentoring younger members.

The main stumbling block for attracting funding was Baraka’s website, which was not a good one. It looked cheap and amateurish, but there was no money to upgrade it. One of the people accusing me and everyone at Baraka of being spies claimed, “There are always other sources of funds.”

But there aren’t, as every charity that folds will testify. Until a charity can demonstrate a track record of receiving and utilising money from established funders, they will struggle to present themselves as a reliable place to invest. This is amplified for a Somali youth charity in North Kensington with limited media/tech savvy and no posh, white or networked trustees.

None of those calling out Baraka are from a demographic that faces comparable challenges to British Somalis. As members of the so-called North Kensington Network, they should know better, but for some reason they don’t. One claimed that “parents are distraught” about what they read in Declassified. Somali parents went outside their own community to raise their concerns? It doesn’t ring true. More on the accusers later…

I’m not from the British Somali community, but I was aware enough from a few years volunteering with Baraka and working in local schools that this was not a community that experienced its first malevolent contact from the British state when Breakthrough Media turned up. Baraka will make their own statement, and I cannot speak for them, but it is important for me to state that I felt and feel strongly the importance of Baraka’s work. Many young people have been given a chance in life thanks to that charity.

2018

In 2018, I was employed part-time by Baraka. One of my tasks was to liaise with staff from Breakthrough Media to get the website up and running. At no point did anybody from Breakthrough ask me for information on any service users; they also never asked me about what I was hearing generally about ISIS, Grenfell, or anything else. I took it upon myself to ensure that, to the best of my ability, Baraka’s authentic voice was not compromised by Breakthrough Media, who would sometimes suggest certain approaches that I considered a watering down of the messaging. In the wake of the fire, it was imperative that Baraka played its part locally, so there was no way we would be adopting anybody else’s worldview or approach to our community.

Looking back at the emails, I can see times that I told Breakthrough ‘No, that’s not for us’ and times when they said ‘No’ they wouldn’t add something to our website, that we would have to do it ourselves. This included articles and reports about the situation in North Kensington that reflected the scale of the injustice here.

Breakthrough Media was slow to deliver the promised website. They probably worked slowly as a matter of policy, buying time for their surveillance or intelligence-gathering activities. Even though it was pro bono, we realised that the Breakthrough deal was costing us time and energy and gave up on them. Some funding and project delivery momentum was gained after the fire and we successfully fundraised for a full-time Director in 2019. Baraka has since grown a bit more and now has its own basic website where most of the information is out of date.

Spy

I don’t like being called a spy and found it suspicious that people chose to do this publicly. They have my number, they could have called me, text me, asked to meet, asked me any question about the story, but they chose not to. They showed no curiosity, just ignorance of the context. This all played out on a WhatsApp group where it’s almost impossible to have a decent dialogue.

The accusations seem opportunistic. For reasons that I do not know, people wanted to smear me and smear Baraka. Given that no Baraka representatives are in that WhatsApp group, you’d think the accusers might have aired their concerns somewhere that would give the charity the ability to respond directly. But none of them have contacted any Baraka staff or trustees. This means they don’t really want answers, they just want to defame people.

One of them claimed that I wrote my last article, on the Zionist restaurant Miznon, and posted it in the group as a distraction from the Baraka story. But that isn’t true. I was not ignoring the Declassified story, I was waiting to hear from people at Baraka; I was looking back at my notes and emails from the time, and I was providing more information to Declassified, who had stated at the end of the article that their investigation into Breakthrough Media is ongoing.

The accusers said “spying on children for the government is not acceptable” – obviously, but the article doesn’t claim that Baraka did this.

They said I work “with the home office” and their evidence for this is non-existent.

Confusion

I was frustrated with Baraka’s slow reaction to the Declassified piece because I didn’t want to respond before they did. In their defence, they don’t have anything resembling a media team and the article arrived just as the Summer holiday and their residential trip began, so their capacity has been limited.

As a rule, Urban Dandy doesn’t engage with local gossip and doesn’t make personal attacks on the non-powerful. But, as I have been called out by name in public, I have to respond. I did send a long response in the WhatsApp group but it was met with zero curiosity, just more abuse.

I spoke with the Director of Baraka who was the only other member of staff at the charity at the time of the Breakthrough debacle and I arranged a meeting for us with Martin Williams, the Declassified journalist.

None of those who were so quick to try to damage the reputations of me and of Baraka have bothered to look into some of the inconsistencies in the article. Who are the sources for the story? There appear to be more than one. But Baraka only had two members of staff, and neither of us was a source for this article. For obvious reasons, the Director wouldn’t frame it in the way that it has been framed, with minimal defence of the charity. And I, having been a named source for Declassified three months earlier, would have no problem being named in an article on a company that I dislike, and which has now triggered a diplomatic row between Britain and Slovakia.

The sources aren’t us, so who are they? And why didn’t the keyboard warriors ask us if we were the sources….surely the most obvious explanation. But they are not interested in the truth of this story or how a local charity that does so much positive work was used and its reputation put at risk by the government and the Prevent scheme.

There is more to this story than what is contained in the Declassified article. If people were as enthusiastic about knowing the truth as they are about smearing people who have worked for decades to uplift our communities, they would know this already. But they choose to be pig ignorant. What the agendas are, I don’t know. Some of it might be paranoia or too much time spent online. It has crossed my mind that the smears might be something to do with the Epstein-Saville paedophile protection front known as the Labour Party, but I don’t have any evidence of that connection, so I won’t name the people involved or try to smear them that way. That would not be a classy thing to do, even to people who have failed to show any class themselves.

The wording of the article is important; the title’s focus on Grenfell Tower left Baraka and its associates wide open for any bad-faith actor to have a go at people who surely deserve more respect. And that is exactly what happened.

Questions?

It wasn’t possible to include every detail here, but if anybody from the community has any questions or would like anything to be clarified, feel free to contact me via DM, in a comment on here, on X or urbandandy at proton mail dot com. For maximum transparency, I will publish any answers I give right here.

by Tom Charles

@tomhcharles

Postscript, added 13th August 2025

Talk of spies, surveillance and government intrusion in North Kensington triggers memories of the post-Grenfell Tower fire period, from the immediate aftermath until today. Although the above article did not focus on the Grenfell angle, there is an understanding locally about the violations of trust and abuses of power by the state, the council, the corporations and their allies in relation to Grenfell Tower and North Kensington. The Grenfell-related corruption and control is still being played out as you read this.

The state implemented its psychological operations while the Tower burned; the community was closely monitored and controlled and there was undoubtedly efforts at ‘controlled spontaneity‘, something that Breakthrough Media was clearly already heavily involved in.

There was also the fake ‘support group’ for survivors and victims, a very clumsy attempt at surveillance and control. We can assume they have refined their methods a bit since that embarrassment.