Follow the Money You Can’t See
The UK’s largest Palestine-campaign group asks the public for cash every week. It does not publish a donor list. It is not a charity. After 7 October 2023 its income leapt into the millions. Twice in two decades, high-street banks shut the account after looking at outflows toward the Palestinian territories.
That is the money story. The political story next to it is often told as “the Socialist Workers Party founded the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.” That slogan is too neat, and it should not be hung on one man. PSC was launched in 1982 by a left coalition at the University of London Union. A named co-founder, Tony Greenstein, has said that as a teenager he belonged to the International Socialists — the group that later became the SWP. That is a fact about his early politics. It is not a share register for PSC.
The SWP file still belongs in the same article. Not because Greenstein is the missing link, but because the SWP’s fronts, its presence on the same national marches, and its own antisemitism record are independently documented. Opacity of cash plus that street-level tradition is what should worry anyone who writes a cheque.
What PSC is, and why the money is hidden
Wikipedia records the Palestine Solidarity Campaign as an activist organisation in England and Wales, founded in 1982 and incorporated in 2004. The legal vehicle is Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ltd, company number 05213508: a private company limited by guarantee, no share capital. Last accounts made up to 31 August 2025. (Companies House; filing history)
Charities file grants. This form of company can show totals without naming who paid in or who was paid out. PSC’s donate page says it is “almost entirely funded by donations from our members and supporters” and “don’t accept money from governments, political parties, or big businesses.” (PSC donate) Independence from governments is a claim. Independence from unnamed private money is not transparency.
Watchdogs who read the accounts put 2025 income at £3.8 million. — Palestine Solidarity Campaign, NGO Monitor (link) The Jerusalem Post, citing filings, reported £3,675,576 income and a 375% year-on-year jump. — Jerusalem Post (link) PSC’s own 2024 AGM report still described a smaller machine: income £746,000, spend £903,000. The post–October 7 surge is the story. Millions arrived. Names did not.
NGO Monitor, citing The Telegraph, also ties protest-era fundraising to merchandise around the marches PSC helps organise. (NGO Monitor; Telegraph, 1 Mar 2026) Its July 2026 mapping report, Imported Influence, treats PSC as a core coordinator in a regulatory black hole — limited-company NGOs whose sources often cannot be fully identified. (report; PDF)
Origins: 1982, and Greenstein’s International Socialists membership
PSC’s own archive line, repeated by the Bishopsgate Institute, is that it was founded in 1982 during the build-up to Israel’s Lebanon war, and incorporated in 2004.
The person who has repeatedly put his name to the founding meeting is Tony Greenstein (Wikipedia). In the Communist Party of Britain’s Weekly Worker he wrote: “In 1982, shortly before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, I was among a group of people who founded the Palestine Solidarity Campaign at a meeting held in the University of London Union.” (Weekly Worker, 8 July 2021)
Separately — as biography, not as a founding charter for PSC — Greenstein has written: “When I was a teenager I was a member of the International Socialist group, which pre-dated the SWP.” (tonygreenstein.com, 22 Mar 2023)
The International Socialists (IS) were Tony Cliff’s organisation. They renamed themselves the Socialist Workers Party in 1977. (Wikipedia: Socialist Workers Party (UK)) Greenstein was born December 1953, so “teenager” is the late 1960s / early 1970s: a youth member of the forerunner, years before the party took the SWP name, and a decade before the 1982 ULU meeting. By the time PSC launched he was on the Labour left (Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine).
The SWP’s fronts — and the same street
The SWP’s method is independently on the record. Wikipedia describes several fronts through which a small Trotskyist party has sought to coordinate and influence left action: the Anti-Nazi League in the late 1970s, later an alliance with George Galloway in Respect. (Wikipedia: SWP (UK); Wikipedia: Anti-Nazi League — “set up by the Socialist Workers Party”) Stop the War Coalition is the other large vehicle in which SWP cadre have been central since 2001; SWP paper-sellers and banners are a fixture of the national Palestine marches that PSC helps organise.
That is street overlap, not Companies House parentage. Rival socialists at Workers’ Liberty have said PSC is “well established without any strong relationship with the SWP.” Take it as a factional swipe if you like. Reddit users clock the SWP on the ground anyway: a first-time Leeds Palestine march described as SWP-run. (r/UKGreens)
The honest picture is two organisations in the same demonstrations and the same far-left ecology — not one man tying the founding minute to Cliff’s central committee.
The SWP’s antisemitism file (this part is documented)
That ecology still matters, because the SWP’s record is not a rumour. It is in Socialist Worker, in a Jewish-society ban, and in a bookshop platform.
1985 — Sunderland Polytechnic. The students’ union banned a campus Jewish Society on the grounds that Zionism was racism. Socialist Worker, the SWP paper, rallied to the ban. It called the SPSU “quite clearly not racist … unlike the Zionists who oppose them,” and defined Zionism as “the idea that Jewish settlers are entitled to drive Palestinians out of their own country to create an exclusively Jewish country.” Dale Street’s documentary trawl of three decades of Socialist Worker reprints the quotes with issue numbers. (Workers’ Liberty, 27 Jan 2020) Banning Jewish students for the politics most British Jews hold is textbook left antisemitism. The SWP’s paper defended it.
2005 — Bookmarks, the SWP bookshop. The SWP invited saxophonist Gilad Atzmon to speak. Jews Against Zionism picketed. Atzmon’s essay On Anti-Semitism is not ambiguous: “we must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously”; “American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy”; “the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus.” He promoted Paul Eisen’s Holocaust-denial text Holocaust Wars. The SWP’s defence was that “one or two small groups” were smearing him. JAZ published the quotes in full. (Labournet / JAZ, 27 June 2005; Wikipedia: Gilad Atzmon, section “Socialist Workers Party”)
Programme. SWP politics on Israel have long been smash / destroy the Jewish state, not two states. On the 2006 Lebanon war, SWP/Stop the War marches carried “We are all Hezbollah now.” (Algemeiner) A 2023 ADL report with European partners, including the UK’s Community Security Trust, documents antisemitism and radical anti-Israel bias on the European political left: conspiracy tropes, Holocaust inversion, IHRA rejection. (ADL) Wikipedia: Socialist antisemitism is the long historical frame.
The outflow problem: two banks, two decades
If inflows are a blank donor list, outflows are where banks already said no.
2004 — Alliance & Leicester. NGO Monitor: the bank closed PSC’s account after a £750 transfer to a Palestinian medical charity; the US Treasury asked for more information. (NGO Monitor)
2015 — Co-operative Bank. After “advanced due diligence,” the Co-op closed the account. The Jewish Chronicle reported it “was not satisfied” the account would not aid proscribed / illegal activity in the Palestinian territories, and feared money could “inadvertently” be funnelled to illegal groups in Gaza. (JC, 25 Nov 2015) Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are proscribed in the UK. “Inadvertently” is not a conviction. It is also not a clean bill of health.
There is no Companies House line item “grant to Hamas.” There is no OFSI designation of PSC as a terrorist entity. On Reddit the same mix appears in the open: users circulating PSC personality scandals, and comments that bank accounts were “closed down for sending money to organisations with ties to hamas.” That is forum speech, not a filing. Threads: r/ukpolitics on the PSC scandal; r/IsraelPalestine on Ben Jamal / PSC; r/IsraelPalestine on Ghassan Abu-Sitta / banks.
The honest file is: unauditable inflows + destination risk on outflows + an SWP tradition, documented in its own paper, standing in the same demonstrations.
Bottom line
PSC is a guarantee company taking multi-million protest cash without a donor list. It was not incorporated as an SWP front in 1982. It was a ULU activist launch. Tony Greenstein, a named co-founder, was a teenage member of the International Socialists, the forerunner of the SWP. That fact is about him. It does not assign PSC’s minute-book to the SWP.
What does stand on its own is the SWP’s method of fronts (Anti-Nazi League, Respect, Stop the War), its paper-sellers on PSC-linked marches, and an antisemitism file that is quoted, not alleged: Sunderland 1985; Atzmon at Bookmarks in 2005; “We are all Hezbollah now.” Banks, twice, walked away from Palestinian-territory payments.
If the donate page is true, publish the payees and the large donors. Until then, “independent” means unauditable — and the collecting tin sits in a political street whose SWP chapter is not a mystery.
Primary documents: Companies House 05213508 · Wikipedia: PSC · Wikipedia: Tony Greenstein · Wikipedia: SWP (UK) · Wikipedia: Anti-Nazi League · Wikipedia: Gilad Atzmon · Greenstein on IS membership · Workers’ Liberty on Socialist Worker · JAZ / Labournet, 2005 · JC, 2015
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