In the twelfth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, the Canary and its supporters push back against Stop Funding Fake News and Rachel Riley – but then, they come for Corbyn. This is the sixth part of Chapter Three.
In late March 2019, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) scored its first major success when the Macmillan Cancer charity responded to its campaign against the Canary. Macmillan was alerted to the fact that one of its appeals for donations appeared at the bottom of an article in which the Canary criticised the former Labour MP Joan Ryan.
Ryan had left the Labour Party to join The Independent Group, the breakaway splinter that became Change UK. Prior to this defection, Ryan had been the chair of the pro-Israel lobby group Labour Friends of Israel. She had previously received donations from Labour Together’s Trevor Chinn. She is not Jewish.
The Canary article in question recounted how Ryan had travelled to the US to address a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committees (AIPAC), a leading pro-Israel advocacy group. The Canary reported that Ryan’s presentation before AIPAC had “smeared” Corbyn with claims of antisemitism, including the allegation that he was “friends” with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Dave Gordstein and the engine of hate
Whether or not one agrees with the Canary’s argument, it is an extraordinary stretch to suggest that it was an exercise in fake news. The article was sourced and its factual basis was true. To be sure, the Canary’s interpretation of those facts was up for debate, but such is the nature of all political media. Nevertheless, Macmillan was urged to “please stop funding fake news” in a tweet that copied the Canary headline and included a picture of Macmillan’s ad. The tweet tagged SFFN’s Twitter account and included the hashtag #sffnews. It was sent by an account with the username @ed_derwent on March 25.
The appeal was amplified by Rachel Riley the following day. Within hours, Macmillan announced that “we are taking action to remove this placement whilst we review the platforms used for our online ads”. SFFN would tweet out their fulsome thanks for ‘Dave’. But who was Dave? Dave was none other than David Gordstein: the Twitter account, @ed_derwent, which only had a handful of followers, used the descriptor name ‘Dave Gordstein’, the strikingly Jewish-sounding pseudonym of LAAS’ non-Jewish Euan Philips.
The Canary: demonetised at the behest of a fake Jewish-sounding Twitter profile
To recap: the Canary, arguably the most widely read alternative media outlet that supported Corbynism, was being demonetised at the behest of a fake Jewish-sounding Twitter profile run by a non-Jewish man, as part of a broader SFFN astroturf campaign that hid its connections to CCDH, Labour Together, Imran Ahmed, and sitting MPs. This, at least in part, was what the Labour Together Project was presumably doing with Labour Together’s undisclosed pot of funding: celebrating the ‘David Gordsteins’ of the world as they destroyed the careers and livelihoods of young journalists, some of whom had written proudly of their Jewish cultural roots – all in the name of fighting antisemitism.
Macmillan’s decision infuriated many left-wing Twitter followers. Within hours, Twitter users reacted with their own campaign organised around the hashtag #BoycottRachelRiley, which began trending on Twitter. The hashtag was treated as antisemitic by, amongst others, the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The hashtag “tells you just about everything you need to know about these people”, the Board was quoted as having said in the Jewish Chronicle:
Racists and racism-apologists, attacking a Jewish woman for speaking out against antisemitism.
Dave Rich of the CST commented that:
#BoycottRachelRiley is what happens when you speak out about antisemitism. It’s a double-punch: first the antisemitism, then the bullying to shut you up’.
Rich’s response presaged an astonishing report published by the Community Security Trust (CST) in August 2019 called Engine of Hate: The Online Networks Behind the Labour Party Antisemitism Crisis. The report purported to track a web of ‘antisemitic’ networks backing the Labour Party under Corbyn and charged that articles published by the likes of The Canary had fuelled this bigotry. The report traced accounts using hashtags implicated in the party’s antisemitism controversy. One of those hashtags was #BoycottRachelRiley. CST claimed that the hashtag was developed and used to:
promote the online bullying of a public personality who had repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism.
#BoycottRachelRiley: hashtag retaliating to fake news smears
This was chilling. #BoycottRachelRiley was, after all, a defensive response to a campaign launched by SFFN and housed inside or alongside CCDH – a campaign the CST itself has discreetly advised. This campaign was based on the smear that a popular, left-wing, and independently regulated media website was nothing more than a “fake news” factory “deliberately” making up “lies” to spread “hate”, including antisemitism.
When CST published Engine of Hate, garnering fulsome coverage in the Guardian and Jewish Chronicle, it had the effect of linking numerous people to allegations that seriously tainted their reputations. Some of these people were Jewish – like Heather Mendick, who woke up one morning to lurid coverage of how she, a Jewish Labour Party member, was part of an antisemitic “engine room”.
Seen in this context, what the CST report represented was the hostile surveillance of left-wing social media users, many Jewish, who had been provoked by an inflammatory astroturf campaign in which the CST had played its own undisclosed role. More importantly, the SFFN’s dishonest and anti-pluralist campaign had been incubated by the same team that would deliver Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party, and, upon Starmer’s 2024 election victory, be elevated to the highest levels of state power.
SFFN targets right-wing figures
As well as demonetising Labour-supporting websites, SFFN also staged a problematic intervention in the European parliamentary elections of May 2019.
On May 23, SFFN posted a lengthy thread about participants in the election. “We’re not party-political”, SFFN absurdly promised:
but we do campaign against fake news . . . Here are the fake news merchants involved in today’s #EUelections2019.
SFFN’s thread targeted two right-wing figures, Tommy Robinson and Michael Heaver. Heaver, a journalist, was also the Brexit Party candidate for the East of England and co-founder of SFFN’s target Westmonster. He would be elected to the European Parliament in the 2019 campaign alongside the Brexit Party chairperson, Richard Tice. Tice subsequently formed and ran the Reform Party with former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage.
SFFN complained that Heaver was the editor of the “fake news website” Westmonster, also pointing out that he had previously worked as Farage’s press officer. SFFN’s ‘evidence’ threads against Westmonster, posted when SFFN was launched and thereafter, included numerous allusive photographs of Farage and Donald Trump, amid complaints that:
fake news website Westmonster, co-founded by Arron Banks, is now effectively a propaganda channel for Nigel
Farage’s #Brexit Party.
“Please don’t vote for those who spread lies, bigotry or hate”, the May 23 thread implored:
And make sure you vote today!
Electoral interference
I do not support the politics and opinions of the likes of Farage and Heaver. But this is beside the point. SFFN’s Twitter thread was a direct and material intervention in a UK election, which sought to convince people who they should and should not vote for. It is manifestly problematic for an astroturf campaign funded with resources not declared to the Electoral Commission in violation of electoral law, and secretly created by an organisation that counted multiple sitting Labour Party MPs among its directors, to attempt to influence electoral outcomes.
What a fillip to Farage, Tice, and Reform, who can now legitimately claim that the current chief of staff to the prime minister was responsible for creating a secret astroturf campaign that tried to ‘cancel’ a news website sympathetic to their views, and which used its censorious mode to try and influence the outcome of a major national election to the detriment of the Brexit Party – all in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’. But for those concerned about the rise of Reform and the health of British democracy, and those who fear that SFFN’s history could be turned to Reform’s advantage, the real question is: How could McSweeney and Ahmed have been so irresponsible?
Engineering the EHRC investigation into Corbyn’s Labour Party
The story of the Labour Together Project, CCDH, and SFFN is important for a host of reasons: first, there is little doubt that the Labour Together Project drove major stories in the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’, without public knowledge of their involvement and based on a melange of serious and sensationalised claims. It did so both by working directly with the media and indirectly by launching the SFFN campaign, which itself fuelled media coverage conveying that there was a serious problem with antisemitism on the Corbyn-supporting left.
As discussed later, the Labour Together Project also helped the Jewish Labour Movement to ‘engineer’ the EHRC investigation into Corbyn’s Labour Party. The Labour Together Project was thus a major hidden hand driving a crisis that would have devastating consequences for not just the British left but also the very fabric of British democracy and those people in Britain who needed a redistributive, democratising government to help them get by.
In addition, as I show later, the ‘antisemitism crisis’ would also frame and haunt the Labour Party’s response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Premeditated, politically-motivated campaign to destroy Corbynism
Put otherwise, there were indeed powerful and hidden actors driving the ‘antisemitism crisis’. Those actors were simultaneously engaged in a premeditated, politically motivated campaign to destroy Corbynism and then recapture the Labour Party for the right. This campaign – including those elements intended to foment the ‘antisemitism crisis’ – unfolded under the cover of purposeful misdirection and was funded by illegally undeclared donations.
While all this played out, those same actors were working secretly with other important players in the ‘antisemitism crisis’ like the Jewish Labour Movement and the Jewish Leadership Council, on whose board one of Labour Together’s key funders sat. It would be obtuse not to acknowledge that the ‘antisemitism crisis’ narrative has to be problematised and understood in this light.
At the very least, promiscuous allegations of antisemitic ‘denialism’ have to be rethought. It was never persuasive to reflexively stigmatise as antisemitic any speculation about ulterior political agendas driving the ‘antisemitism crisis’. Such an attitude is now wholly unpersuasive because this is just what the Labour Together Project was doing.
When left-wingers railed against ‘fifth columnists’, ‘Trojan horses’ or ‘wreckers’ when confronted by allegations of pervasive antisemitism in the party, perhaps they weren’t engaging in Jew-hate but instead divining a truth that had been deliberately obscured and which has taken years to emerge. Or, maybe they were engaging in Jew-hate. Who knows? The water has been so muddied by the Labour Together Project that it may forever be impossible to tell.
Covert machinations to smear independent investigative journalism
Second, SFFN’s covert machinations showed how unethical the Labour Together Project’s modus operandi was.
SFFN targeted factional opponents while presenting itself as non-partisan; smeared independent, fact-based journalism as ‘fake news’; and implicitly pilloried left-wing Jews in the name of fighting antisemitism. It will be forever to the Labour Together Project’s discredit that it helped to create such a shameful operation. It says much about Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party that his candidacy emerged from, and was embedded in, a project that could conceive of and execute a campaign as appalling as SFFN.
Third, SFFN proved a brutally effective method of policing so-called ‘denialism’. By demonetising the Canary, SFFN sent a powerful message that anyone who questioned the dominant narrative about Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ would be destroyed – a narrative being manufactured, at least in part, by McSweeney and Ahmed themselves. Meanwhile, the lack of publicly available information about who was running SFFN precluded effective rebuttal.
Establishing ‘denialism’ as a thought-crime would have profound implications. As the rest of this book shows, countless Labour Party figures, including many left-wing Jews, would be accused of antisemitism for alleging that the ‘antisemitism crisis’ was at least partially driven by a political impetus to destroy Corbynism; or, alternatively, that reporting on the alleged crisis tended to overstate the prevalence and severity of the problem. Corbyn himself would eventually be turfed out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for making this precise claim in October 2020 – a decision in which Morgan McSweeney would play a key role. But our knowledge of the Labour Together Project now confirms that these claims were credible, and, indeed, that McSweeney must have known them to be so.
Starmer’s people and the implications of Labour Together
Finally, the murky history of SFFN and CCDH could come back to bite Starmer, now sitting as prime minister. Ahmed and the CCDH would migrate to the US after the spectre of Corbynism had been vanquished. From this new perch, they began targeting populist politicians, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Their influential advocacy for censoring social media sites provoked X’s owner Elon Musk into a “war” against the organisation and attracted the ire of the incoming Trump administration, which promised that CCDH would move to the “top of the list” of investigative targets upon election.
If and when the notoriously vindictive Trump administration, in which Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have played a key role, realises that one of its ‘top’ investigative targets was created by the man who is now chief of staff to the UK prime minister, who knows what might happen.
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.