In the eleventh installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, Stop Funding Fake News and Rachel Riley’s campaign against the Canary is exposed as fake in itself – but the damage was done. This is the fifth part of Chapter Three.

In 2021, Impress launched an investigation into the Canary alongside Skwawkbox, another independent, pro-Corbyn political website. Impress acted pursuant to a report published by Lord Mann, a vehement Corbyn critic and former Labour MP who was promoted to the House of Lords by the Tories. Mann’s report had accused both online publications of antisemitism.

The accusation was based, in part, on the research of Daniel Allington, an academic based at King’s College London. Allington was also ‘Head of Online Monitoring’ for the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) between June 2016 and September 2018. The CAA had been a fervent critic of Corbyn and had submitted the founding complaint that led to the EHRC investigation into the Labour Party, which is dealt with in more detail later. Allington was thanked in CCDH’s first publication, the aforementioned Don’t Feed the Trolls.

Impress investigation into the Canary and Skwawkbox: nothing to answer to

Impress approached Allington and asked for the entirety of his evidence implicating both sites. This was, in effect, the case for the prosecution against the Canary. The accusations were reviewed by Impress’ Regulatory Committee whose conclusions were confirmed by the Board. Both bodies were staffed by some of the most well respected figures in journalism and law, such as Board chairperson Richard Ayre. Ayre was the former deputy chief executive of BBC News and later the chair of the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee.

On reviewing the material, Impress noted that the majority of Allington’s chosen articles centred on the:

defence of Jeremy Corbyn or Corbynism (and in some cases criticism of Israel), criticism of the British Board of Deputies, and hypocrisy surrounding the reporting of the antisemitism crisis.

After considering all of this material, Impress found that it:

did not amount to discrimination against Jewish people.

It felt moved to add that those who:

disagree with the Publisher’s views on subjects such as Zionism may find these views offensive, adversarial or provocative but this in itself does not rise to the level of threat to, or targeting of, persons or groups on the basis of their protected characteristics.

SFFN’s aim to ‘eviscerate the economic base’ of the Canary

SFFN’s campaign was tendentious, untransparent, censorious – and startlingly successful. In August 2019, the Canary announced that, partly as a result of SFFN’s hostile campaign, it had been forced to downsize its workforce and move to an entirely new funding model. SFFN celebrated the coming unemployment of a number of young journalists. The following year, in his address to the State Department conference opened by Netanyahu, Imran Ahmed boasted of how SFFN’s methodology could:

completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.

Ahmed cited the Canary as a case study of success, gloating that the website:

went down from twenty-two staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it.

In December 2019, SFFN posted an update to a (largely unsuccessful) crowdfunding campaign in which it took credit for massively reducing the impact of the Canary and Evolve Politics during that year’s general election. “In 2017 the Fake News site The Canary received 6m views a month – in this general election it was cut to 1.4m”, SSFN trumpeted. “In 2017, the Fake News site Evolve Politics received 2m views a month – it is now 170,000”. In a further call for funding, SSFN argued that it was now time to “finish the job”.

While changes to Facebook’s algorithm also had an impact on the reach of the Canary and Evolve Politics, it seems likely that both sites did not wield the same influence in 2019 as they had in the 2017 general election, and that SFFN played a significant role in this diminution.

Independent media isolated bastions of pro-Corbyn progressivism

This may be obvious, but it is important to emphasise that both the Canary and Evolve Politics were pro-Labour Party websites when the party was led by Jeremy Corbyn. They both wrote favourably about the Labour Party and published information as well as arguments that would persuade voters to back Corbyn’s Labour over the Tories. Within Britain’s media ecosystem, which overall skewed heavily to the right, the Canary and Evolve Politics were isolated bastions of pro-Corbyn progressivism.

Amidst a non-stop barrage of absurd and unproven media allegations against the Labour Party, these websites functioned as fact-checkers. SFFN’s campaign was thus attacking a key source of support for the Labour Party. Indeed, it can be compellingly argued that the Labour Together Project’s offspring, SFFN, was effectively dedicated to undermining Labour’s own prospects during the 2019 general election. This would be unsurprising, considering that McSweeney’s own SWOT analysis had identified the election of a Labour government under Corbyn as an obstacle to achieving Labour Together’s so-called ‘renewal’.

One reason SFFN succeeded was that it harnessed the power of celebrity, as public figures with outsized platforms ensured that SFFN messages reverberated across social media. Rachel Riley was SFFN’s biggest asset. She maintains a strong relationship with Ahmed and CCDH. Shortly after CCDH was publicly launched in September 2019, Riley was appointed its sole ‘patron’. At the time of writing, Riley still describes herself on X (formerly Twitter) as ‘CCDH Ambassador’.

SFFN, Rachel Riley, and LAAS

Working with Riley, SFFN and CCDH found themselves at the coalface of the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’. By the time Riley began amplifying SFFN content, she had become close to LAAS, with whose members she repeatedly conversed on social media and which she endorsed on Twitter (alongside other contentious accounts such as the anonymous and pugnacious @gnasherjew).

Riley’s interactions with LAAS were not limited to social media. In late November 2019, only weeks before the general election, Riley caused outrage amongst some when she wore a shirt that featured an edited photograph of Jeremy Corbyn. The picture showed Corbyn being led away from an anti-apartheid protest by police in the mid-1980s wearing a large placard around his neck. In the original photograph, Corbyn’s placard read: “DEFEND THE RIGHT TO DEMONSTRATE AGAINST APARTHEID JOIN THIS PICKET”. This text was deleted on Riley’s shirt and replaced with the phrase: ‘JEREMY CORBYN IS A RACIST ENDEAVOUR”.

Facebook posts reveal that the shirt was designed and printed by a LAAS member, Zoe Kemp, who had given it to Riley in February 2019. Kemp shared a photo of Riley wearing the shirt in Riley’s kitchen, holding her Ragdoll cat. Kemp bragged to her Facebook friends:

I had dinner at hers last night. We are both anti racist activists too, so we do politics.

Like many LAAS activists, though unlike Riley, Kemp is not Jewish. Kemp, incidentally, had been stridently criticised in a 2016 Canary article after Kemp and a Guardian columnist, Nicholas Lezard, had joked on Facebook about an assassination plot against Corbyn. In the same exchange, Kemp also dismissed the UK’s first Black woman MP, Diane Abbott, as Corbyn’s “ex-shag”. This was just one example of the Canary’s critical reporting on the activities and political histories of people connected to LAAS, such as Hoffman and Kemp. Indeed, the site was one of the only outlets in the country to subject LAAS to journalistic scrutiny.

Riley’s libel case against Corbyn staffer Lauren Murray

The Canary had also run comments directly and explicitly critical of LAAS. This meant that when LAAS activists amplified SFFN’s attacks on the Canary, they were targeting a news outlet that had reported critically on their own organisation.

The extent of LAAS’ connection to Riley was further revealed during a libel case brought by Riley against the Labour Party staffer Laura Murray, who had previously been highlighted in the Sunday Times’ ‘hate factory’ article that had been covertly seeded by McSweeney and Ahmed. As noted previously, Murray was the stakeholder manager in Corbyn’s office. Shortly afterward, she moved to the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit to help process antisemitism complaints.

The libel case had its origin on March 3, 2019, when Corbyn visited the Finsbury Park Mosque, which had recently been the site of a terrorist attack by a far-right figure. Corbyn was attacked and punched in the head by a man holding an egg. Later that day, Riley tweeted out a screenshot of an old tweet by left-wing commentator Owen Jones. In that tweet, Jones had discussed the egging of Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP. Jones had commented:

If you don’t want to be egged, don’t be a Nazi.

Riley retweeted Jones’ post, commenting “Good advice” alongside a picture of a rose – the symbol of the Labour Party – and an egg. Murray responded later that day. “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque day and was attacked by a Brexiteer”, Murray tweeted:

Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked. She is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever.

LAAS at the heart of the libel case

Riley sued Murray claiming that this libellously misrepresented the content of her tweet. Court records show that Riley’s legal team relied heavily on the evidence of a LAAS activist and spokesperson, Emma Feltham (alias Emma Picken), to prove that Murray’s tweet had spread widely. Feltham provided screenshots for use by Riley’s legal team. Feltham/Picken explained that she was a member of LAAS and had been:

very concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the Labour Party and chose to take an active role in monitoring what was happening in that respect.

The evidentiary basis of Riley’s trial thus rested heavily on the work of Feltham/Picken, a spokesperson for LAAS.

Riley posted her ‘Good advice’ tweet only two days before SFFN launched its public campaign, and three days before she began amplifying their work. The judge found in Riley’s favour, stating that Murray had failed to capture that there were two “obvious” meanings that could be inferred from Riley’s tweet. In one meaning, Riley could be seen to be criticising Owen Jones, effectively claiming that it was hypocritical of him to cheer on the egging of Griffin but deplore the egging of Corbyn. Nobody deserved to be egged, according to this version, and to celebrate one and criticise another amounted to hypocrisy.

The second ‘obvious’ meaning was that Corbyn “deserved to be egged for his political views”. But the court found that Riley’s tweet

. . . falls to be characterised as provocative, even mischievous. It was calculated to provoke a reaction and it did.

The court further found that Riley “was quite aware that [her tweet] was capable of being read in both senses”, even if she intended only to convey the “hypocrisy” meaning. And she could “not complain” that her tweet provoked a furious reaction after many people interpreted it to mean that she believed Corbyn deserved to be egged.

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.