In the eighth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, Morgan McSweeney colludes with Gabriel Pogrund at the Times – and it starts a chain of events that will lead to Corbyn’s downfall. This is the second part of Chapter Three.
McSweeney and Ahmed got to work. Starting in either January or February 2018, Ahmed and McSweeney joined a raft of Corbyn-supporting Facebook groups, many of which had tens of thousands of members. McSweeney used Labour Together’s money to commission YouGov to poll two of the largest groups, in order to develop a picture of members’ demographics and beliefs. At the same time, McSweeney and Ahmed trawled the Facebook groups and recorded every post they could find that they deemed to constitute ‘hate’ of one kind or another: racism, misogyny, violent language, or – most consequentially – antisemitism.
Labour Together gets to work constructing the narrative
“McSweeney ensured the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times“, Pogrund and Maguire write in their 2025 book recounting Starmer’s rise to power. How McSweeney achieved this is not clarified. But unstated in their book is that the Sunday Times reporting that resulted from McSweeney’s efforts was written up by Pogrund himself, who was one of four journalists credited on the stories.
Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory, the Sunday Times front-page headline screamed on April 1, 2018. A second article on the inside pages, headlined Vitriol and Threats of Violence: The Ugly Face of Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabal, fleshed out the story. Presented in an air of breathless scandal, both stories were examples of the arguably alarmist reporting on the ‘antisemitism crisis’ that would make it such an ungainly muddle and fuel much left-wing scepticism of how the media addressed this complex topic. As such, they merit a detailed deconstruction.
At the heart of the stories was a ‘dossier’ comprising two thousand incidents of ‘hate’, which had been identified by Sunday Times journalists working alongside unidentified ‘whistleblowers’ for two months – McSweeney and Ahmed. These had been found by combing through twenty Corbyn-supporting Facebook groups, which had a combined membership of four hundred thousand people. Many of these groups were ‘open’, meaning that anyone in the world could post to them.
The ‘incidents’ largely consisted of comments posted by Facebook users in the groups. The article quoted a professor dubbing these groups “online hate factories”: the implication being that the groups, which were also said to be central to Corbynism’s on-the-ground political operations, were pumping out filth on an industrialised scale. The article hinted that the rhetoric in such groups could eventually give rise to political violence.
‘Online hate factories’: far from it
A very different picture was painted by Wendy Patterson in a rebuttal published by openDemocracy four days later but universally ignored in the mainstream press. Patterson was an administrator of a Facebook group that fell within the scope of the Labour Together Project’s investigation. She estimated that there were approximately four million user posts across the twenty Facebook groups identified in the investigation. While the existence of two thousand ‘hate’ posts was of course to be regretted, they constituted a miniscule fraction of the groups’ total activity. Far from being “online hate factories” churning out antisemitic bile, the scale of hateful content was so small, she believed, that it was virtually:
impossible to find on the groups unless you conduct a 2 month investigation specifically searching for antisemitism.
Patterson was also troubled by the implication that administrators of the Facebook groups were either supportive of ‘hate’ posts or else delinquent in their duties as moderators. She described her extensive efforts alongside other administrators to develop codes of good practice for her group – what they referred to internally as the ‘Corbyn standards’ of:
zero tolerance for racism, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, all discriminatory language or personal abuse.
She explained how there was a meta-group where administrators from multiple Corbyn-supporting groups met to exchange insights and guidance on best practice, and how administrators repeatedly encouraged ordinary users to report every breach they came across so they could refer them to Facebook. Considering the scale of activity on the groups, she argued, there was always the chance that problematic posts could fall through the cracks – but it was not for want of trying.
Serious antisemitism incidents versus the less-than-convincing
The Sunday Times articles, like much mainstream media reporting of the ‘antisemitism crisis’, would mix together real and serious incidents with others that were less-than-convincing. In the former camp, one user was identified as posting that Hitler “should have finished the job” while another claimed the Holocaust was a “big lie”. Ian Love, a Momentum organiser, was rightly excoriated for posting that Tony Blair was “Jewish to the core” and for telling the Sunday Times that the “Rothschilds control all the money in the world”.
But then the article lingered on the fact that Corbyn staffers were members of the group, including Laura Murray (then a stakeholder manager in Corbyn’s office) and James Meadway, a staffer in Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s office and now a respected left-wing economics commentator. The article noted that Murray had “seen” a post by another user that dismissed claims of antisemitism in the Labour Party as a “Blairite to far-right” conspiracy designed to damage the party. The article disclosed that the offending material had been posted by Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, but failed to mention that Wimborne-Idrissi was herself Jewish and a prominent voice in pro-Palestinian activism. Murray told the paper that she had no recollection of ever seeing Wimborne-Idrissi’s post.
Readers were thus invited to be scandalised by the claim that a junior official in Corbyn’s office had seen, but neither endorsed nor interacted with, a solitary post made by a Jewish Labour Party member that expressed scepticism about how claims of antisemitism were being used to undermine Corbynism. And how outrageous were Wimborne-Idrissi’s comments, really, considering that we now know her posts were identified and reported as part of a project led by an associate and protégé of Peter Mandelson using undeclared donor funds and premeditated misdirection to destroy Corbynism?
A collaborative affair: Labour Together, pro-Israel groups, and the creation of CCDH
While McSweeney and Ahmed were secretly feeding alarmist stories to journalists to build the narrative that Corbyn’s Labour was awash in antisemitism, they were simultaneously establishing what I believe to be the Labour Together Project’s most problematic known initiative: the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its sister campaign Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN).
I first exposed Labour Together’s undisclosed role in creating CCDH and SFFN in articles published by Matt Taibbi’s Racket News in 2023 and 2024. These were based on three sets of documents discovered in Labour Party files.
The first set of documents was drafted by Owain Mumford, a parliamentary assistant to Labour Together’s Steve Reed MP. Mumford wrote two briefing documents that were intended to be given to Jewish Chronicle journalist Lee Harpin, seemingly in preparation for an interview or profile of Reed. The profile and interview did not materialise. The documents extolled Reed’s role in tackling antisemitism in the Labour Party.
One of the briefing documents was titled ‘Steve’s Record on Fighting Anti-Semitism’. It said that Reed had:
created Labour Together to bring together people across the Labour Party to combat the threat of extremist politics and antisemitism.
This was an odd claim given that, for the first four years of its existence, Labour Together barely mentioned antisemitism in public at all.
CCDH and the SFFN: two sides of the same coin
According to Mumford’s briefing, Labour Together’s role in fighting ‘antisemitism’ focused on the creation of CCDH. “Labour Together set up the Campaign for Countering Digital Hate [sic] by raising start-up funds and providing office space”, the briefing explained. At the time, remember, Labour Together was not declaring its donations, in violation of the law. The briefing further noted that CCDH:
started life with a campaign to stop corporates from paying for advertising space on anti-Semitic websites
and political blogs. These sites deploy a form of micro-advertising farmed out by marketing firms who pay per websites or click. CCDH would take a screenshot of a corporate’s advertising on a page alongside anti-Semitic propaganda and would then bombard the image at the corporate’s social media channels, using celebrity endorsers to call on them to stop funding hate.
This description is important because it actually describes the work of SFFN and not CCDH, as shown below. On this version, at least, it would appear that CCDH emerged out of SFFN. This was striking both in describing the questionable roots of CCDH and because, for the first year of SFFN’s existence, the campaign did not publicly acknowledge any connection to CCDH. The founding of CCDH was a collaborative affair. Mumford’s briefing claimed that:
Steve Reed MP engaged directly with the Community Security Trust (CST) and the Jewish Leadership Council for consultation and advice on setting it up.
This involvement of the CST and the JLC has never been publicly disclosed. At the time, Trevor Chinn – a Labour Together director and the group’s second largest donor – was vice president of the JLC. Neither the CST nor the JLC replied substantively when Racket News approached them with the allegation.
The CST is a charity that “protects British Jews from antisemitism”, according to its website. This includes monitoring antisemitic incidents and providing, or overseeing the provision of, physical protection for Jewish schools and other Jewish cultural meeting points. The CST relies heavily on funding from the UK government. Serious questions must be asked about whether it was appropriate for the CST, as a charity with significant ties to the government, to be advising a party political faction behind closed doors on such a divisive (and as we will see, disreputable) project.
Enter: the Board of Deputies, the CST, and the JLC
The second set of documents was also drafted by Mumford and comprised his minutes of a meeting convened on December 2, 2020, between Reed – then shadow communities secretary – and several Jewish community organisations. Attendees included Amanda Bowman, vice president of the Board of Deputies in charge of the organisation’s Defence and Group Relations division; Daniel Sugarman, also of the Board of Deputies; Trevor Chinn, appearing along with two colleagues on behalf of the JLC; and Dave Rich, head of policy at the CST.
“Dave Rich remarked that the CST saw first-hand the importance of Labour Together’s work tackling Anti-Semitism [sic] in left-wing spaces”, the minutes recorded. It is not known what ‘work’ this referred to. Rich refused to be interviewed for this book, claiming that I had already made up my mind about the issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party.
In 2016, Rich published a book called The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn and Antisemitism. Rich was a strident critic of Corbyn. His book argues that left-wing critiques of Israel can amount to coded expressions of antisemitism, and that Corbyn’s Labour was allowing this distinct form of antisemitism to flourish. In 2019, Rich made the same point in a bombshell BBC Panorama documentary entitled Is Labour Anti-Semitic?:
if you look back at the antisemitism that existed in the 1930s – Jews using their money, Jews controlling
governments. Instead you see the same ideas being directed . . . toward Israel. These kinds of ideas are much more acceptable on the left and in pro-Palestinian campaigning circles because they talk about Israel, they don’t talk about Jews – but actually, underneath the surface, it’s the same thing.
Reed’s antisemitic comment: glaring double standards
Less than six months prior to the minuted meeting, Reed had caused a mini-scandal when he tweeted that Richard Desmond – a British Jewish businessman – was “puppet master to the Tories”. This comment had been condemned as an antisemitic trope and Reed apologised profusely the following day. In a gesture of striking magnanimity, Amanda Bowman kicked off the Board of Deputies’ contribution to the meeting by reassuring that she was:
confident that Steve was unaware he [i.e., Desmond] was Jewish and of the context of his remark.
Bowman’s remarkably lenient attitude towards an offence that would have terminated the careers of lesser – or leftier – Labour figures teed-up Reed to present his record of fighting antisemitism. Reed referenced the work of Labour Together, assuring the assembled parties that “he was active in the fight internally against anti-Semitism through Labour Together” while he served on Corbyn’s shadow front bench. Chinn burnished Reed’s reputation by affirming that “Steve for many years had been a very good friend to the Jewish community” and noted that Labour Together had “played a significant role” in getting Starmer elected as Labour leader.
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.