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.

In the tenth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, Morgan McSweeney and Rachel Riley come for the Canary – and attempt to destroy us. This is the fourth part of Chapter Three.

The purview of Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) extended beyond alleged antisemitism. SFFN also tackled what it called ‘fake news’. In a Twitter thread from April 2019, SFFN explained that:

fake news . . . means lies & deliberate misleading, particularly when designed to fuel hate.

This definition is important, because it meant that SFFN, in effect, defined fake news as disinformation rather than misinformation. Disinformation refers to the creation and spread of false information with the intention to deceive; misinformation refers to false information spread without such intention.

SFFN: fake news outfit targets… ‘fake news’

The irony was that SFFN, run by a man who had made his career as a factional spin-doctor, could itself be regarded as a prime example of fake news. SFFN did not disclose the actors behind its creation and operation; it was only in May 2020 that SFFN declared any relationship with CCDH.

For the first year of its public existence, SFFN explained to readers of its website that “we would like to be open about our identities, but doing so could put our activists at risk”. SFFN was thus presented as a group of anonymous ‘activists’ inspired by a US campaign called Sleeping Giants, which had targeted the rightwing Breitbart News in the US. But the contrast between the two initiatives is stark: Sleeping Giants was initiated and run by grassroots campaigners, while SFFN was resourced from undeclared funding provided by millionaires to Labour Together, which itself featured three Labour MPs on its board alongside Morgan McSweeney – who subsequently became perhaps the most powerful non-elected official in the country.

SFFN was assiduous in cultivating this grassroots image in profiles of its work. In April 2019, the Jewish News described SFFN as a “small group of friends” and “activists”. Explaining why they had remained anonymous, these plucky underdogs said they:

didn’t want the levels of hate that far braver people than ourselves have been subjected to.

They then neatly deflected attention away from their anonymity by explaining that “the campaign isn’t about us” but relied on ordinary people taking a “stand for truth and tolerance”.

A textbook example of astroturfing

SFFN’s failure to disclose its true origin, funding, and political leanings makes it a textbook example of what is known as astroturfing. As an academic article from 2019 explains, political astroturfing involves:

a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens
acting independently.

The article warned that such campaigns can:

influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behaviour’.

As this definition indicates, astroturfing is not just considered ethically dubious but is a form of disinformation. SFFN was thus an astroturf disinformation campaign purporting to target disinformation.

SFFN’s astroturfing had a profound impact on how it was received. The group’s work would surely not have resonated as widely as it did if audiences had known the group was founded by Labour Party insiders who despised Corbyn’s leadership and run by a man with a long history of battles against the independent media outlets he was now trying to demonetise. Its studied secrecy allowed SFFN to pass as non-partisan, a false impression that would have rendered its activities more credible.

Anonymity also made SFFN and its controlling minds unaccountable to public scrutiny and, most importantly, the law. Because no-one knew who was behind SFFN, it would have been difficult to bring claims of libel against it. To do so would have required getting Twitter or SFFN’s website registrars to disclose confidential information, which may have ultimately needed court applications.

There is a good case to be made that SFFN may have defamed media outlets, their editors, and journalists when it accused them of making up “lies” and being “deliberate[ly] misleading”, especially when such allegations were directed against outlets like the Canary that were independently regulated and whose survival depended on public trust. Yet these targets were, on account of SFFN’s anonymity, effectively denied their legal right to defend their reputation at the time.

SFFN’s endorsements from Labour figures

SFFN launched its online campaign on March 5, 2019, with a series of Twitter posts directed at advertisers. SFFN targeted four sites from what it presented as ‘both sides’ of the political spectrum: Evolve Politics and the Canary on the left, Westmonster and Politicalite on the right. Its methodology was strikingly similar to that employed by the likes of LAAS. SFFN compiled virtual ‘dossiers’ against their targets based on deep dives into social media posts. The dossiers were then posted in long Twitter threads as evidence of fake news and antisemitism.

For a budding new campaign of disconnected grassroots activists with no obvious political connections, SFFN was able to secure some remarkably quick endorsements from niche Labour Party figures. “Fantastic new campaign to persuade advertisers to stop funding fake news sites that spread hatred, bigotry, and warp our politics towards extremism stopfundingfakenews.com”, Steve Reed tweeted out on the evening of March 6. The following day, Hannah O’Rourke, the long-time Labour Together staffer, posted her own endorsement.

By far the most consequential endorsement came from Rachel Riley. “Just had a look at your website @SFFakeNews and actually burst into tears seeing where all the hate I get daily is coming from. With you in any way I can be, you have my full support”, Riley posted at 6.18 p.m. on March 6, 2019, ending her post with a link to the SFFN website.

Rachel Riley: the celebrity face of the campaign to defund the Canary

Riley had agreed to front the SFFN campaign a month earlier. She had been taken to meet McSweeney and Ahmed at Labour Together’s offices in February 2019, brought there by Adam Langleben. Langleben was a prominent member of the Jewish Labour Movement, a Labour Party affiliate that was sharply critical of Corbyn and his supporters. As discussed later, Langleben would work closely with McSweeney to ‘engineer’ the JLM’s submissions to the EHRC, whose slapdash findings would prove devastating to the long-term reputation of Corbynism. “McSweeney and Ahmed made a modest proposal. Might Riley be the face of a campaign to defund The Canary? She agreed with alacrity”, Pogrund and Maguire write.

Both Evolve Politics and the Canary had emerged in reaction to what was perceived as a media environment hostile to left-wing ideas and, specifically, the Corbyn leadership. The Canary, formed in 2015 by Kerry-Anne Mendoza and her wife Nancy Mendoza at a cost of £500, grew spectacularly in its first year. By July 2016, it was listed as the seventy-ninth-most-viewed UK Media Publishers website, attracting over 7.5 million views a month. Both outlets grew their reach and impact in the crucible of the 2017 election, where their pro-left and generally pro-Corbyn stance garnered significant social media support. The Canary’s revenue allowed it to employ twenty-five editorial staff.

Numerous studies have argued that the Canary, in particular, played a significant role in Labour’s better-than-expected showing at the 2017 general election. Two weeks after SFFN launched its campaign, the Canary celebrated publishing its ten-thousandth article.

Smearing independent, gold standard regulated reporting

The two other sites targeted by SFFN were Westmonster and Politicalite. Both were right-wing and accused by SFFN of posting Islamophobic material. Westmonster was funded by Arron Banks, the controversial Brexit backer.

But SFFN’s ‘both sides’ approach, and its explicit decision to target these four websites first, was a striking act of unfair conflation. Westmonster and Politicalite had never agreed to be regulated and both received mixed reviews from services that monitor media bias and trustworthiness.

By comparison, both Evolve Politics and the Canary had been regulated by the independent regulator Impress since 2017. Impress was the first regulatory body approved by the Independent Press Review Board, itself created by Royal Charter to implement the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry. The combustible first phase of the Leveson Inquiry had looked into historic cases of media abuses, including phone hacking. It made recommendations about setting up robust systems for press regulation that were properly independent of media proprietors. Impress was thus the first media regulator that actually met the stringent tests and guidelines suggested by Leveson. Its regulation arguably represents the gold standard of press accountability in Britain.

In April 2019, not long after SFFN launched its campaign against the Canary, the independent and often-cited Media Bias/Fact Check service described the site’s reporting as manifesting a liberal ‘bias’ but gave its factual content a ‘high’ rating for accuracy. In the same month, the Canary was one of the first media websites in the UK to be awarded a green trust mark for credibility by Newsguard. And while Evolve Politics has not been reviewed by either service, it was considered sufficiently credible that, in 2018, it was given a press pass for ‘the lobby’: the political reporting centre of Westminster.

‘Destroy the Canary, or the Canary destroys us’

But it was the Canary that was the real target of SFFN’s early operations. Indeed, as Anushka Asthana tells it, the Canary was one of McSweeney’s ‘obsessions’. It had featured prominently in McSweeney’s 2017 SWOT analysis, which had decried the power of independent media outlets in buttressing Corbynism.

With no little hint of irony, one of the biggest threats that McSweeney identified in the same analysis was that the Canary might discover what the Labour Together Project was really up to. Or, seen another way, one of the biggest threats to his project was that the Canary’s dogged investigative journalists might discover the truth and report it accurately. As Asthana tells it, McSweeney’s warning to Labour Together insiders was stark: “Destroy The Canary, or The Canary destroys us”.

This background must, of course, raise questions about whether SFFN was established out of an authentic impulse to challenge disinformation and hate – or whether it was created to neutralise an obstacle to the success of the Labour Together Project, cynically deploying anonymity and widespread concern about disinformation as its weapons of choice.

The Canary the clear target of its crusade

SFFN’s focus on the Canary is clear in retrospect: between its first post and the 2019 general election, SFFN posted no fewer than 176 tweets about the Canary, which it branded a “Fake News website”. In its first anti-Canary broadside, it highlighted stories published by the website that questioned aspects of the alleged Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’, as well as a story about the poisoning of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal.

When the Canary rejected the allegations that it purveyed fake news, SFFN responded by listing a number of articles with which it took issue. The number of pieces that SFFN highlighted amounted to a tiny fraction of the site’s output. But in an approach that characterised much reporting of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ more broadly, this unrepresentative sample was used to justify a sweeping delegitimisation.

SFFN misrepresenting the facts to attack the Canary

The paucity of SFFN’s claims against the Canary was revealed when SFFN cited an Impress adjudication as evidence against the Canary. What this judgment actually showed was that the Canary had voluntarily submitted to rigorous regulation and assiduously corrected errors in its reporting.

To summarise a somewhat complex case: the headline of a Canary article claimed that Laura Kuenssberg, the political editor of BBC News, was speaking at a Tory party conference. The Canary asked the BBC for comment but the BBC did not provide one by the noon deadline, when the Canary hit publish. The BBC then responded in the late afternoon, noting that Kuenssberg was not a speaker but merely an invitee. The Canary fixed the article and put out a correction on social media.

Impress investigated the Canary after a complaint from the public. The regulator found that the Canary should have done more to put questions to the BBC prior to publishing. It also commented that the Canary’s note of correction should have appeared at the top and not the bottom of its amended article. Impress directed the Canary to apologise and publish Impress’ decision, which it duly did.

A strange form of ‘fake news’

This was a strange form of ‘fake news’, indeed: not only had the Canary contemporaneously corrected an error in its reporting, but it also then voluntarily submitted to an independent investigation and swiftly carried out the remedial measures required. This was best practice, not fake news.

SFFN followed up its screenshots of the Kuenssberg article by quoting a New Statesman headline that accused the Canary of running a “misogynistic” campaign against Kuenssberg. This was a remarkable accusation to level at the only independent media outlet in the country edited by a lesbian woman of colour.

Later, in May 2019, SFFN would share a link to a Press Gazette story reporting that among outlets regulated by Impress, the Canary had received the most complaints – again effectively attacking the Canary for having submitted to robust oversight. SFFN failed to note that of the eighty complaints received, only two were upheld by the regulator – including the Kuenssberg case.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel for ‘incriminating’ social media posts

SFFN also accused the Canary of antisemitism based on social media comments made by Canary journalists in their personal capacity as well as a handful of Canary articles. By way of illustration, SFFN was scandalised by a social media post from Canary journalist Emily Apple. “Israel is a cunt”, she had written in 2010, a full nine years before SFFN’s campaign (they really scraped the barrel). This comment accompanied a link to a protest march against Israel’s killing of nine activists involved in the Free Gaza Flotilla.

In SFFN’s fevered imagination, this off-colour epithet directed against a state that had just killed unarmed civilians was not only antisemitic but sufficiently egregious to warrant the closure of an entire independent media website that the writer would contribute to nearly a decade later. In another four-part exposé, SFFN criticised an article written by Apple that had the temerity to criticise Britain’s chief rabbi for contentious comments he had made about Jeremy Corbyn.

It should be noted that Emily Apple was raised in a Jewish family (her father is Jewish) and has written movingly about how her Jewish upbringing forms a central part of her identity.

Elsewhere, SFFN pointed to multiple Canary headlines that supposedly demonstrated the publication’s antisemitic tendency. One of these purportedly incriminating headlines read: Jewish Voters Are Done with the Bogus Antisemitism Smears Against Jeremy Corbyn. The accompanying article was based almost entirely on comments by left-wing Jews that contested media allegations about the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’. The Labour Together Project’s secret astroturf campaign was effectively amplifying claims that left-wing Jews were antisemitic, such that giving space to their perspectives constituted a form of antisemitic denialism.

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.

In the ninth 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.

The third set of documents comprises emails shared in 2021 between Reed, Mumford, and Ellie Robinson, the latter serving as deputy political director in Starmer’s office. The context of the email exchange was that Reed had been selected to address parliament for Holocaust Memorial Day. Reed drafted a speech and distributed it for feedback.

Reed’s original draft was striking in its self-regard:

I could not bear the thought that over 100 years of my party’s story could end in a cesspit of racism.
So I chose to find my own way to resist . . . I helped establish the Centre [sic] for Combatting [sic—actually
‘Countering’] Digital Hate, which ran a hugely effective operation to identify, expose and disable online antisemitism . . . This project tackled anti-Semitic extremism on the left and right, but where it identified anti Semites who were Labour members I reported them immediately for expulsion.

Reed’s draft, and the speech he finally delivered, failed to mention Labour Together’s central role in creating the organisation, as reported by Mumford.

Steve Reed and the CCDH: accusing left-wing members of antisemitism

Reed’s involvement in the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is both instructive and disturbing; indeed, he is one of the more chilling figures encountered in researching this book. Two things are worth noting here, both of which are set out in more detail later.

First, party files show that Reed had a history of accusing people of antisemitism on the basis of arguably tendentious evidence; as noted above, this included submitting complaints dossiers to the party that demanded the immediate suspension of four left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews. Party files also show that Reed submitted complaints about left-wing members of his local constituency, accusing them of antisemitism for, amongst other things, sharing factually accurate news stories.

In one case, Reed accused a party member of antisemitism for having shared a well-researched article about how Labour MP Margaret Hodge’s family company had run a profitable South African subsidiary during the era of apartheid. The company had helped to market South African steel to Chile, then under the fist of the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. (Hodge happens to be Jewish, but this is not mentioned in or relevant to the article.)

Reed targets local independent media holding the Labour right to account

Second, Reed took what I consider a disturbing approach to alternative and citizen media. As is shown in much more detail below, Reed tried to get the editor of local outfit Inside Croydon suspended or expelled from the Labour Party. Reed claimed that reports alleging gross dysfunction in Croydon’s local government – reports I consider accurate and well evidenced –  amounted to a campaign of “hostility, distortion and abuse” designed to “misrepresent facts” and thereby “undermine public confidence and support in the Labour Party”: fake news, in other words. At one point, Reed submitted to party officials a complaints dossier that cited, as an example of the editor’s alleged ‘harassment’, Inside Croydon’s use of a satirical photo that Reed took exception to – because it photoshopped a Tory party rosette onto a smiling picture of him.

Party files show that Reed would later be copied into exchanges in which emails hacked from Inside Croydon were shared. Those hacked emails were being used to identify and punish the news website’s confidential sources. Importantly, these sources were helping Inside Croydon reveal how Croydon’s local government had become so dysfunctional under the leadership of Reed’s political allies that it required a £120m bailout to remain afloat after declaring bankruptcy in 2020.

Party files thus paint a worrying picture of Reed: of a man who reframed investigative journalism sounding the alarm over serious governance failures in Croydon as harassment and misinformation, and who showed a penchant for trying to get left-wingers in his constituency booted from the party for antisemitism on highly contestable grounds.

Lawbreakers and factional spin-doctors spearheading the charge against misinformation

McSweeney, Reed, and Ahmed – these were the political operatives who came together to create CCDH and SFFN with the purported aim of tackling misinformation and hate. It is hard to imagine three people less suited to the task.

McSweeney, at that very moment, was breaking the law by failing to report hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations, and using premeditated misdirection (in fact: disinformation) to mislead people about the nature of Labour Together and his secret mission to defeat Corbynism. Ahmed was a factional spin-doctor with a long history of making contentious claims of bullying against left-wingers and railing against independent media outlets that challenged his versions of events.

Finally there was Reed, who was not only collaborating in McSweeney’s conspiracy of deception, but who had himself attempted to get a bona fide journalist expelled from the Labour Party for the temerity of trying to hold Reed’s local political allies to account.

CCDH’s conflicting origin stories

There is some confusion as to when CCDH was established. Imran Ahmed claims on his LinkedIn that he became a director of the organisation in December 2017. At the time, however, there was no corporate entity called CCDH. Across multiple interviews, Ahmed has given slightly different versions of when the idea for CCDH first came to him, or when he started putting the plan into action. His most recent story is that the idea for CCDH was seeded in 2016 when he was working with Angela Eagle.

On this version, the impetus for establishing CCDH was the death of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was killed in June 2016 by an adherent of the far right. If true, this would mean that Ahmed was considering the need for the organisation just as his work levelling unsubstantiated allegations of abuse and discrimination against the political opponents of Angela Eagle was being challenged by independent media asking difficult questions.

The corporate entity that would eventually become CCDH was originally called Brixton Endeavours. Brixton Endeavours was set up in October 2018 and shared its address with Labour Together. Morgan McSweeney was its sole director. This is also the date that McSweeney has provided on his LinkedIn for when he became a director of CCDH.

CCDH targeting Elon Musk’s Twitter

McSweeney ran this LinkedIn account for years, listing his role in CCDH. But in November 2024, as this book was being finalised and just after Donald Trump swept to victory in the US presidential election, McSweeney’s LinkedIn profile suddenly went dark. This happened two weeks after a story broke in the US media about how CCDH had targeted Elon Musk’s Twitter, based on leaks from within the social media company.

That exposé was written by the American journalists Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi, with whom I’d been working for about year on CCDH. It quoted extensively from my work on CCDH’s prehistory and highlighted McSweeney’s role in creating CCDH. The story caught the attention of Elon Musk who announced that he was declaring “war” on the organisation. Trump campaign insiders told Taibbi and Thacker that CCDH would be “investigated from all angles” if Trump was elected.

McSweeney and the CCDH: butting heads with… the Trump administration

Was it a coincidence that McSweeney’s longstanding LinkedIn profile disappeared just as Trump was entering the White House and critical attention began to be trained on CCDH? Certainly, Thacker and Taibbi’s article had set the cat among the pigeons and there were hurried attempts to distance Labour Together and McSweeney from CCDH. On October 24, two days after their story came out, Taibbi appeared on the Times podcast to talk about the history of CCDH. He was told that Labour Together claimed they had “nothing to do” with CCDH. “What can we say in response to that?” Taibbi texted me.

I sent him a raft of screenshots, company reports, and extracts from the documents we had already published. Amongst them were screenshots of McSweeney’s LinkedIn page, which I had fortuitously saved after Taibbi reached out to me. Soon thereafter, McSweeney’s LinkedIn profile disappeared. About a year later, McSweeney’s LinkedIn was reactivated, with subtle but interesting changes to how he described his overlapping occupational arrangements at Labour Together and CCDH, and as Starmer’s campaign director (see Figure A).

The day after Taibbi appeared on the Times podcast, the Guardian ran a lengthy story about how Ahmed and CCDH were determined to continue their work despite Musk’s threats. The Guardian explained that McSweeney had simply helped Ahmed out by “providing a shell company to house the organisation” and that McSweeney “had no operational role at CCDH”. Then why had McSweeney listed his directorship in CCDH for years on his LinkedIn? It was hard to credit.

Who funds CCDH?

As noted, CCDH started life as Brixton Endeavours; it shared an address with Labour Together and listed McSweeney as its sole director. This enterprise would eventually be renamed CCDH in September 2019, coinciding with the outfit’s public launch via the publication of a thin pamphlet entitled Don’t Feed the Trolls. McSweeney would remain a listed director of CCDH until April 2020, giving up the role only after Starmer won the Labour leadership election.

Another company that shared its address with Labour Together and Brixton Endeavours/CCDH was Labour Campaigns. Labour Campaigns’ sole director was none other than Imran Ahmed. He changed the registered address of Labour Campaigns in January 2019 to that of CCDH and Labour Together. This was the same month that some unknown person or entity registered the web domain of Ahmed’s first public foray into the world of disinformation: Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN).

There is, however, a striking lack of detail known about how CCDH has been funded. When the organisation first launched in late 2019, its website said it received funding from five philanthropic foundations: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Pears Foundation, the Laura Kinsella Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, and Unbound Philanthropy. In June 2020, CCDH changed its website so that individual funders were no longer listed; it now simply stated that CCDH:

is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that is funded by philanthropic trusts and members of the public.

The current incarnation of CCDH’s website, launched after the creation of a US affiliate company registered in Washington, does not identify any funders. CCDH has never publicly acknowledged that it was created by Labour Together, or that it received resources from the think tank while being set up (including ‘office space’ and ‘help’ with raising start-up funds) – or that Labour Together was failing to report its donations as required by law at the time.

The astroturf campaign

In March 2019, five months after the formation of Brixton Endeavours, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) was born. As noted above, Mumford’s briefing suggested that CCDH had emerged out of SFFN’s work. But in 2020, Ahmed would give a talk to a US State Department conference on antisemitism opened by such storied fighters for civil liberty and moderation as Mike Pompeo, Michael Gove, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Pompeo served as the director of the CIA and then secretary of state under Trump. His contributions to global free speech included plotting with CIA officials to abduct and assassinate WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Gove, a long-time Tory MP and cabinet minister, has been robustly criticised for his views on Muslims. One of his critics is the Tory grandee Lady Warsi, who was genuinely “fearful of the idea of Michael Gove becoming prime minister” because of “his views on British Muslims”. Ahmed suggested in his speech that SFFN had emerged out of research work done by CCDH – not the other way around.

In reality, there seems to have been little distinction between these entities behind the scenes. In 2021, for example, Ahmed noted on Twitter that he was the ‘founder/CEO’ of both CCDH and SFFN. Historical website registration data for the now-defunct SFFN website shows that it was previously registered as belonging to Imran Ahmed and under his personal email address. In fact, in light of what we now know about McSweeney and Ahmed’s long-term collaboration, there does not appear to be any real distinction between SFFN, CCDH, and the Labour Together Project itself.

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.

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.

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.

In the sixth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we chart the involvement Labour Against Antisemitism – which would quickly lead to the involvement of Rachel Riley. This is the second part of Chapter Two.

To recap: it is wrong to say that there was no antisemitism in the Labour Party. But it is also wrong to say that every allegation of antisemitism in the Labour Party was true. Questions about the prevalence of antisemitism in the party remain a difficult, but important and necessary, subject for rational debate. The charge of ‘denialism’ killed this nuance. It demanded that anyone exercising scepticism be ejected from the political and moral community as anti-Jewish bigots – even when the sceptics in question were themselves Jewish.

The crusade against ‘denialism’ also upped the stakes. It became nearly impossible for well-meaning people to sift through the welter of claims about antisemitism and to have a reasoned discussion about what conduct was truly antisemitic. It chilled into frosty silence precisely the discussions that needed to be had. It created a sense of panic and fostered a political environment in which the safe option for many people was to tactically concede that, for example, robust criticism of Israel was antisemitic, or to cede the ground on that issue and not engage at all. It also incentivised party officials to err on the side of unfairly sanctioning members because it was more politically expedient to deliver ‘results’ than it was to properly examine the cases against them.

It is perhaps for this last reason that Corbyn’s faction would eventually over-compensate for earlier procedural failings, rushing to discipline members even where the evidence against them was scanty – or where accused individuals merely had the temerity to question a flawed narrative, some of which was being written, behind a veil of anonymity, by a Labour Together Project that ‘despised’ Corbynism itself.

Labour Against Antisemitism and the Zionist fringe

One more feature of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ needs to be understood before moving on to the nuts and bolts of Labour Together’s interventions in this arena: the role played by the online group Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS). The astroturf project that the Labour Together Project created would succeed with the support of LAAS activists and supporters. Its most prominent cheerleader was the British television celebrity Rachel Riley, who was also close to LAAS activists.

LAAS formed around late 2016 or early 2017 as a loose network of affiliated activists. An open letter of LAAS members, signed in March 2018, suggested it had at least fifty-five members at the time.

The primary (but not exclusive) focus of LAAS’ work was to engage in deep digs into the social media histories of real or apparent Labour Party members to discover alleged evidence of antisemitism. This evidence would be compiled into dossiers that were sent into the Labour Party demanding the expulsion of alleged antisemites.

An audit of complaints files for Al Jazeera’s 2022 documentary, The Crisis, found that approximately 12% of all antisemitism-related complaints submitted to the party during Corbyn’s leadership had come from LAAS-affiliated actors.

When the party failed to expel and suspend LAAS’ targets, LAAS would inform the media that it had made thousands of complaints that had been ignored. This, in turn, would drive the key narratives that the party was both overwhelmed with antisemites and that it was failing to meaningfully deal with complaints. Party files, discussed below, suggest that far more critical scrutiny should have been applied to LAAS’ allegations.

Fake Jewish-sounding personas to make antisemitism allegations

LAAS was controversial for two reasons. The first was that the organisation and its members had a history of attacking the conduct of left-wing and non-Zionist Jews and accusing Jewish figures of antisemitism. Many of these allegations were made by non-Jews.

In 2022, Al Jazeera reported on documents leaked from the Labour Party which showed that LAAS’ spokesperson and one of its most well-known activists, Euan Philipps, had created a fake persona called ‘David Gordstein’, which many readers would take to be a Jewish name. Philipps is not Jewish. Philipps admitted to Al Jazeera that he was David Gordstein but insisted that “he never claimed to be Jewish when doing so”. ‘David Gordstein’, as shown below, would play a material role in the success of the astroturf campaign that was incubated by the Labour Together Project. Philipps remained a prominent member and spokesperson of LAAS even after his Gordstein persona was exposed.

Previously unseen documents from the Labour Party show that the Gordstein persona was used to make hundreds of complaints of antisemitism to the Labour Party between 2017 and 2021. The reports are detailed, but perhaps the most important feature was the number of times the persona was used to accuse left-wing Jews of antisemitism. The outrageous story of Gordstein’s complaint about the elderly Jewish party member Riva Joffe, which led to the party investigating her on her death bed, is dealt with in Part Three below.

Miriam Margolyes calls it what it is

One of the more absurd Gordstein complaints was directed against Miriam Margolyes, the idiosyncratic national treasure and garlanded Jewish actress who played Professor Pomona Sprout in two of the film adaptations of Harry Potter.

One of Margolyes’ allegedly antisemitic acts, according to ‘Gordstein’, was to use her Facebook profile to share an impassioned article written in 2019 by the highly regarded Jewish social anthropologist and London School of Economics professor David Graeber. Graeber challenged aspects of the mainstream narrative alleging a ‘crisis’ of antisemitism in the Labour Party. He argued that the way the Labour Party ‘antisemitism crisis’ had been covered was itself antisemitic, because it generated unjustified “rancour, panic and resentment” that “creates terror in the Jewish community”. Ironically, Graeber had written in despair about how many of the “protagonists” of the antisemitism crisis “were not Jewish”.

So, to recap: an invented Jewish-sounding persona (Gordstein), created by a non-Jew, charged a Jewish actress with antisemitism, because she had shared an article by a left-wing Jewish academic, which argued that non-Jews telling scare stories about antisemitism was itself a form of antisemitism. This same non-Jewish activist would play a key role in amplifying the astroturf Stop Funding Fake News campaign, also led by non-Jews, that would implicitly accuse media outlets of being antisemitic for interviewing and recording the views of Jewish people who questioned aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’. That astroturf campaign was run by an organisation established by the Labour Together Project.

I contacted Margolyes for this book to get her response to the Gordstein complaint. In an entertaining potty-mouthed tour of world politics, Margolyes bemoaned the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. On Gordstein she was amusingly frank:

I’m an old cunt and I know what’s what, and if he thinks I’m an antisemite he is speaking out of his bottom.

Mocking anti-Zionist Jews

Another, previously unseen document indicates that contempt for left-wing Jews emanated not merely from this or that LAAS figure but was one of the group’s core commitments. It is one page of a longer text, prepared with a LAAS logo, which appears to be a training document or a preparation of press lines. The document endorses the use of the phrase ‘as a Jew’.

This is a derogatory play on how (often progressive or non-Zionist) Jews might open their critique of Israel, or some other related matter, with the qualifying clause: ‘As a Jew . . . ’. Some Jews find the phrase hurtful, even offensive, as they feel it can imply an accusation that they only recognise or inhabit their Jewish identity when it is politically convenient to do so.

LAAS was apparently very comfortable with deploying the as-a-Jew epithet to mock Jewish people guilty, in their view, of either engaging in or defending antisemitism. Thus, under the heading ‘As-a-Jew antisemitism’, the LAAS document alleges that:

racist Jews tend to underline their identity as a defence and to separate themselves from non-Jewish antisemites.

An illustrative example tells the reader that:

Jackomi and her friends commonly say they are talking “as a Jew” – as if that gives them more authority to make antisemitic statements.

This is quite something from an organisation whose most prominent spokespeople and many of whose most active members were not Jewish.

In May 2023, Novara Media broke the story of how Julie Cattell, a LAAS member, had been selected by the Labour Party as a councillor candidate in Brighton and Hove to contest the 2023 elections – despite a history of using the phrase ‘As a Jew’ on Twitter. In one 2019 exchange, Cattell was asked why a range of Jewish public figures – such as Noam Chomsky, John Bercow, and Miriam Margolyes – questioned aspects of the mainstream narrative of the antisemitism crisis. “I asked for proof. Not a list of AsAJews”, she responded. Cattell is not Jewish.

LAAS’s links to the far-right

The second controversial aspect of LAAS was that it was connected to a group of fringe pro-Israel activists who had historical links to the far right. One of those activists was a man called Jonathan Hoffman, who was an early advisor to LAAS. The same 2022 Al Jazeera documentary that exposed David Gordstein also established Hoffman’s links to figures on the far right. It included footage of Hoffman and a fellow member of this fringe network called Damon Lenszner hectoring a Palestinian woman in 2018, for which they were both convicted of “aggressive, bullying behaviour” in a North London court the following year. Hoffman was connected to a broader group of equally fringe pro-Israel activists who harboured what some might call robust opinions about Muslims.

To give a flavour of Hoffman’s milieu: in 2010, he was pictured protesting alongside a woman named Roberta Moore. Moore was one of the founders of the far-right English Defence League (EDL). She parted ways with the EDL in controversial circumstances in 2011, the year after she was pictured with Hoffman. Moore would claim that she quit the EDL because of ‘Nazi elements’ within it. But this had come after the EDL’s leadership rebuked her for developing a working relationship with the far-right American Jewish Task Force, whose leader had been imprisoned for terrorism offences.

When the photo of Hoffman and Moore was published, Hoffman attempted to claim in his Jewish Chronicle blog that the photo was a photoshopped fake, but embarrassingly he was forced to retract the claim. Moore would subsequently write articles trying to contextualise the murderous attacks by Anders Breivik, the terrorist who killed dozens of children and teenagers on the Norwegian island of Utoya, which she described with near-comic understatement as “regrettable”. “I hold the same amount of sympathy for those on Utoya as I would if somebody committed this act on a Hitler Youth camp in the 1940s”, she would write.

Attacking pro-Palestine meetings

Moore was an assiduous contributor to the comment section of a blog run by a man called Richard Millett, who worked closely alongside Hoffman for years. Moore posted repeated rants using Islamophobic slurs on Millett’s blog. She also referred to liberal or anti-Zionist Jews as ‘kapos’, a reference to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.

Together, Hoffman and Millett formed a double team: Hoffman would disrupt pro-Palestinian meetings, provoking confrontations that Millett would record. Millett would then post the recordings on his blog. During the ‘antisemitism crisis’, Hoffman and Millett’s videos and stories were the source of a number of scandalised articles targeting the Labour Party and Corbyn. Indeed, Hoffman and Millett were at the centre of one of the defining scandals of the ‘antisemitism crisis’: the unearthing of a video (albeit not sourced from Millett or Hoffman) that showed Corbyn telling an obscure meeting in 2013 that certain “Zionists in attendance” at a previous meeting did not understand “English irony”.

Corbyn was referring to four individual ‘Zionists’, two of whom were Hoffman and Millett. Much media coverage was canny in cutting up Corbyn’s comments to make it seem as if he was casting aspersions against all Zionists, rather than four specific people, at least two of whom (Hoffman and Millett) had a history of disruptive behaviour at pro-Palestine events.

LAAS advised by director of UK Lawyers for Israel

Another key advisor to LAAS was the libel lawyer Mark Lewis, who was also a director of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) between 2014 and 2017. Mark Lewis’ role in advising LAAS was not well known until 2023, when a video of LAAS activists speaking on a platform in 2020 was discovered. A LAAS spokesperson confirmed during the event that:

we could not have functioned without him.

After the video was discovered by journalists in 2023, it was quickly set to private on YouTube. Richard Millett was appointed the operations manager of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) in February 2020.

Lewis also represented, amongst others, Rachel Riley, who would play an important role in amplifying the work of Stop Funding Fake News – something she agreed to do after meeting directly with McSweeney and his closest collaborator, Imran Ahmed, in February 2019.

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.

In the fifth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we look at Labour Together’s help in manufacturing an antisemitism crisis in the party. This is the first part of Chapter Two.

In April 2023, Labour Together came clean about its long involvement in the fight against Corbynism. “In 2017, Labour Together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left”, as Steve Reed MP matter-of-factly explained.

Much remains unknown about what this factional ‘strategy’ concretely entailed.

What is clear is that, behind closed doors and away from public knowledge, the Labour Together Project inserted itself directly into a national media furore centred on allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party. The project’s interventions inflamed this controversy, which dogged Corbyn’s leadership and was later cited by the Starmer regime to justify suppressing the party’s left flank.

The ‘antisemitism crisis’

Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ comprised many strands. Fierce condemnation of Israel from many on the left of the party was undoubtedly painful for those Jewish members who had profound emotional ties to that country. Sometimes, albeit much less often than alleged, left-wing criticism of Israel took antisemitic forms. Sometimes it lacked sensitivity to the intergenerational trauma many Jews carry. Sometimes it raged with the fury of the oppressed. Sometimes the truth hurts.

Broadly, the ‘antisemitism crisis’ wove a series of discrete allegations of anti-Jewish rhetoric or discrimination, levelled against individual Labour members as well as the party’s leadership and institutional practices, into a comprehensive indictment: that Corbyn’s Labour Party was deeply antisemitic, and that this antisemitism flowed from the left-wing ideology Corbyn espoused.

In the main, and with a forewarning that this is a brutally reductive summary, the ‘antisemitism crisis’ was composed of four related allegations:

• That Labour’s elected leader Jeremy Corbyn MP was personally antisemitic, as illustrated by statements he made and the company he kept;
• That the Labour Party had become infested and overrun with antisemites since Corbyn’s election as party leader in September 2015, inferentially because Corbyn’s politics were antisemitic and because his leadership tolerated antisemitism;
• That the Labour Party had received a huge volume of complaints alleging antisemitic conduct by members, which the party was either failing to properly process or in which Corbyn’s office was unduly interfering, inferentially either to support allies accused of antisemitism or because Corbyn and his leadership team were insufficiently concerned about antisemitism;
• That any person or organisation questioning the substantial truth of any of the above allegations, or suggesting that any of them were driven by antipathy to left-wing politics or Palestine solidarity, was engaged in ‘denialism’, which was its own form of antisemitism.

Targeting Corbyn’s associates

As the ‘crisis’ unfolded over the years, emphasis was placed on different aspects, and certain allegations flitted into and out of relevance or were redefined, sharpened, and sometimes even totally inverted depending on how particular stories developed. This dynamic process ensured that the ‘crisis’ retained political momentum and salience across the full span of Corbyn’s leadership.

In 2016, for instance, commentators primarily focused on the claim that Corbyn’s associates were antisemitic, based largely on contemporary reporting. This was the year when, for example, Ken Livingstone made remarks defending a Labour MP, Naz Shah, for having once shared a controversial cartoon about Israel. The image had previously been posted online by Norman Finkelstein, a leading scholar of the Israel-Palestine conflict and well-known American Jewish critic of Israel.

Livingstone’s comments led to feverish media coverage demanding his expulsion – and then further media coverage demanding answers as to why this had not already happened. Livingstone was the former mayor of London and, at the time of his comments, a member of the party’s highest organ of elected governance, the National Executive Committee (NEC). He was also a prominent supporter of Corbyn.

Labour Together confecting the ‘crisis’

The media hubbub quietened in 2017 but reignited the following year, just as the Labour Together Project turned its attention to the issue. This revival of the controversy was predicated on the unearthing of historical examples of alleged wrongdoing through a process of digital archaeology.

Stories began circulating that accused Corbyn personally of antisemitism based on old social media posts or comments he had made at events years prior. Meanwhile, online campaign groups such as Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS) began scouring the social media records of actual or presumed Labour Party members so that they could submit formal complaints to the Labour Party.

When the party failed to process such complaints to the groups’ satisfaction, case details were leaked to the media, driving lurid coverage about obscure councillors sharing dodgy ‘Rothschild’ memes and the narrative that Corbyn’s administration was letting antisemites off the hook.

Anonymously feeding stories to the media

We now know that McSweeney and Labour Together Project insiders were also engaged in this online trawling.

Unlike LAAS, they did so behind the scenes, anonymously placing stories in the media rather than publicising them directly. By about late 2018, and certainly from mid-2019, the primary alleged sin of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ was one of ‘denialism’, which could, at times, give the whole controversy a Kafkaesque air.

The coverage from 2016 through early 2019 had, it was implied, established an impossible-to-deny bedrock of evidence supporting the three primary allegations so conclusively that they could not be denied, rejected or contextualised in good faith. It followed that anyone who tried to do so was indifferent to Jewish well-being, blinded by factional devotion to Corbynism, or – and this was the most common inference – either tolerant of antisemitism or antisemitic themselves. Furthermore, anyone who defended someone else accused of antisemitic denialism found themselves charged with the same offence. This discursive structure ensured that the allegation of antisemitism spread with the speed, ferocity, and relentlessness of a contagion.

This chronology is important for appreciating the role of the Labour Together Project. As shown in more detail below, the project went to work in 2018 and early 2019 placing media stories about alleged antisemitism in the Labour Party, creating that bedrock of ‘facts’ which all decent people thenceforth simply had to accept. In March 2019, the Labour Together Project initiated a campaign to “completely eviscerate the economic base” of alternative media outlets that investigated or reported on aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ in ways that did not chime with or directly undermined the mainstream narrative. This campaign stigmatised such reporting as antisemitic denialism.

The thought crime of antisemitic denialism

Importantly, the Labour Together Project’s interventions recast ‘denialism’ as being not just antisemitic but also a form of misinformation. Questioning aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ could then be construed as part of a broader threat to the fabric of Western democracy – akin to, say, claims that the 2020 American presidential election was fraudulent. The chutzpah of this campaign was impressive: even as it was busy plotting to destroy Corbynism, using money it was unlawfully failing to declare to the Electoral Commission, the Labour Together Project secretly fuelled a moral panic about antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party, then set up a seemingly unconnected entity that delegitimised any questioning of this moral panic as antisemitic. All in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’!

Indeed, when independent reporters or commentators speculated or reported on a hidden hand or ulterior agenda driving the ‘antisemitism crisis’ narrative, the astroturf entity covertly associated with the Labour Together Project would brand them antisemitic conspiracists – even as the Labour Together Project was itself a hidden hand! A still crueller irony was that the thought-crime of ‘denialism’ would become a web that ensnared large numbers of left-wing Jews who questioned aspects of the ‘antisemitism crisis’, or who worried that the prevalence of antisemitism in the Labour Party was being exaggerated in order to undermine socialism as well as pro-Palestinian activism.

The ‘antisemitism crisis’ also became a proxy battle in a long-running conflict between establishment Jewish community organisations, on the one hand, and non-conformist as well as non-Zionist Jews on the other. Resolving the ‘antisemitism crisis’ on terms acceptable to the Jewish communal establishment required the performative and ugly exclusion of Jewish people from the Labour Party on the basis that their dissenting opinions amounted to denialist antisemitism.

Manufacturing a moral panic

The problem with the charge of ‘denialism’ is that it stigmatised scepticism toward media narratives on antisemitism, even where there was evidence that these narratives rested on claims that were sometimes untrue, incomplete or patently absurd.

To be sure, there was and is antisemitism in the Labour Party, while there are particular forms of antisemitism that appear disproportionately in left-wing circles. Indeed, the Corbyn leadership repeatedly acknowledged that social media trawling by various groups had unearthed clear-cut cases of antisemitic speech, such as Holocaust denial or conspiracies about sinister Jewish involvement in a New World Order. A 2022 Al Jazeera documentary, The Crisis, also unearthed evidence that some party members had engaged in clearly antisemitic exchanges. It would therefore be untrue to dismiss all claims of antisemitism in the Labour Party as politically motivated smears.

But it was another thing entirely to allege that these examples of antisemitism defined Corbynism, that it was pervasive throughout the party, or that it was a logical outcome of leftwing progressivism – all claims made repeatedly by the likes of the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, two leading Jewish community organisations that also engage in pro-Israel advocacy. The Al Jazeera documentary referred to above also discovered that substantial numbers of party members were accused of antisemitism merely for having engaged in legitimate criticism of Israel, while multiple studies found that anti-Jewish prejudice is lower among Labour supporters than among supporters of other political parties.

Double standards and inaccurate reporting

What’s more, many of the high-profile concrete stories making up the ‘antisemitism crisis’ were questionable, involving double standards or inaccurate reporting. This helped generate unwarranted hysteria and grievously hurt those left-wing Jews who found themselves pasted across tabloids as defenders of antisemitism, or even as antisemites themselves. Even in cases where the reporting may have been largely accurate, some stories were just plain dumb. Take the example of ‘Jew process’.

In March 2019, a Jewish Labour Party councillor named Jo Bird was suspended and then swiftly readmitted after the Jewish Chronicle had whipped up a froth. . . about a pun. The Chronicle, which was stridently critical of Corbyn’s leadership, reported on a “shocking recording” of a meeting of Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) at which Bird was said to have made a number of “shocking comments”.

JVL was founded in 2017 as a pro-Corbyn counterweight to the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), a formal affiliate of the Labour Party that had been critical of Corbyn. We now know that JLM figures worked closely with Morgan McSweeney from at least 2019 onward. JVL’s leadership team was entirely Jewish and the group counted well-known Jewish anti-Zionist activists among its ranks. JVL contested aspects of the mainstream narrative around the ‘antisemitism crisis’ and for this reason became the target of ferocious condemnation from the pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn Jewish establishment.

Accusations… over a pun

What so ‘shocked’ the Jewish Chronicle were remarks by Jo Bird in defence of Marc Wadsworth, a Black member of the Labour Party who Bird and others believed had been unfairly accused of antisemitism. Bird said that JVL was:

calling for disciplinary hearings to be paused until a due process has been established based on principles of natural justice. What I call Jew process.

The pun was not only a little bit funny but also implied a positive comment on Jewish identity. Bird was saying that JVL wanted an unfair process to be reformed so that it upheld what Bird considered to be a positive Jewish trait, namely a respect for natural justice. For this innocuous bit of wordplay, Bird – a Jewish woman – was subjected to multiple days of damning media coverage and suspended from the Labour Party.

Outrageous allegations against professor Jonathan Rosenhead

But things would become even more absurd. In May 2020, the newly minted shadow minister and Labour Together Project alum Steve Reed submitted dossiers on ten individuals to the head of Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU), which handled membership complaints. Reed demanded that all face immediate suspension and investigation for engaging in allegedly antisemitic conduct. Four of the people on Reed’s list were Jewish. One of them was Jonathan Rosenhead, an esteemed emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, who had a long history in anti-racist activism, including in the anti-apartheid movement. Reed is not Jewish.

Reed’s complaint then prompted Labour Party bureaucrats to dredge up every complaint ever submitted against Rosenhead and subject him to an investigation on suspicion of antisemitism. One of the charges that Rosenhead was forced to answer – to prove that he, a Jewish professor with a lifelong history of anti-racist activism, was not antisemitic – was that he had repeated Jo Bird’s pun. In fact, Rosenhead, during a party meeting, had simply retold the story of what had happened to Bird.

The party would eventually find that he had no case to answer on this charge. But in the febrile crucible of the ‘antisemitism crisis’, the party found itself interrogating an elderly Jewish professor on charges of antisemitism because he had recounted how another Jewish member had been suspended, because she had made a pun that cast Jewish identity in a positive light.

Failing to ‘grasp the enormity of antisemitism as a concept’

Rosenhead’s written response to the party is one of the most authentically moving pieces of writing about Jewish identity one is likely to encounter. Rosenhead detailed his family’s history of antisemitic persecution, including how one branch of his father’s family had been entirely wiped out in the Holocaust. “The awareness of the provisionality of tolerance has a taproot stretching back centuries”, Rosenhead wrote in response to the party’s investigation:

That is why all my parent’s friends were Jewish; and why all their friends were Jewish . . . I am telling you all this to give you a take on how outrageous it feels, in effect, to be accused of antisemitism. Outrageous. It actually gives me the sense that whoever drafted this Notice [of Investigation] has quite simply failed to grasp the enormity of antisemitism as a concept or practice.

Sadly, this sort of deeply silly and cruel stuff was a routine feature of the ‘antisemitism crisis’. It is no mystery why many observers would see such absurdities and conclude that the alleged ‘antisemitism crisis’ was not nearly so clear-cut as some claimed, that not every allegation of antisemitism was true or even reasonable, and that the people making those allegations should not be taken seriously or should have their motives examined.

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.

In the fourth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we look at Keir Starmer’s bid to be leader of the Labour Party – and how Morgan McSweeney engineered it. This is the fourth part of Chapter One.

On December 6 2017, an unidentified Commission staffer wrote to McSweeney. They informed him that Labour Together was correctly registered as a members association and that Labour Together was therefore required to continue to declare donations.

“As the Board of Labour Together is made up of Labour Party members, it is considered to be a Members Association”, the Electoral Commission confirmed. The response went into considerable detail about what donations members associations were supposed to report and provided guidance on what forms to fill in and where to download them. It reminded McSweeney that donations had to be made within thirty days of receipt.

Potentially serious legal consequences of McSweeney correspondence

Further correspondence in February 2018 shows McSweeney engaging with an Electoral Commission official about how to report donations; the Commission pointed out that he had filled in a form incorrectly when reporting a single donation.

This correspondence has potentially serious legal consequences. When the Electoral Commission began its investigation into Labour Together in 2020, Labour Together was asked to provide the Commission with any and all information relevant to the matter. Party emails show that McSweeney receive the correspondence in which this request was made clear. They also show that McSweeney was being consulted about Labour Together’s response to the Electoral Commission in February 2021, as the Electoral Commission investigation was ongoing, even though he had already stepped down from Labour Together as a director. McSweeney was pencilled in to meet Labour Together’s lawyers to discuss the issue the following month, apparently ahead of sending a response to queries raised by the Electoral Commission.

Emails show that McSweeney was told that it was possible that the Electoral Commission had failed, during its investigation, to identify the existence of his call to the Commission in November 2017. If it is true that the Commission was unaware of the call, it is something the Commission is going to have to work extremely hard to explain and justify.

Electoral Commission has questions to answer too

Email correspondence shows that the idea was floated with McSweeney that no mention should be made of his call to the Commission. Emails also show that Labour Together’s initial correspondence with the Commission made no mention of McSweeney’s call, or the clear and explicit directions that the Commission gave to McSweeney of the need to report donations and how to do so.

Email correspondence also shows that McSweeney was sent copies of the Electoral Commission’s correspondence with Labour Together up until March 2021, as well as Labour Together’s response to the Commission, quoted above, all of which neglected to mention McSweeney’s call and asserted that the failure to report was due to an “administrative oversight”.

One important caveat: the available documentation concerning how the Commission and Labour Together addressed this issue does not go beyond March 2021. It is possible that Labour Together decided, at some later point, to acknowledge McSweeney’s call. The Commission has failed to answer whether this is so – all the more reason why it is so imperative that the Commission release the investigative report it drafted in preparation for levying its fine.

On the available evidence, there is an urgent need to establish precisely what Labour Together told the Commission.

McSweeney lies to Labour MPs’ faces

More alarmingly still, there is evidence that, in my opinion, raises serious questions as to whether McSweeney may have deliberately chosen not to report donations to the Electoral Commission: first, we have the correspondence between the Electoral Commission and McSweeney. This indisputably establishes that McSweeney had put it to the Commission that Labour Together did not have to report donations as it did “not campaign” and that the Commission repeatedly informed McSweeney that Labour Together was indeed required to report donations, and how to do so.

Second, as noted above, the Sunday Times reported in November 2023 on McSweeney and his failure to report donations. The article was prompted by my decision to give certain documents to Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund. The paper spoke to a well-placed MP who had attended a Labour Together meeting in parliament in 2019. This source claimed that the issue of reporting donations was raised in that meeting, and that McSweeney was directly asked in front of the assembled MPs whether Labour Together was properly reporting its donations to the Electoral Commission. McSweeney, according to the source, affirmed that Labour Together was reporting its donations properly. In reality, Labour Together failed to report even a single donation as required by law throughout the entirety of 2019.

Misinforming the public

As McSweeney was reportedly misinforming MPs, Labour Together was simultaneously misinforming the public. From at least April 2019, Labour Together’s website claimed that:

we are funded by donations small and large from activists, trade unions and members who recognise our network needs to exist.

It then directed readers to the Electoral Commission’s donation register, providing a hyperlink to the Electoral Commission’s searchable database with the phrase ‘Labour Together’ pre-filled in. Of course, anybody clicking that link in April 2019 would not have seen the majority of the donations Labour Together had received in 2018 and 2019, because McSweeney had not reported them.

Labour Together would repeat this claim, and again direct people to the Electoral Commission’s register, in an article published by LabourList in February 2020, when McSweeney was still neglecting to report donations while acting as the campaign chief for Starmer’s Labour leadership bid.

Shabana Mahmood laying cover in LabourList

The February 2020 article, written on behalf of Labour Together and incorrectly telling the public that Labour Together was reporting its donations, was penned by Shabana Mahmood, who would later be appointed the lord high chancellor and secretary of state for justice. As discussed later, this was not the only inaccurate or incomplete claim Mahmood made in that article, which, taken together, must raise questions about her suitability for her current role as the safekeeper of the UK’s legal system.

The FOI documents, the MP’s testimony, and the Labour Together website all indicate that the organisation in general and McSweeney himself were repeatedly informed of the legal requirement to report donations and were simultaneously testifying that this was taking place – when it was not. Is it really credible that, in light of these repeated reminders and public statements, Labour Together just absent-mindedly forgot to disclose more than half a million pounds in politically sensitive donations?

A third relevant piece of evidence is what we now know about what McSweeney was actually doing. As the following chapters will show, while Labour Together was failing to report donations it also helped set up an astroturf campaign that fuelled the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’. It did so without any public disclosure – and, it appears, without informing Jon Cruddas MP, its own erstwhile director. It also worked to place damaging stories in the media about the same issue – again, without any public disclosure. At the same time, McSweeney was purposefully misleading all but a small group of insiders about what Labour Together was really doing, curating a façade of cross-factional bonhomie that would deflect close or critical scrutiny.

A propensity to misdirect, obscure, and plot in secret

We also now know that McSweeney was upfront about the biggest threat to his secret projects: discovery. As noted above, his 2017 SWOT analysis had warned that, if anybody found out what he and his allies were really doing, the initiative would fall apart. In my opinion, the SWOT analysis provides compelling evidence of motive: a need to avoid scrutiny and fly under the radar, so as to free the Labour Together Project’s hands to pursue its secret mission to destroy the Corbyn movement.

The Labour Together Project under McSweeney’s direction was arguably defined by this propensity to misdirect, obscure, plot in secret, and – as in the case of its February 2020 LabourList article – mislead the public about its work and activities.

As we’ve seen, Labour Together now brags about having strategised to destroy Corbynism whereas, at the time, it had adopted a public posture of studied neutrality and pretended to seek unity. Similarly, it now celebrates its part in Keir Starmer’s election as party leader, a role it explicitly denied playing at the time. Indeed, its secret projects, as McSweeney set out in the SWOT analysis, were entirely contingent on misleading people.

Substantive new evidence – enough for another probe

In these circumstances, would it be so surprising that Morgan McSweeney, who was incubating secret campaigns and misdirecting the public about his objectives, would take the exact same approach to his funding?

There is another crucial aspect to this: when the Electoral Commission conducted its investigation into Labour Together in 2020 and 2021, there was no hint that Labour Together was anything other than the anodyne, well-meaning think-tank it was claiming to be in public. The true nature of McSweeney’s projects being run via Labour Together have only very recently come to light.

This constitutes substantive new evidence that altogether recasts Labour Together’s failure to report donations; evidence indicating that McSweeney and his allies were comfortable with using deception to achieve their political objectives. This is one reason why I believe the Electoral Commission must not only release its investigative reports but also reopen its probe. The integrity of British democracy and the rule of law require it.

Starmer’s leadership bid

One way that Labour Together helped Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign was with access to polling. By the time McSweeney hooked up with Starmer in mid-2019 to incubate his candidacy, Labour Together had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on intensively polling the party membership. Polling was a declarable benefit under parliamentary reporting rules at the time. Starmer, if he did receive this sort of benefit above a certain value, would have been required to report it in his parliamentary spending declarations.

As of the end of 2023, not a single donation or benefit-in-kind flowing between Starmer and Labour Together appeared on the Electoral Commission’s donation register or in Starmer’s parliamentary declaration of interests.

Perhaps this is true. Perhaps Labour Together’s support was merely of the moral, or financially negligible, variety.

Perhaps it was spending its undeclared pot of funding on matters wholly unrelated to the very campaign that McSweeney was running while simultaneously sitting on the board of Labour Together, and even as Labour Together was helping Starmer win the leadership election – per its own subsequent online boasting.

McSweeney running Starmer’s campaign while breaking the law

Regardless, questions must arise about how McSweeney has been able to retain his roles in the Labour Party and as chief of staff to the prime minister. It is now incontrovertible that McSweeney caused Labour Together to break electoral law by failing to report donations over a long period of time. Then there is the matter of Labour Together breaking the law by failing to report donations valued at £147,500 during the period of Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign – while the organisation was secretly backing Starmer’s campaign (as it subsequently admitted) and while McSweeney still figured as its company secretary.

Three donations were made to Labour Together in January 2020, while a fourth was made in February (see Table 1). Labour Together failed to report the donations within the mandated thirty-day period, and still had not reported them by the time McSweeney resigned as Labour Together’s company secretary on April 4, 2020. In fact, Labour Together only reported these four donations in December 2020. Between January and April 2020, McSweeney served as the campaign chief for Starmer’s Labour leadership bid.

To reiterate: McSweeney was the company secretary of Labour Together while he was running Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign. During this period, Labour Together was breaking the law by failing to report donations; it was also secretly backing Starmer’s campaign while telling the public it was not supporting any particular candidate. During this period, Steve Reed and Lisa Nandy were also serving as directors of Labour Together; both were later appointed shadow ministers and then cabinet ministers under Starmer’s leadership. This means that two of Starmer’s future cabinet appointments, as well as his future chief of staff, served as the directors of a company that was breaking electoral law while secretly backing his Labour leadership campaign.

What a mess.

Original sin

McSweeney’s failure to report donations as required by law was the original sin of the Labour Together Project. Everything the project did between mid-2017 and at least April 2020 must be understood as having been done with a pot of money that Labour Together was failing to report to the authorities and the public in violation of the law – with compelling (albeit not conclusive) evidence suggesting that he might plausibly have done this on purpose.

In order to grasp precisely what the Labour Together Project was up to, and how problematic its interventions were, one has to understand, at least in broad outline, the nature and content of the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ that raged for years under Corbyn’s party leadership. That controversy contributed to Labour’s 2019 electoral drubbing and, arguably, haunted and constrained how Starmer’s party navigated the ‘plausible’ genocide Israel went on to inflict in Gaza.

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.

In the third installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we peel back the mask to reveal the real Morgan McSweeney – and how he came to end up in Downing Street. This is the third part of Chapter One.

From the outset, then, the Labour Together Project acted with premeditated misdirection and deceit.

In years of investigating McSweeney and Labour Together, I’ve only ever found one clip of McSweeney talking to camera: a recording of his introductory remarks to a small gathering hosted by Labour Together on July 15, 2019. It is chilling to re-watch the presentation knowing, as we now do, what McSweeney was up to behind closed doors.

McSweeney’s duplicitous speech: the soul of the Labour Party

McSweeney stands in a natty suit in front of a big-screen TV broadcasting the subject of the event: ‘How can we build a 21st Century Labour Party?’ He is positioned behind three speakers spanning the breadth of political opinion in the party: Nathan Yeowell, director of the Blairite think-tank Progress, is ironically seated on McSweeney’s left. To McSweeney’s right is Laura Parker, a former Corbyn aide and director of the left-wing campaign group Momentum, which had been established following Corbyn’s shock leadership victory in 2015. Sandwiched between them is Neal Lawson, the director of Compass. Compass is devoted to the Sisyphean task of getting progressive left-wing and liberal forces to work together.

As will be seen later, both Parker and Lawson would eventually fall foul of the political project being incubated by McSweeney, having being lured into giving it their tacit and sometimes explicit support. Both came to denounce the authoritarian and factional project that McSweeney would incubate. Both were played like a fiddle.

To be fair, McSweeney was utterly convincing. “The Labour Party has always been a party that has brought traditions together: our Labour unionist tradition, our radical socialist tradition, our reforming and social democrat tradition”, McSweeney told the meeting in his soft Irish lilt:

But too often and for too long these traditions are in a state of angry estrangement. Too often [and] for too long the focus has been on our differences, and that can come at a cost. The party is divided, and unity requires reconciliation. The best place to start this journey is by revisiting our founding principles. Labour was built on the principle of justice. We stand for decency in how we treat one another, and fairness in how we share out the advantages and burdens in society. The moral heart of justice is equality: each person is of equal worth. We must embed into our systems and actions this principle that all members are equal . . .

Sometimes some people seem to make it their mission to try and kill off the traditions that are not theirs. But you can’t do that, because these traditions are always with us. They’re like our souls. When those three souls stand together is when our party comes to life.

By this time, McSweeney’s secret plot to “kill off” the party’s Corbynite “soul” was well-advanced. But to put it into action, McSweeney needed cash.

The unreported money that made it possible

McSweeney’s work with Labour Together, so important for Starmer’s rise, was made possible by hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations. The public was totally unaware of this because McSweeney failed to report these donations as required by law. Serious questions need to be asked about whether McSweeney may have failed to report the donations on purpose – in my opinion, there is evidence that strongly suggests that possibility.

The Electoral Commission is a statutory body that regulates elections in the UK. It is of fundamental importance to UK democracy as it provides vital information about who funds politicians, parties, and related organisations like think-tanks. Its remit includes regulating and monitoring political donations. Individuals and organisations that fall under the ambit of the Commission are supposed to report any donation made or received over £7,500. Details of the donation are made public via the Electoral Commission’s register, which is searchable. It is not difficult to report donations or search the Commission’s public register.

One consequence of McSweeney’s failure to report donations as required by law was that the donations were not contemporaneously published. This meant the public had no way of knowing that Labour Together was receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds, or who it was receiving the money from. This will have helped the organisation to fly under the radar as it pursued its “secret planning” and “strateg[ising]” to defeat the “Hard Left”. If the donations had been made public, questions would certainly have been asked about why Labour Together, with its limited public presence, was receiving such huge pots of cash, and what it was doing with it.

Cash pours in for Labour Together at a telling time

Prior to McSweeney’s arrival Labour Together was modestly funded. Between October 2015 and June 2017 it received £121,000 in donations, all from Martin Taylor. Taylor, a hedge fund manager with interests in private healthcare, would become a major funder of Starmer’s Labour Party. Taylor’s financial records reveal an affinity with anti-Corbyn causes, including a £180,000 donation to an outfit called Labour Tomorrow that was reportedly being used to “fund campaigners against Jeremy Corbyn” during the 2016 Labour leadership contest. Taylor’s 2015 and 2016 donations to Labour Together were properly reported.

After the 2017 general election, which suggested that Corbynism could be electorally viable, Taylor and Chinn poured resources into Labour Together. Between June 2017 and September 2020, Labour Together received £862,492 in cash and non-cash donations. Taylor donated £585,992 in cash and non-cash donations; Chinn donated £175,500 in cash. The vast bulk of these donations – £849,429 – was made between June 21, 2017, and March 18, 2020: two weeks before the vote in which Starmer was elected as Labour Party leader.

At a telling time: McSweeney behind the scenes

This date range is revealing. It spans the time between Labour’s unexpectedly good showing at the June 2017 general election, the devastating results of the 2019 general election, and Starmer’s Spring 2020 Labour leadership campaign. It thus covered the exact period when McSweeney secretly worked first to undermine Corbyn and then to secure the Starmer succession.

Additional, smaller donations to Labour Together were made by Baron Clive Hollick (£10,000), a co-founder of the Institute for Public Policy Research; Simon Tuttle (£10,000), a private equity executive and director of the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate; Baron Paul Myners (£25,000), a ‘City grandee’ and former Labour minister under Gordon Brown; Richard Greer (£10,000), reported to be an investment banker; and Sean Wadsworth (£10,000), the founder of the Nigel Frank recruitment company and a donor to Owen Smith’s leadership campaign. Smith had unsuccessfully challenged Corbyn for the leadership in 2016 in the so-called ‘chicken coup’, after revolting MPs triggered a contest.

‘Failing’ to report three-quarters of a million in donations

Labour Together failed at the time to report fully £739,429 of the cash and non-cash donations it received between June 2017 and September 2020 to the Electoral Commission, as required by law. Of this amount, £143,992 consisted of three non-cash donations made by Taylor. The remainder (£595,000) were cash donations made by Chinn, Taylor, Myners, Tuttle, Greer, and Wadsworth. Electoral law requires that all donations must be reported within thirty days of receipt. There is no evidence that the donors were aware their gifts were not being properly reported.

In September 2021 the Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 for these failures, after Labour Together’s new company secretary (who replaced McSweeney) reported the matter to the Commission. The fine was levied following an investigation by the Commission. The implication of this finding is profound: the Commission found that Labour Together had incontrovertibly broken the law. That is now beyond dispute. What remains to be settled, I believe, is why.

An ‘administrative oversight’?

Labour Together has claimed that it was all a big mistake – that it broke electoral law for two years by accident. Hannah O’Rourke, a long-time employee of Labour Together and company secretary at the time of the self-report, told the media following the outcome of the Commission’s investigation that the failure to report had been “entirely unintentional” and an “administrative oversight”. She further claimed that Labour Together had contacted the Electoral Commission “as soon as we became aware of the error”.

Documents show that this was also the story that Labour Together told the Electoral Commission directly. Labour Together explained to the Commission that:

put simply, a number of donations should have been reported but were not: it appears, as a result of human error and administrative oversight.

It further explained that:

enquiries have been made with those involved at the material time and frankly it was assumed that donations were being properly reported.

Most importantly, correspondence reiterated that:

there was absolutely no intention to make a false declaration, nor to fail to report.

McSweeney’s donation cock-ups: intentional?

The Electoral Commission has refused to disclose the full basis on which it reached its decision to levy only a very modest fine on Labour Together, or any details of the investigation it conducted. It has refused at least three Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for copies of its investigative report. It has claimed – wrongly, in this author’s view – that disclosure of its investigative report in this instance would dissuade others from self-reporting wrongdoing. The Commission has maintained this position despite publishing detailed investigative reports on other matters, like its investigation into Momentum in 2019 and Vote Leave/BeLeave/Veterans for Britain/Darren Grimes in 2018.

However, having looked at the documents from the Labour Party, the more limited number of documents released to me by the Electoral Commission based on FOI requests, and new details about what the Labour Together Project was doing behind the scenes, I don’t find Labour Together’s version convincing. Or, more precisely, it is my opinion that the totality of evidence about the Labour Together Project, not least its capacity and appetite for misdirection and subterfuge, when read alongside the FOI requests and Labour Party files, could just as plausibly give rise to the suspicion that McSweeney’s failure to report donations was intentional.

Call logs to the Electoral Commission: the receipts

We turn to the FOI disclosures first. In late December 2023, the Commission finally released documents to me showing that it had explicitly told McSweeney that Labour Together needed to report its donations.

The FOI disclosures included records of a call between McSweeney and an unidentified person at the Commission dated November 14, 2017. The call was logged in the Commission’s contact system and appears to have been initiated by McSweeney. At the time of the call, Labour Together had received three donations that it had yet to report, including one donation of £10,000 from Chinn and two donations totalling £38,000 from Taylor. McSweeney had by this time already set in motion his secret plan to destroy Corbynism.

Under the heading ‘detail’, the call log records that:

Labour Together have not been reporting donations to us, Mr McSweeney was under the impression that Labour Together did not have to report because they do not campaign. However, Labour Together is a registered MA [members association] on our system. Mr McSweeney says that they are not a members association and this is where the confusion started.

The unidentified Commission advisor told McSweeney:

to report the donations to us with a cover letter saying why they had not been reported sooner and said that if the details in the system were wrong, we can review it.

A members association is an “organisation that is not a political party, but is wholly, or mainly, made up of members of a political party”, the Commission would later tell McSweeney. Members associations are required by law to report to the Electoral Commission donations they make and receive above £7,500.38.

Did ‘not campaign’, except that’s exactly what Labour Together did

McSweeney’s claim that Labour Together “did not campaign” is striking. By the time of this call in November 2017, McSweeney had already told Labour Together insiders that it should prepare to incubate a future leadership bid once its undisclosed political projects had contributed to the defeat of Corbynism.

McSweeney’s plan also involved fostering an ecosystem of influencers and publications to rival pro-Corbyn alternative media in order to achieve his political aims. Indeed, McSweeney would literally script a podcast called Changing Politics! Furthermore, this podcast engaged directly in political campaigning, without any public acknowledgment that it was funded by Labour Together and part-written by McSweeney.

“So excited for @changingpolipod”, Hannah O’Rourke, an employee of Labour Together, tweeted one day before the first episode was released in late June 2018. “[It is] the first all female presented [sic] political podcast that connects politics to actually campaigning”, she enthused.

Labour Together extolling the virtues of the Labour Party

The first episode of the podcast focused on Seni’s Law: a laudable piece of legislation to improve the treatment of people with mental health issues. Seni’s Law was submitted as a Private Members’ Bill by none other than Steve Reed, McSweeney’s long-time ally and collaborator on the Labour Together Project, as well as the shadow minister for civil society. Reed was given five minutes of the tight thirty-minute runtime of the first episode to sell the bill. The episode closed with a call for members of the public to contact their MPs to push for them to attend the next reading of Reed’s bill the following week and vote it through the Commons.

The podcast’s Twitter feed also extolled Seni’s Law and prominently featured Steve Reed. “Steve’s the MP for Croydon North who is pushing Seni’s Law through Parliament”, the Changing Politics Twitter account explained, sharing Reed’s own endorsement for the show. “Follow him for updates”. The podcast’s Facebook account was also used to set up a Facebook group called ‘Changing Politics Campaign for Seni’s Law’. In February 2019, the podcast’s Twitter account shared a video produced by Labour Together that extolled the historic virtues of the Labour Party.

Political podcast scripted by none other than… McSweeney

This was an extraordinary situation, regardless of the virtue of Seni’s Law. Just over seven months after McSweeney had told the Electoral Commission that Labour Together “did not campaign”, the organisation was using its undeclared donations to pay for and launch a podcast, scripted in part by McSweeney himself, that was explicitly “campaign[ing]” for a bill introduced and backed by Steve Reed, a shadow cabinet minister and McSweeney’s fellow Labour Together director – all without any public disclosure of these connections.

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.

In the second installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we peel back the mask to reveal the real Morgan McSweeney – and how he came to end up in Downing Street. This is the second part of Chapter One.

The 2017 election result was the backdrop to a radical transformation of Labour Together. According to Anushka Asthana, ITV’s deputy political editor whose 2024 book Taken As Red traced Starmer’s rise to power, McSweeney took up employment at Labour Together the very day after the 2017 general election results came in. What is certain is that the following month, on July 10, McSweeney was appointed Labour Together’s company secretary, leaving the LGA.

McSweeney tightens his grip on Labour Together

According to Labour Together legend, 2017 was the year its eight “brave” MPs formed the organisation to lead Labour back to electability through “secret planning”. As the above account shows, this is not true. Labour Together was created in 2015 out of a very different impulse – to hold the party together as the right wing revolted against a Corbyn leadership. During Labour Together’s first years, the Labour Party’s right wing had gone into overdrive to undo Corbyn’s election, feeding endless attack lines to the media and using the pretext of the UK’s vote to exit the European Union in 2016 to launch the so-called ‘chicken coup’ – a leadership challenge to Corbyn that was roundly defeated by a Labour membership that rallied behind its embattled leader.

But as with most legends, there is fact amidst the fancy: The organisation did fundamentally change character in 2017. It was then that McSweeney came on board and started working to undermine the Labour left.

John Cruddas: now critical of Starmer’s authoritarian leadership

I interviewed Cruddas for this book in 2023. His disappointment at the direction Labour had taken at the hands of Starmer and McSweeney was palpable. Cruddas’ long-time friend, Neal Lawson, had been suspended from the party on contentious charges (his story is discussed in more detail later). Lawson hailed from Labour’s so-called ‘soft left’. Cruddas was highly critical of the authoritarian style that Labour had adopted under Starmer’s leadership.

During the interview, I presented Cruddas with quotes from Labour Together figures retrospectively claiming credit for “defeating the Hard Left” and playing a “key role” in Starmer’s leadership campaign. Cruddas seemed genuinely flummoxed. He speculated that this was a rewriting of history to cast Labour Together as more central to Starmer’s leadership than it really was and thereby cement the group’s influence in government.

I then asked Cruddas whether he had ever heard of an entity called the Center for Countering Digital Hate. CCDH, as shown in considerable detail later, was created by the Labour Together Project without any public disclosure. CCDH played an arguably ugly and certainly undisclosed role in the Labour Party ‘antisemitism crisis’ that would engulf the party under Corbyn’s leadership. Cruddas, again, looked flummoxed. He had never heard of it, or of the people that Labour Together worked with to create CCDH.

“What, do you think Morgan and others were creating secret campaigns or projects or something?” he asked, seemingly betraying his own ignorance of the projects that McSweeney and Reed, via Labour Together, had launched and run for years.

Bucolic getaways, private dinners, and pieties concealing its ugly underbelly

The extent of Cruddas’ ignorance appears to have been matched by Jonathan Rutherford, a veteran Labour figure who was invited to various Labour Together meetings and getaways. In November 2023, the Sunday Times ran a front-page story about Labour Together, based in part on documents I gave to the paper. The story looked at the way Labour Together had transformed politics “under the cover of darkness and in breach of the law”, a reference to Labour Together’s unlawful failure to declare its donations – discussed below.

The article prompted a bemused response from Rutherford, who appears to have been involved in Labour Together’s more respectable early endeavours. Rutherford wrote an article in the New Statesman denying that there was anything secret or nefarious about the group. By then, a brief blurb for this book had been published, and, on the basis of a scant three-hundred word summary, Rutherford declared that it leaned toward the “conspiratorial”.

Rutherford then went into colourful detail about all the wonderful things Labour Together did behind the scenes to unite the party, like organising rural retreats for MPs and hosting them for private dinners à la Winston Churchill’s The Other Club. Rutherford insisted Labour Together had “developed bridge-building for a common-good politics”. It all sounded positively bucolic – and a world away from the disturbing projects that McSweeney and Reed actually launched via Labour Together, such as CCDH.

Labour Together: a project of ‘renewal’ not rivalry?

Assuming that Rutherford, like Cruddas, was speaking in good faith (and there is no reason to believe otherwise), both suffer from striking gaps in knowledge about what Labour Together was being used for in the period between 2017 and 2020 – and precisely what sort of character they were dealing with in Morgan McSweeney.

To be fair to both Rutherford and Cruddas, they were not the only people who the Labour Together Project would lull or misdirect with soothing pieties about unity. In April 2019, McSweeney arranged a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn; Cruddas also attended.

By then, McSweeney was already intervening covertly in the party’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ that was undermining Corbyn’s public reputation. McSweeney used the meeting to assure Corbyn that Labour Together was a project of ‘renewal’, not rivalry – even as McSweeney was actively plotting to destroy Corbyn and his politics, which McSweeney “despised”.

The real McSweeney

Multiple insiders have described McSweeney as charming, polite, and serious, and there is no doubt he was exceptionally skilled at convincing the very people whose politics he was actually conspiring against that he was a reasonable man who had their best interests at heart.

One of these people was Gráinne Maguire, an Irish comedian and political commentator. In 2018, Maguire co-hosted a podcast series, Changing Politics, which put out twenty episodes before being shuttered in December 2018. Maguire confirmed to me that the podcast was largely McSweeney’s brainchild and was generously funded by Labour Together, which paid for her time.

Maguire said that McSweeney also played a central role in scripting the content of different episode segments. Labour Together’s role in funding the podcast, and McSweeney’s role in writing it, were not publicly known at the time, making the podcast one of a number of undisclosed projects McSweeney had a hand in directing after joining Labour Together.

‘Progress type’ in sheep’s clothing

Maguire had voted twice for Corbyn as Labour leader and openly identified with the party’s left. By the time I caught up with her in 2024, Maguire had been so put off by Labour’s direction under the Starmer Project that she voted Green in the July general election. Like many, she was upset by the party’s approach to Gaza and trans rights, and by its decision to retain the two-child benefit cap (discussed in more detail later).

Maguire was clearly taken with McSweeney, their shared Irishness underpinning an instant rapport. “He seemed like such a pure boy”, she recalled, “with his little bright cheeks”. After a long time in the party, Maguire had become finely attuned to ‘Progress types’, a reference to the Blairite group that was implacably opposed to Corbynism. She detected no hint that McSweeney was aligned with this faction or that he “despised” Corbyn and Corbynism.

In fact, she found him “so fantastic, so intelligent, so articulate”, She recalls thinking that “if only somebody like Morgan was running the country”, everything would be alright. Little did she know that, even as McSweeney was penning scripts about trans rights and other right-on causes, he was simultaneously incubating plans to drive her worldview out of the party for good.

McSweeney: Mandelson’s golden boy

McSweeney joined Labour in the mid-1990s as a receptionist and then a member of the party’s media operations. During the 2001 election he was given the task of feeding data into Peter Mandelson’s famed Excalibur computer that stored information to be used by the party’s rebuttal unit. But according to a New Statesman profile by Rachel Wearmouth, McSweeney’s first real dive into Labour politics came when he worked alongside Steve Reed, then leader of Lambeth council. Under Reed, McSweeney:

led a revolt against the far-left factions for which the authority had become notorious.

Following a period in Dagenham – where retrospective hagiography has him single-handedly routing the far-right British National Party (BNP) – McSweeney ran Liz Kendall’s disastrous 2015 campaign for Labour Party leader. Kendall ran as a Blairite and received just 4.5% of the votes against Corbyn’s landslide. McSweeney then returned to the LGA, where he would stay until leaving to join Labour Together in 2017. Kendall’s career would undergo a renaissance after McSweeney had guided Starmer to victory.

For an organisation supposedly committed to internal harmony through cross-party unity, McSweeney was plainly an odd choice. Nick Forbes, who had been one of Labour Together’s first public supporters, explained in 2021 that McSweeney:

doesn’t have room for compromise with the hard left. He thinks that they need to be eradicated from the party because they are so dangerous.

That doesn’t sound very harmonious. McSweeney is a long-time protégé of Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour who, in February 2017, publicly bragged that he was “working every day” to bring down Corbyn’s elected leadership. That doesn’t sound very unifying. Mandelson has been quoted saying of McSweeney:

I don’t know who and how and when he was invented, but whoever it was . . . they will find their place in heaven.

SWOT analysis: plans afoot to destroy Corbyn and all he represents

Asthana puts it bluntly: McSweeney and his close ally Reed “despised” Corbyn and the ‘hard-left’ politics he represented. Pogrund and Maguire similarly relate that, for McSweeney:

Corbyn’s politics were not just wrong. They were evil.

A man of such uncompromising views plainly could have no interest in bringing the party’s factions together.

Indeed, almost as soon as McSweeney became the company secretary of Labour Together and its employee, he set his sights on destroying Corbyn and the popular movement he had inspired. These plans were laid out in a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis authored by McSweeney that set out the lay of the land for the Labour Together Project in the post-2017-general-election environment. McSweeney distributed the analysis to Labour Together insiders at a meeting in Steve Reed’s office on June 20, 2017 – less than two weeks after the Labour Party had achieved its best national vote share since 2001.

The document argued that Labour Together had to undertake a project of ‘renewal’ to remake the Labour Party as representative of the working class and remove it from Corbynite hands. McSweeney would use that same word, ‘renewal’, in his fabled meeting with Corbyn two years later, but this document shows what he really meant by the word – the permanent defeat of Corbyn and his politics, even as Corbynism had nearly doubled the party’s membership and substantially increased its share of the popular vote.

The document noted that Corbyn was unassailable as party leader in the wake of the impressive 2017 election result, which had secured the left’s ascendancy throughout the party.

McSweeney gets his first bitter taste of defeat in Streatham

McSweeney would experience the bitter reality of the left’s growing influence in Streatham, the constituency of Chuka Umunna, where McSweeney was a right-wing fixture in the CLP. At this local level, McSweeney worked closely with Matt Pound, who in turn was close to Luke Akehurst. Pound was the ‘national organiser’ for Labour First from January 2017 to January 2020.

Whereas Labour Together under McSweeney engaged in covert efforts to sabotage the Corbyn leadership, Labour First was base camp for the Labour right’s overt fightback. Pound would subsequently join the Labour bureaucracy under Starmer; McSweeney, Pound, and Akehurst would all play important roles in the selection of Labour’s parliamentary candidates for the July 2024 general election, a process which (as noted) was heavily criticised for excluding left-wing candidates on controversial grounds.

Streatham’s CLP was the site of fierce factional confrontation following a surge of left-wing members who joined (or began to participate) after Corbyn’s election. The contest came to a head in February 2019, when the CLP voted by the slimmest margin to adopt an all-member-meeting model that was seen as a way of short-circuiting the right’s grip on the CLP.

‘Blue murder’: McSweeney’s mask slips

The fight played out on the pages of LabourList, the party’s de facto in-house journal, with Pound making an impassioned plea for all constituencies to reject the model. One left-winger active in the community recalls that, until that point, McSweeney had cut a modest figure, with Pound considered more personally combative.

But when the Labour right lost the vote in Streatham, McSweeney was seen losing his temper for the first time: he shouted “blue murder” about the voting process, according to one person who attended on the night. Just under three weeks after the left had won its desired changes to the structure of the CLP, Umunna would leave the Labour Party to join the short-lived breakaway party Change UK.

The CLP’s ascendant left would select the left-wing Bell Ribeiro-Addy to replace him as their local MP candidate. Ribeiro-Addy would be elected to parliament in December 2019 and join the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs.

McSweeney’s plan to ‘eradicate’ the ‘evil’ left-wing

Back in Reed’s office, McSweeney explained that the Labour Together Project had two missions: first, it had to prepare for when Corbyn eventually stepped down, identifying and developing a candidate who could swoop in to take Corbyn’s place. This role would eventually be played by Keir Starmer. While there was no need to immediately pick Corbyn’s successor, McSweeney explained that Labour Together would have to transform itself into a vehicle for a leadership bid at the appropriate time. If they succeeded, the rewards would be immense: with a new hand-picked leader in place, the Labour Together Project could capture the party for the right – and, per the testimonies quoted above, “eradicate” those “evil” left-wing tendencies that McSweeney “despised”.

Second, Labour Together had to “ensure” that Corbyn “lost badly”, according to Maguire and Pogrund. Only Corbyn’s resounding defeat in a general election would remove him from the scene and trigger a new leadership contest. There is no doubt that the Labour Together Project viewed electoral success for the Labour Party under Corbyn as anathema. McSweeney’s SWOT analysis listed “a Labour government” in the category of “threats”. As Asthana notes, this made:

explicit that [McSweeney’s] concern was not whether Corbyn could win, but that if he were to become Prime Minister it would prevent the renewal they were focused on.

A Labour government under Corbyn: a ‘threat’ to the Labour right

McSweeney and his allies would burn down the party to inherit the ashes.

Indeed, Labour Together was bent on engineering this ‘renewal’ even though it meant giving the Tories another five years to oversee widening inequality and biting austerity as they drove through a hard Brexit. It is one of the striking ironies of the Labour Together Project that it would select Starmer to replace Corbyn in part because it could trade on his popular image as the party’s ‘Mr. Remainer’ – even as the Labour Together Project had worked for years to ensure that the party “lost badly” to a Tory government that promised to deliver Brexit on the most uncompromising terms.

McSweeney was clear in his briefing that the conspiracy to destroy Corbynism would have to be conducted in utmost secrecy. Indeed, McSweeney’s SWOT analysis identified the discovery of the true work of the Labour Together Project as one of the greatest threats it faced.

But Labour Together couldn’t disappear altogether. Instead, the project set out to mislead all but a small coterie of insiders about what it was really doing. It would do so by curating its public image as a well-meaning, cross-factional think-tank convening convivial dialogues to help the party navigate and transcend its factional divides. McSweeney dubbed this protective manoeuvre ‘Operation Red Shield’.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

In the first installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we take you on a journey through the inception of Morgan McSweeney’s organisation Labour Together.

Labour fought the December 2019 general election with a base split by Brexit and a party divided against itself. It went down to a heavy defeat. After Jeremy Corbyn resigned the helm, Keir Starmer wasted no time in putting his own name forward for the role of new party leader. Starmer’s leadership campaign was a slick affair, launched and defined by a well-produced video that touted his leftist credentials and values. One campaign insider described how, from the outset, it was streets ahead of any contenders in terms of messaging, organisation, infrastructure, and funding.

Starmer could launch his candidacy so quickly thanks to years of preparation largely outside the public eye. This work was done by a political project operating through an organisation called Labour Together. The project had likely started preparing for a leadership contest before Starmer was even aware of its existence. Labour Together provided access to funders. It would also supply Starmer’s key officials including his Svengali, Morgan McSweeney, and many of his future shadow cabinet and cabinet ministers.

Labour Together: laying the groundwork for Starmer’s leadership

Starmer’s left-wing Labour leadership pitch was based on polling undertaken by McSweeney and Labour Together throughout 2019. This equipped Starmer’s campaign with an in-depth understanding of party members’ views. Indeed, as Times reporters Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have written, Starmer effectively ‘subcontracted’ his leadership campaign to Labour Together.

McSweeney, a Labour Together director both before and during Starmer’s leadership bid, was the head of Starmer’s leadership campaign. He was later appointed Starmer’s chief of staff in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (commonly referred to as LOTO). After Starmer formed a government in July 2024, McSweeney became arguably the most powerful unelected official in the UK as Starmer’s chief of staff in Number 10. Before his stint at Labour Together, McSweeney had worked with David Evans, who was appointed general secretary of the Labour Party less than two months after Starmer’s election as party leader.

From its formation in 2015, Labour Together had presented itself as a unifying body that sought to heal Labour’s internal divisions. It even claimed, in February 2020, that it had no horse in the Labour leadership race. Between 2016 and 2018, its website claimed that Labour Together sought to:

provide a space for members and representatives across the party to discuss and debate the future of the Labour Party.

It also promised that:

our aim is to be broadly inclusive, and to involve people right across the movement. Jeremy Corbyn has rightly challenged the Labour Party to re-think the way it does politics.

This complimentary nod to Corbyn was striking in light of what Labour Together now acknowledges it was actually doing behind the scenes.

A ‘brave band’ of MPs… now in government

In 2023, Labour Together would tell a very different story. On the social media platform Twitter (since rebranded as X), it claimed that a “brave band” of eight MPs had “[b]uilt” Labour Together in 2017 in order to make Labour “electable again”. These MPs provided the spine of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, and then his cabinet: Rachel Reeves (now chancellor), Steve Reed (secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs), Shabana Mahmood (lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice), Wes Streeting (secretary of state for health and social care), Bridget Phillipson (secretary of state for education), Lisa Nandy (secretary of state for culture, media, and sport), and Jim McMahon (minister of state in the department for levelling up, housing, and communities). Only Jon Cruddas, the eighth MP, has not subsequently served in Starmer’s shadow cabinet or government.

Editor’s note: since the book went to print, Starmer has instigated a reshuffle. Now, Steve Reed is secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, Shabana Mahmood is home secretary, and Jim McMahon was axed from his cabinet role. Additionally, Bridget Phillipson is currently running as candidate for Labour Party deputy leader. 

Labour Together’s retrospective claim to have been established in 2017 was curious on at least two counts. First, as discussed above, the group in fact formed in 2015. Second, it would have been most odd to found an organisation to make Labour “electable again” in 2017 – the year that Labour achieved the party’s highest vote share in any election since the Blair heyday of 2001.

The ‘secret’ campaign to ‘seize’ the Labour Party from the left

It was in 2017, however, that Labour Together became the vehicle through which McSweeney would run a “secret” campaign to “seize” the Labour Party back from its ascendant left wing. One of Labour Together’s central figures, the MP for Streatham and Croydon North Steve Reed, later bragged that:

[i]n 2017 Labour Together developed a strategy for defeating the Hard Left and reconnecting Labour with the voters it had abandoned. In 2020, it played a key role in Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, and Keir has since transformed our party.

The Starmer Project is thus, in every sense that matters, a product and continuation of the Labour Together Project that preceded, guided, and enabled it.

As a result, the Starmer Project is both illuminated and condemned by Labour Together’s history of financial murkiness, undisclosed influence campaigns, and attacks on citizen media, as well as its role in inflaming Labour’s manipulated ‘antisemitism crisis’. Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party – and the government he went on to form – is the fruit of Labour Together’s poisoned tree.

Labour Together: conspiring behind closed doors

Labour Together was formed in the shadow of Jeremy Corbyn. Its corporate precursor, Common Good Labour, was registered with Companies House on June 9, 2015, only six days after Corbyn announced his intention to run for the party leadership. Its sole director was John Clarke, who would later turn up as a director of Blue Labour. Blue Labour advocated a mixture of redistributive economic policy and social conservatism.

Party emails show that many of the people who would go on to form Common Good Labour (later Labour Together) had collaborated closely for years beforehand. They included Jonathan Rutherford, Jon Cruddas, Steve Reed, and Morgan McSweeney, the last drafted into discussions about localism and local government because of his role in the Local Government Association (LGA). In late 2014 and prior to Labour’s embarrassing electoral defeat in 2015, this group engaged in constant correspondence about creating a project to centre Labour strategy based on a ‘values model’.

Enter Labour right stalwart: Steve Reed

The same emails reveal that the key movers behind the creation of Common Good Labour were Sir Trevor Chinn and Jon Cruddas. Cruddas, an MP well-liked across the party’s factions, was also broadly sympathetic to the Blue Labour tendency.

One email from early July 2015 shows that Chinn had initially wanted the Blairite MP Chuka Umunna to head the organisation. Umunna was at one point the leading light of sweet-talking Labour centrists and considered potential leadership material, before he immolated his political career by abandoning Labour for the ill-fated breakaway party Change UK in 2019. Umunna rejected the overture and Steve Reed or Tristram Hunt (the idiosyncratic MP for Stoke Central between 2010 and 2017) were mooted instead; Reed would become a director a few months later.

Reed, who would serve on Corbyn’s front bench as shadow minister under various portfolios between September 2015 and April 2020, would emerge as one of the key figures alongside McSweeney in the Labour Together Project, and in its undisclosed schemes that, amongst other things, stoked Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’.

Major pro-Israel donor Trevor Chinn on the scene

Chinn, who would become a major donor to both Labour Together and Keir Starmer, is a wealthy entrepreneur with a long history of funding figures on the Labour right. Chinn made donations to Tony Blair (while MP), Ruth Smeeth, Tom Watson, Rachel Reeves, Ian Austin, and Wes Streeting – all of whom would express hostility to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He has long been associated with Labour Friends of Israel and has an extended history of involvement in pro-Israel causes. For twenty years between 1973 and 1993 he chaired the Joint Israel Appeal (now United Jewish Appeal), which raised funds for cultural and educational endeavours in Israel.

In June 2016, a year after Common Good Labour was formed, Chinn was re-elected the vice chair of the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), which engages in advocacy for Israel (among other things). As of November 2023, Chinn was a member of the executive committee of the Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre (BICOM), a pro-Israel lobby group. BICOM’s sister project, We Believe in Israel, was run by Luke Akehurst prior to Akehurst’s election to parliament in 2024. Akehurst is the Labour right’s most effective campaigner and a dedicated warrior against the left. The JLC was fiercely critical of Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party.

Chinn’s award for ‘extraordinary contributions’ to Israel amid a genocide

In November 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour. The award recognises individuals:

who have made an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel or to humanity through their talents, their service, or in any other way.

The award was the gift of President Isaac Herzog, who, in January 2024, had been cited by the International Court of Justice as making statements that plausibly violated the Genocide Convention. Herzog rejected the ICJ’s judgment as a ‘blood libel’ that had ‘twisted’ his words. By the time Chinn was awarded the medal, Israel’s plausibly genocidal assault on Gaza had killed at least 43,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 7,200 women.

Not ‘anti-Jeremy’ assurances: a mendacious deception

Labour Together’s first foray into public life made little impact. Cruddas announced in the Observer in October 2015 that Labour Together aimed to:

bring together all sections of our party to discuss and debate the future of our party

He promised that Labour Together would “learn the lessons of defeat so that we can win again” and acknowledged that Corbyn had:

rightly challenged the party to rethink the way it does politics.

Cruddas confirmed that his colleagues in Labour Together included Steve Reed, Lisa Nandy, and Baroness Judith Blake. Emails show that Corbyn’s team in LOTO was concerned about Labour Together but was mollified when Nandy explained that the group was not ‘anti-Jeremy’. Perhaps this was true at the time; McSweeney had not yet joined Labour Together or united forces with Reed. Nevertheless, the assurance that Labour Together was not ‘anti-Jeremy’ stands out in retrospect as a moment of poignant historical irony.

In March 2016, John Clarke, the original sole director of Labour Together, resigned. He was replaced by Chinn, Reed, Nandy, and Cruddas. They remained directors of Labour Together until a clear-out and reshape of the organisation in 2023.

Labour Together’s launch…for the second time

The October 2015 launch was so forgettable that Labour Together felt comfortable unveiling itself a second time. That re-launch was announced in the Guardian in May 2016 with quotes from Lisa Nandy. The Guardian’s coverage made no mention that Labour Together had already debuted the previous year. The new launch was boosted by articles from Jon Cruddas and Sharon Taylor. Taylor was head of Stevenage Borough Council and deputy leader of the LGA Labour Group – then led by Morgan McSweeney. Nandy, Reed, and Taylor were described as Labour Together’s vice chairs. Another supporter was Nick Forbes, the Labour leader of Newcastle City Council between 2011 and 2022 – a matter of relevance later in our story.

Labour Together’s second outing made almost as little public impact as its first. The group hosted a function at
Labour’s annual conference in September 2016 and established a £40,000 fund for projects advancing localism. It also co-hosted a one-day conference in November 2016 with the Fabian Society. Speakers included Nandy, Reeves, Taylor, and Tom Kibasi, the last of whom was a director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank and charity. Kibasi would go on to play a key part in linking Starmer’s leadership campaign to the Labour left – a role for which he would later express his remorse.

And then: silence. Labour Together effectively disappeared from public view. Although it claims to have done extensive work behind the scenes in setting up meetings and campaign groups, whatever happened unfolded outside the public eye. Neither of the organisation’s Facebook or Twitter accounts posted between November 3, 2016 – the day of the conference – and February 17, 2019.

McSweeney prepares to take control

The 2017 general election was a shot across the bow for the Labour right. Shattering expectations, Corbyn’s party won thirty seats more than in 2015 and, for only the third time since 1974, achieved 40% of the national vote. Within the Labour Party, the 2017 election left the Corbynite faction at its most powerful since Corbyn had been elected leader in 2015, while the right-wing faction that McSweeney represented was at its nadir.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.