The middle-class Corbynista rabble behind Don’t Pay fuel bills rebellion

DON’T Pay UK, the campaign calling for mass non-payment of fuel bills, has been organised by hardLeft militants determined to create civil unrest and ‘break the system’, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

So far, Don’t Pay has maintained a cloak of anonymity, stating it was ‘started by a group of us who are friends’.

To date, 105,000 people have pledged via the website to stop paying their energy bills from October 1 in response to soaring prices.

Yet in reality, Don’t Pay is a political project whose organisers have links to a series of direct action campaigns including Extinction Rebellion and what they describe as ‘post-Corbyn projects’.

At the heart of it is Alessio Lunghi, 44, a veteran of the anarchist scene and known to police across Europe for helping organise anti-capitalist riots. This newspaper has uncovered a YouTube video in which Lunghi, a middle-class university drop-out, can be seen speaking to activists in an online meeting.

‘Hi everyone, my name’s Al from Don’t Pay,’ he says. ‘I live in London. It’s been a very intense five weeks since we launched Don’t Pay. I’ll give you as much information as you want.’

Describing the campaign as anonymous for ‘various reasons which I won’t go into’, Lunghi says he is connected to ‘an alliances working group’. ‘It’s the usual,’ he continues. ‘We’ve got climate NGOs, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, some post-Corbyn projects, some unions, some other kind of social movements as well, housing unions, that want to support us.’

Revealing the campaign’s true nature, he says: ‘We saw energy bills as being a kind of point at which we felt a mass movement could come about. This might be a thing that can be deepened into a very serious political crisis on the scale we haven’t seen for 30 years in the UK.’

Direct action campaigns such as Don’t Pay have caused disquiet among some traditional Left-wing activists, who regard them as counter-productive.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one activist with close knowledge of Britain’s militant fringe said: ‘The anarchist movement Plan C is at the heart of this. There is this overarching plot going on. Don’t Pay are looking to build political infrastructure on the left for what happens when the Labour Party destroys itself.’

Among those working with Mr Lunghi is activist Matthew Chessum, who is known to have handed out Don’t Pay leaflets at a trade union march in London on June 18 – the day Don’t Pay was founded.

Mr Chessum is a former member of the Corbynite Momentum group. He refused to criticise violence during student protests of 2010, saying: ‘I don’t think I’m going to wade in and condemn violence from protesters.’ He is also linked to the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, a Communist splinter group.

On the YouTube video, Lunghi is introduced to Rob Callender, an Extinction Rebellion veteran, yoga teacher and actor who has been in three episodes of Game of Thrones.

Mr Lunghi, brought up in Camberwell in South-East London, is said to have dropped out of his engineering degree at London University after discovering anarchism.

Last night, another activist said: ‘The problem with these guys is they’re generally well-heeled, they don’t really know what struggling is like. They’ve got no idea.’

Mr Lunghi and Mr Chessum could not be reached for comment.