In the seventh installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we look at how Labour Together embedded itself in the fake antisemitism crisis – including the infamous Angela Eagle ‘brickgate’ and homophobia crisis. This is the first part of Chapter Three.
What was the Labour Together Project doing with Labour Together’s huge pot of unlawfully undisclosed donations? Thanks to previously unseen Labour Party documents and more recent contemporary disclosures, we now know at least part of the answer: the project was fanning and fuelling the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ that would besmirch Corbynism’s reputation and enable the Starmer Project to impose an iron grip on the party.
Labour Together: seeding stories, starting astroturf campaigns against independent media
How did the Labour Together Project intervene in the ‘antisemitism crisis’? First, McSweeney and his allies, including Imran Ahmed, seeded and placed a raft of media stories alleging that the Labour Party under Corbyn had a serious antisemitism problem that a Corbyn-aligned bureaucracy was failing to properly address. Details of the Labour Together Project’s role in fuelling the controversy were only revealed in 2025 – a shocking lack of disclosure about a crisis that helped transform British politics.
Second, internal party documents and recent revelations confirm that Labour Together was directly involved in creating an organisation called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its deeply problematic astroturf campaign, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN played a frankly unforgivable role in inflaming the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ well beyond what the evidence warranted. SFFN also evinced a disturbing hostility to free speech and democratic media as it set out to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working journalists on the basis of claims that were at best contentious.
Third, even while SFFN was destroying the careers of journalists at left-wing news outlets with largely unfounded allegations of misinformation, McSweeney worked ‘secretly’ with the Jewish Labour Movement to ‘engineer’ the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation into the Labour Party over allegations of antisemitism. I deal with this aspect of the Labour Together Project’s involvement in the ‘antisemitism crisis’ in Chapter Eight.
The room where it happened
For many of the people who have been caught up in the antisemitism controversy, or witnessed how it disoriented and demoralised Labour’s briefly ascendant left wing, there was always a lingering sense that there was some hidden hand guiding and stoking a moral panic that raged for years in the media – much of it powered by claims that were misleading and, at times, absurd.
The truth is more complicated. There was no single organising force, no one smoke-filled room in which all conspirators met to plot their next move. Like most things in politics, the antisemitism controversy was propelled by diverse impulses and actors. Some of the furore was genuine and organic, as many people were authentically hurt and alarmed by evidence of undeniable antisemitism that was uncovered. Some of it, though, was disingenuous, as antisemitism claims were opportunistically exploited by people who treated a profoundly important issue as a cudgel to beat a political movement they opposed for other reasons and which they could not best through democratic means.
But we also now know, many years later, that there was at least one hidden hand orchestrating the ‘antisemitism crisis’: the Labour Together Project. And there was also at least one room in which plotting took place: Room 216 at the China Works hot-desking offices in South London, where McSweeney and his closest allies covertly inflamed the ‘antisemitism crisis’ and undermined the elected Corbyn leadership so that they might one day rule over the ashes of the party they had set alight.
And when the Starmer Project took up the baton as the Labour Together Project’s next act, it would cynically use the ‘antisemitism crisis’ – a controversy that the Labour Together Project had itself exacerbated – as a pretext to marginalise the Labour left while disempowering the party’s membership at large.
Factional bedfellows
McSweeney’s plot to undermine Corbynism and incubate its replacement was carried out in utmost secrecy. Only a handful of insiders were ever allowed access to the inner sanctum where McSweeney’s schemes unfolded. Indeed, the need for secrecy was so overwhelming that only a tightly controlled selection of people ever visited Labour Together’s office, the aforementioned Room 216. Only three people, besides McSweeney, were allegedly allowed to work from there. Two were junior staffers: Hannah O’Rourke and Will Prescott. The third was McSweeney’s contemporary and a man who shared his visceral antipathy to Corbynism: Imran Ahmed.
McSweeney, Ahmed, and Steve Reed MP would together establish CCDH and SFFN, both of which would declare war on what they dubbed online ‘misinformation’. Ahmed, now based in the US, is the current CEO of CCDH, in which capacity he rails against alleged misinformation in the New York Times and on CNN while endorsing censorship legislation that many human rights groups consider a draconian threat to democracy. Since 2020, CCDH has grown into one of the most influential groups tackling ‘misinformation’ on both sides of the Atlantic, supported by millions in donations (the sources of which CCDH often does not identify).
As I have extensively detailed elsewhere, Ahmed had a long history in the Labour Party – and a long history of butting heads with the Corbyn movement. After an initial stint with Andy Slaughter MP he went to work for Hillary Benn, another MP and son of the famous Labour left-winger Tony Benn. Hillary Benn had been drafted into Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet. When he defied Corbyn’s position by delivering an impassioned speech arguing for British bombing raids in Syria, in December 2015, he was reading words allegedly written by Ahmed. Corbyn eventually sacked Benn in July 2016 after it emerged that he had been encouraging ministers to resign if Corbyn refused to accede to a motion of no confidence.
Imran Ahmed: ‘an absolute agent of horror’
By then, Ahmed’s name was already the subject of dark whispers in Corbyn’s office. One LOTO insider described Ahmed to me, with admittedly knowing hyperbole, as ‘an absolute agent of horror’. Ahmed was widely suspected (albeit with no hard proof) of being the source of a raft of damaging leaks about the Corbyn project.
Ahmed’s career would appear to make him an unlikely choice for organisations claiming to fight misinformation. For example, while working for Hillary Benn MP, Ahmed collaborated with a Guardian journalist on a story that would run during the 2015 general election about Grant Shapps. Shapps was a prominent minister in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government and co-chairman of the Conservative Party.
The article alleged that Shapps had created a fake Wikipedia profile (called Contribsx) to edit his own Wikipedia page. In an internal party email Ahmed claimed that the piece was based on a joint investigation by himself and the Guardian. Alas, the story fell apart in spectacular style a few months later after an investigation by Wikipedia’s arcane audit committees comprehensively repudiated the claims.
‘Brickgate’: fabricated for faux outrage
Ahmed then moved to work with Angela Eagle MP, who would soon challenge Corbyn for leadership of the Labour Party. During this period, Ahmed amplified an allegation that angry Corbynites had smashed Eagle’s window with a brick after she announced her leadership challenge. This incident had been dubbed ‘Brickgate’ in the media. In the midst of the resulting furore, Ahmed released a press statement on behalf of Eagle’s office that included numerous questionable claims for which he was later chastised by independent media. Ahmed’s statement, for example, alleged that a planned event at a Luton hotel where Eagle was slated to appear had been cancelled because the venue received threats.
Alas, the hotel quickly pooh-poohed the story. ‘Brickgate’, an entirely ludicrous affair, would nevertheless bolster the media narrative that left-wing members of the Labour Party who supported Corbyn were intolerant reprobates. It was a narrative that Ahmed and McSweeney would continue to foster, covertly, when they started working together in 2018.
Dogged investigations by independent bloggers and media outlets revealed that Eagle’s office window had not been smashed (it was instead a window on the ground floor in a shared office stairwell); the police had no evidence this incident was linked to Eagle; and there was no evidence the window had been broken by a brick. It eventually emerged that there wasn’t even a brick on the scene – just a stray piece of masonry on the road, which may or may not have played a role in the damage. Nobody knew, in fact, what had broken the window, or who had done it, or why – yet the incident still somehow retains its force as a shorthand for the alleged thuggishness of Corbynism.
Unsubstantiated accusations of homophobia
Brickgate was part of a broader attempt to defend Eagle’s position against the real prospect that her mostly leftwing constituency would organise and vote to deselect her. It coincided with an allegation made by Eagle’s supporters, and then by Eagle herself, that, at a critical meeting where left-wingers won control of the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP), members had engaged in rampant homophobia, including limping their wrists at a young gay man. The claim was never properly substantiated. It was also fiercely disputed by people who, unlike Eagle, were physically present at the meeting.
Emma Runswick, the self-identified ‘queer’ daughter of the CLP meeting’s chair Kathy Runswick, wrote in the New Statesman of how unimaginable it would be that her loving, accepting mother would ever tolerate such gross and blatant homophobia. In fact, the day after the meeting at which Kathy was said to have allowed homophobia to run amok (and at which she was elected chair of the CLP), she attended her daughter’s wedding – to another woman. Unsurprisingly, despite years of investigations and alarmist reporting, not a single individual was ever sanctioned or found guilty of homophobia in this case.
Nevertheless, Eagle’s supporters flooded the bureaucracy with complaints alleging that homophobia at the meeting, alongside a generalised air of left-wing menace, meant it was no longer safe or appropriate for the CLP to convene meetings. Of course, if the party agreed, the newly elected left-wing leadership of the CLP would be unable to move motions that could censure Eagle – or seek to replace her as an MP. Emails show that at this time, Labour Party bureaucrats opposed to the Corbyn leadership were working with Eagle to ensure her CLP remained suspended in order to prevent her deselection.
Working to undermine party democracy and expel journalists
The same emails show that Ahmed was frequently corresponding with Labour Party bureaucrats – including the now-infamous Sam Matthews, an official in the party’s internal disciplinary unit, whose activities are discussed in more detail later. Documents show that Matthews was frequently at the coalface of a bureaucratic fightback against the Corbynite left. In one email, Matthews acknowledged speaking to Ahmed and described how Ahmed was involved in desperately trying to manage processes in Eagle’s CLP to protect her position from the presumed wishes of local party members.
Even as he was working with Eagle and anti-Corbyn bureaucrats to undermine party democracy, Ahmed was also using his connections to try and convince the Labour Party to expel journalists who happened to be party members. By this point, Eagle’s office was framing expressions contesting the claims of homophobia as a form of- you guessed it – homophobic denialism.
Ahmed left Eagle’s office in late 2017 or early 2018. From there he went to work with Morgan McSweeney. Ahmed’s history in the party is important for three reasons: first, it showed that Ahmed was a factional, anti-Corbyn spin-doctor. He was responsible for seeding and amplifying contentious stories in the media that damaged the left by depicting it as a hotbed of hate, bullying, and abuse. Second, it revealed Ahmed’s intolerance of alternative media outlets that constrained the ability of the Labour right to foster political narratives unhindered. Third, it illustrated Ahmed’s uncanny ability to recode the legitimate contestation of controversial controversial claims as ‘bullying’ and ‘libelous’ conduct spread via ‘conspiracy theory channels’. Ahmed would bring all of these qualities to the table when he joined McSweeney in Room 216.
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.
Featured image via the Canary
By Paul Holden
This post was originally published on Canary.