One spring afternoon in 2023, Lawrence Newport was out walking his dog in a local park in south London when he saw what he initially thought were two pit bull terriers hanging from a tree. He moved closer. “They were triple the size of a pit bull and were gripping a branch,” Newport, who was working as a law lecturer at Royal Holloway, told me. “But I knew from my law degree that pit bulls had been banned in Britain.”
The ferocity of the dogs disturbed him and after returning home, he researched dog attacks in Britain, which he discovered had increased significantly since the pandemic. A disproportionate number of the attacks, including fatal attacks, which he plotted on a graph, were by the American Bully, also known as the XL Bully. The two dogs in the park were Bullies.
On 6 June he published a Substack article provocatively headlined “Why are so many children dying to dogs in the UK?”. The reason, he wrote, answering his own question, was the rise in the number of XL Bullies, which are known for their strength and stamina, and began arriving here in 2014. The article, in which he said Bullies should be banned, “went viral”. He followed it by posting a video on the same theme on YouTube, after which he was contacted by a victim-support group. “There were a lot of people who would speak in private but few would speak out publicly because they feared the consequences. I was persuaded to go public.”
Newport became the de facto leader of the campaign to ban the XL Bully and shared research with special advisers he knew who worked in the Conservative government. The campaign developed momentum: on 1 February 2024 it became a criminal offence to own an XL Bully without a valid certificate of exemption.
Newport felt vindicated, but there were personal costs. “The entire academic and policy establishment is against you if you go public on something like this,” he said. “And you receive direct threats from owners, from dog fighters.”
For months he was subject to sustained online abuse and death threats. At one point, he and his family were advised by an off-duty police officer to leave London for several weeks because of fears over their safety. Royal Holloway received a daily stream of anonymous emails in which defamatory allegations were made against Newport. “It was very intense and driven by pure emotive hatred. It really affects you and I hid away for nearly a year.”
But he has returned and, having resigned his academic post at the end of 2023, Newport, 34, is leading two new campaigns: one dedicated to promoting economic growth, the other to “crushing crime” (he also wants a cross-party inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal). He became interested in the criminal justice system because of the number of people he knew who’d had mobile phones or bikes stolen in London without any police action being taken. He is adept at using video and social media to popularise his campaigns and is encouraged that “you can reach huge numbers of people online very easily and quickly”.
He has since become close to Dominic Cummings (“we bonded over campaigns and death threats”), whose political intuition he praises, and his work is being noticed inside the Labour government; I was first alerted to him by a senior adviser to a cabinet minister. In March, Newport – or Dr Lawrence Newport, as he calls himself on social media using the professional honorific (he has a PhD in history) – organised a cross-party event in Bristol on growth at which the speakers included Cummings, Chris Curtis, co-leader of the 110-strong Growth Group of Labour MPs, and Zia Yusuf, chair of Reform UK.
In one sense, unlike Cummings, who in the early years of the coalition government worked as an adviser to Michael Gove at the Department of Education before leading the campaign for Brexit, Newport comes from nowhere. He was never part of the Westminster-policy-media-think-tank establishment or Oxbridge networks. He was an undergraduate at Kent University but suffered acutely from obsessive compulsive disorder and was encouraged by his mother to take a year out from his studies. He published a remarkable Substack post about exposure therapy and the long, slow, painful process of recovery. When I mentioned that I’d read and admired the piece he seemed surprised and moved. “You are the first person to ask me about that,” he said. “It was extremely bad. I was extremely thin at the time and not very well. When I came back to uni the next year, I wrote essays in the way I wanted, and didn’t have any fear or worry. I’d literally battled things when I thought I was going to die, when I thought people I loved were going to die. I wanted to follow what I thought was true and not be held back. It was very freeing. And now I really don’t like constraints because I spent years being truly constrained in a very bad way. It still crops up from time to time – such as when I was having the death threats – but nowhere near in the same way.”
During our hour-long conversation, Newport repeatedly spoons sugar into several cups of tea and uses laughter as a form of nervous punctuation, especially when recounting periods of stress or trauma. Is he part of the ecosystem of the new online radical right, I asked. He replied by pointing out that his parents were Labour voters and his grandparents Brexiteers: “Life’s complicated!” Above all, he wants to challenge consensus and groupthink, and use data to sharpen public understanding of system failure.
Newport aligns with Cummings – but also with Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff – in his critique of state failure. “Look at the justice system, look at policing, look at the courts, look at the prisons – there are a bunch of failures everywhere you look. Every part of the system is completely broken.”
Newport cites the backlog in the courts, “with people waiting three to four years for criminal trials”, as an example of system failure. “There was one day last November when a third of crown courts were shut! My mum said to me: ‘Why can’t the government just make the courts open?’ That would make sense, but it’s not happening. People are shocked when they hear the courts can choose to shut… If you try to nail down who is responsible, everyone can point to everyone else, and so no one is responsible.”
McSweeney has said that many people in the country have had “the hope beaten out of them”: they no longer believe change for the better is even possible. “It’s about more than system failure,” Newport said. “It’s people failure as well. People are not brave enough, they’re too constrained. They’re not able to look at the world and ask: ‘How do you fix this thing?’ Instead, they think: ‘How can I fix this thing in a way that my dinner parties would agree?’ The whole Bully campaign was a lesson in: how do I get it to be high-status to talk about this issue?”
If he is sceptical about the constraints of Westminster politics and what he describes as “the failure of government to act on what people want”, he believes in the potential of coordinated action. He mentions how the woke and environmental movements have influenced public policy. “My view is if you build coordinated groups, you can change the vibe and suddenly it becomes high-status to talk about it at dinner parties.”
You must take people’s frustration and anger in a constructive direction because the alternative is dangerous, Lawrence Newport said. For now, he will continue his campaigns. “In the end, I want to live in a country where things work, and my son is going to have a better life.”
[See also: Why China is winning]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall