In the twelfth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, the Canary and its supporters push back against Stop Funding Fake News and Rachel Riley – but then, they come for Corbyn. This is the sixth part of Chapter Three.
In late March 2019, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) scored its first major success when the Macmillan Cancer charity responded to its campaign against the Canary. Macmillan was alerted to the fact that one of its appeals for donations appeared at the bottom of an article in which the Canarycriticised the former Labour MP Joan Ryan.
Ryan had left the Labour Party to join The Independent Group, the breakaway splinter that became Change UK. Prior to this defection, Ryan had been the chair of the pro-Israel lobby group Labour Friends of Israel. She had previously received donations from Labour Together’s Trevor Chinn. She is not Jewish.
The Canary article in question recounted how Ryan had travelled to the US to address a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committees (AIPAC), a leading pro-Israel advocacy group. The Canary reported that Ryan’s presentation before AIPAC had “smeared” Corbyn with claims of antisemitism, including the allegation that he was “friends” with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Dave Gordstein and the engine of hate
Whether or not one agrees with the Canary’s argument, it is an extraordinary stretch to suggest that it was an exercise in fake news. The article was sourced and its factual basis was true. To be sure, the Canary’s interpretation of those facts was up for debate, but such is the nature of all political media. Nevertheless, Macmillan was urged to “please stop funding fake news” in a tweet that copied the Canary headline and included a picture of Macmillan’s ad. The tweet tagged SFFN’s Twitter account and included the hashtag #sffnews. It was sent by an account with the username @ed_derwent on March 25.
The appeal was amplified by Rachel Riley the following day. Within hours, Macmillan announced that “we are taking action to remove this placement whilst we review the platforms used for our online ads”. SFFN would tweet out their fulsome thanks for ‘Dave’. But who was Dave? Dave was none other than David Gordstein: the Twitter account, @ed_derwent, which only had a handful of followers, used the descriptor name ‘Dave Gordstein’, the strikingly Jewish-sounding pseudonym of LAAS’ non-Jewish Euan Philips.
The Canary: demonetised at the behest of a fake Jewish-sounding Twitter profile
To recap: the Canary, arguably the most widely read alternative media outlet that supported Corbynism, was being demonetised at the behest of a fake Jewish-sounding Twitter profile run by a non-Jewish man, as part of a broader SFFN astroturf campaign that hid its connections to CCDH, Labour Together, Imran Ahmed, and sitting MPs. This, at least in part, was what the Labour Together Project was presumably doing with Labour Together’s undisclosed pot of funding: celebrating the ‘David Gordsteins’ of the world as they destroyed the careers and livelihoods of young journalists, some of whom had written proudly of their Jewish cultural roots – all in the name of fighting antisemitism.
Macmillan’s decision infuriated many left-wing Twitter followers. Within hours, Twitter users reacted with their own campaign organised around the hashtag #BoycottRachelRiley, which began trending on Twitter. The hashtag was treated as antisemitic by, amongst others, the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The hashtag “tells you just about everything you need to know about these people”, the Board was quoted as having said in the Jewish Chronicle:
Racists and racism-apologists, attacking a Jewish woman for speaking out against antisemitism.
#BoycottRachelRiley is what happens when you speak out about antisemitism. It’s a double-punch: first the antisemitism, then the bullying to shut you up’.
Rich’s response presaged an astonishing report published by the Community Security Trust (CST) in August 2019 called Engine of Hate: The Online Networks Behind the Labour Party Antisemitism Crisis. The report purported to track a web of ‘antisemitic’ networks backing the Labour Party under Corbyn and charged that articles published by the likes of The Canary had fuelled this bigotry. The report traced accounts using hashtags implicated in the party’s antisemitism controversy. One of those hashtags was #BoycottRachelRiley. CST claimed that the hashtag was developed and used to:
promote the online bullying of a public personality who had repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism.
#BoycottRachelRiley: hashtag retaliating to fake news smears
This was chilling. #BoycottRachelRiley was, after all, a defensive response to a campaign launched by SFFN and housed inside or alongside CCDH – a campaign the CST itself has discreetly advised. This campaign was based on the smear that a popular, left-wing, and independently regulated media website was nothing more than a “fake news” factory “deliberately” making up “lies” to spread “hate”, including antisemitism.
When CST published Engine of Hate, garnering fulsome coverage in the Guardian and Jewish Chronicle, it had the effect of linking numerous people to allegations that seriously tainted their reputations. Some of these people were Jewish – like Heather Mendick, who woke up one morning to lurid coverage of how she, a Jewish Labour Party member, was part of an antisemitic “engine room”.
Seen in this context, what the CST report represented was the hostile surveillance of left-wing social media users, many Jewish, who had been provoked by an inflammatory astroturf campaign in which the CST had played its own undisclosed role. More importantly, the SFFN’s dishonest and anti-pluralist campaign had been incubated by the same team that would deliver Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party, and, upon Starmer’s 2024 election victory, be elevated to the highest levels of state power.
SFFN targets right-wing figures
As well as demonetising Labour-supporting websites, SFFN also staged a problematic intervention in the European parliamentary elections of May 2019.
On May 23, SFFN posted a lengthy thread about participants in the election. “We’re not party-political”, SFFN absurdly promised:
but we do campaign against fake news . . . Here are the fake news merchants involved in today’s #EUelections2019.
SFFN’s thread targeted two right-wing figures, Tommy Robinson and Michael Heaver. Heaver, a journalist, was also the Brexit Party candidate for the East of England and co-founder of SFFN’s targetWestmonster. He would be elected to the European Parliament in the 2019 campaign alongside the Brexit Party chairperson, Richard Tice. Tice subsequently formed and ran the Reform Party with former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage.
SFFN complained that Heaver was the editor of the “fake news website” Westmonster, also pointing out that he had previously worked as Farage’s press officer. SFFN’s ‘evidence’ threads against Westmonster, posted when SFFN was launched and thereafter, included numerous allusive photographs of Farage and Donald Trump, amid complaints that:
fake news website Westmonster, co-founded by Arron Banks, is now effectively a propaganda channel for Nigel
Farage’s #Brexit Party.
“Please don’t vote for those who spread lies, bigotry or hate”, the May 23 thread implored:
And make sure you vote today!
Electoral interference
I do not support the politics and opinions of the likes of Farage and Heaver. But this is beside the point. SFFN’s Twitter thread was a direct and material intervention in a UK election, which sought to convince people who they should and should not vote for. It is manifestly problematic for an astroturf campaign funded with resources not declared to the Electoral Commission in violation of electoral law, and secretly created by an organisation that counted multiple sitting Labour Party MPs among its directors, to attempt to influence electoral outcomes.
What a fillip to Farage, Tice, and Reform, who can now legitimately claim that the current chief of staff to the prime minister was responsible for creating a secret astroturf campaign that tried to ‘cancel’ a news website sympathetic to their views, and which used its censorious mode to try and influence the outcome of a major national election to the detriment of the Brexit Party – all in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’. But for those concerned about the rise of Reform and the health of British democracy, and those who fear that SFFN’s history could be turned to Reform’s advantage, the real question is: How could McSweeney and Ahmed have been so irresponsible?
Engineering the EHRC investigation into Corbyn’s Labour Party
The story of the Labour Together Project, CCDH, and SFFN is important for a host of reasons: first, there is little doubt that the Labour Together Project drove major stories in the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’, without public knowledge of their involvement and based on a melange of serious and sensationalised claims. It did so both by working directly with the media and indirectly by launching the SFFN campaign, which itself fuelled media coverage conveying that there was a serious problem with antisemitism on the Corbyn-supporting left.
As discussed later, the Labour Together Project also helped the Jewish Labour Movement to ‘engineer’ the EHRC investigation into Corbyn’s Labour Party. The Labour Together Project was thus a major hidden hand driving a crisis that would have devastating consequences for not just the British left but also the very fabric of British democracy and those people in Britain who needed a redistributive, democratising government to help them get by.
In addition, as I show later, the ‘antisemitism crisis’ would also frame and haunt the Labour Party’s response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Premeditated, politically-motivated campaign to destroy Corbynism
Put otherwise, there were indeed powerful and hidden actors driving the ‘antisemitism crisis’. Those actors were simultaneously engaged in a premeditated, politically motivated campaign to destroy Corbynism and then recapture the Labour Party for the right. This campaign – including those elements intended to foment the ‘antisemitism crisis’ – unfolded under the cover of purposeful misdirection and was funded by illegally undeclared donations.
While all this played out, those same actors were working secretly with other important players in the ‘antisemitism crisis’ like the Jewish Labour Movement and the Jewish Leadership Council, on whose board one of Labour Together’s key funders sat. It would be obtuse not to acknowledge that the ‘antisemitism crisis’ narrative has to be problematised and understood in this light.
At the very least, promiscuous allegations of antisemitic ‘denialism’ have to be rethought. It was never persuasive to reflexively stigmatise as antisemitic any speculation about ulterior political agendas driving the ‘antisemitism crisis’. Such an attitude is now wholly unpersuasive because this is just what the Labour Together Project was doing.
When left-wingers railed against ‘fifth columnists’, ‘Trojan horses’ or ‘wreckers’ when confronted by allegations of pervasive antisemitism in the party, perhaps they weren’t engaging in Jew-hate but instead divining a truth that had been deliberately obscured and which has taken years to emerge. Or, maybe they were engaging in Jew-hate. Who knows? The water has been so muddied by the Labour Together Project that it may forever be impossible to tell.
Covert machinations to smear independent investigative journalism
Second, SFFN’s covert machinations showed how unethical the Labour Together Project’s modus operandi was.
SFFN targeted factional opponents while presenting itself as non-partisan; smeared independent, fact-based journalism as ‘fake news’; and implicitly pilloried left-wing Jews in the name of fighting antisemitism. It will be forever to the Labour Together Project’s discredit that it helped to create such a shameful operation. It says much about Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party that his candidacy emerged from, and was embedded in, a project that could conceive of and execute a campaign as appalling as SFFN.
Third, SFFN proved a brutally effective method of policing so-called ‘denialism’. By demonetising the Canary, SFFN sent a powerful message that anyone who questioned the dominant narrative about Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ would be destroyed – a narrative being manufactured, at least in part, by McSweeney and Ahmed themselves. Meanwhile, the lack of publicly available information about who was running SFFN precluded effective rebuttal.
Establishing ‘denialism’ as a thought-crime would have profound implications. As the rest of this book shows, countless Labour Party figures, including many left-wing Jews, would be accused of antisemitism for alleging that the ‘antisemitism crisis’ was at least partially driven by a political impetus to destroy Corbynism; or, alternatively, that reporting on the alleged crisis tended to overstate the prevalence and severity of the problem. Corbyn himself would eventually be turfed out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for making this precise claim in October 2020 – a decision in which Morgan McSweeney would play a key role. But our knowledge of the Labour Together Project now confirms that these claims were credible, and, indeed, that McSweeney must have known them to be so.
Starmer’s people and the implications of Labour Together
Finally, the murky history of SFFN and CCDH could come back to bite Starmer, now sitting as prime minister. Ahmed and the CCDH would migrate to the US after the spectre of Corbynism had been vanquished. From this new perch, they began targeting populist politicians, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Their influential advocacy for censoring social media sites provoked X’s owner Elon Musk into a “war” against the organisation and attracted the ire of the incoming Trump administration, which promised that CCDH would move to the “top of the list” of investigative targets upon election.
If and when the notoriously vindictive Trump administration, in which Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have played a key role, realises that one of its ‘top’ investigative targets was created by the man who is now chief of staff to the UK prime minister, who knows what might happen.
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.
On 18 October, Zarah Sultana led the Northern March for Your Party. She also talked to children who did a sponsored walk for Palestine, gave a speech at a rally, took part in a question-and-answer session, and spoke to the Canary. She made so many important points about the struggle for change in Britain. Plus, she revealed telling aspects of her early life – like working in Primark. So below, we’ve listed some of the comments from Sultana that didn’t appear in previous articles.
These include comments on: uniting the left against capitalism and fascism; building community power while empowering workers and students; ensuring Your Party is as democratic as possible; taking on the genocide-supporting establishment, from Labour to Reform; and more.
Radically changing the system
“The challenges facing the working class can’t be met by a Labour 2.0 that mimics the party’s structures or limits itself to pursuing reforms under capitalism. At best, you might get some temporary gains. You might be able to nationalise a few industries, but you cannot fix the crises of capitalism, of inequality, of exploitation and ecological destruction that define the capitalist system. So we need full democratic control of the economy by workers because the problem we know isn’t just a few bad bosses or a few greedy companies. It is a system that is built for private profit, not social need. And as long as this system remains in place, it will reproduce all of these inequalities and exploitation.”
On socialism, “we mean factories, banks, the energy system, industries being democratically owned and run rather than controlled by private profit and right now those decisions are obviously being made in boardrooms by people who are only accountable to shareholders – socialism means that those decisions are made by society as a whole in the interests of many. So when I say democratising the economy it’s not just voting every five years while the billionaires run the show in between, it means workers having a say in their workplaces, in their communities controlling local services, it means public ownership not just as an arm of state bureaucracy but real democratic participation… So put simply, it’s democracy in every aspect of our life, not just parliament but the economy too.”
Unity to deal with the biggest threats we face
“The biggest threats we all face today aren’t military invasions. It’s the rise of the far right, it is global pandemics, it is climate catastrophe and economic crises. And NATO cannot solve any of these. Instead, it swallows billions of pounds that should be going into our homes, our healthcare, and addressing the climate catastrophe.”
“I don’t think it’s right that you can’t be a member of another party while joining the party, because our job is to unite the left… The planet is on fire, inequality is deepening, fascism is growling at the door. We unite now, or else we’re going to lose. And that is a terrifying concept.”
“The mailing list of Your Party should have been used to mobilise people to turn up to that [13 September] demo to counter the fascists… We need an anti-fascist league of the 21st century and Your Party has to be building that with trade unions root and branch to fight back.”
“In liberation politics, we talk about the chains that we have being different, but we have to unshackle them all, and that’s a key part of my politics, understanding that our oppressions might look different, but we’ve got to dismantle the whole system, because none of us are free until all of us are free.”
“We know that the media is our class enemy and they will throw everything at us, including calling for me to be deported. And I think we have to understand that we are building something that the establishment will throw everything and the kitchen sink at, and we have to build the resilience to defend ourselves and the party that we are building.”
Education, work, and community power
“I believe an MP’s position is supporting workers on the picket line.”
“Education is a public good. It is not a commodity that you can buy and sell. And so we must have a fully funded education model which involves maintenance grants, it involves abolishing fees for good, it means having a democratically run system where student and staff welfare and well-being is respected and prioritised.”
“This party that we’re building isn’t just an electoral project. It is one to build power in our communities. Because that’s where change truly comes from.”
“There are so many people in our communities that are leaders and they are organising food banks, they are supporting schools and teachers and parents, they are making sure no kid goes hungry at night, they are providing uniforms. Those are the people that we want to engage with what we’re building, they know the issues of their community and they can represent them really well and there’s so many people in this room who can do a much better job than many people who are MPs.”
“Any successful left-wing party must be a campaigning, social-movement-orientated force, combined with a robust parliamentary presence and winning councils up and down the country, where our MPs are on picket lines, outside embassies, at Palestine demonstrations, at anti-fascist mobilisations, and defending the rights of all marginalised people, trans people, migrants, the most vulnerable in our communities. Because if you only focus on parliament, and if you neglect the movement, you might end up with a disestablishment, as we’ve seen before. And when they lose their seats, or when they retire, the whole project collapses.”
Your Party democracy and structures
“Your Party councillors elected through open selection must be people who do not vote through cuts but fight cuts and recognise that that is their job to do, not to administer austerity.”
“Future conferences must have all-member meetings in local branches that elect delegates, because that is democratic. We must have an executive committee that is elected through OMOV [one-member-one-vote], that holds the party’s leadership to account. That executive committee must be the one that has a hiring panel taken out of it, because we do not give jobs to mates.”
“We must put our efforts and our energies to building a democratic member-led party that is not controlled by a handful of people, especially MPs at the very top.”
“Conference has to be sovereign, democratic, and its motions have to be binding. If, for example, councillors and MPs are not upholding what is passed at conference, we have to look at the right to recall and obviously mandatory re-selection has to be there. Because you are not an MP for yourself. You are a voice of the movement. And that’s incredibly important.”
“Going forward, I hope comms will be better.”
The ‘authoritarian, anti-socialist’ Labour Party
“What we are seeing is authoritarianism trying to smear our cause, the Palestinian cause, and to trample on all of our civil liberties.”
The invasion of Iraq saw “a million people contacting their MPs, taking part in our democracy, trying to stop this country, this Labour government at the time, from following the US as the US’s poodle into an illegal war. Those people were ignored… And what that showed many of us across the country is that if you see something that’s wrong, and you oppose it, and you organise and a million people march, your government can still turn around and ignore you. So do we really live in a democracy?“
“Under Keir Starmer, this is a party of corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors, a party that is so anti-socialist it is stepping into McCarthyite territory.”
Israel’s genocide in Gaza
“What I’ve seen through all the London marches, all the events I’ve done all over the country, is that the people in this country, the British public, completely disagree with this government and the previous Tory government – that we do not allow genocide to happen in our name.”
“We know that a ceasefire has not led to any material change. Bombs are still falling on Gaza. There is not enough aid in Gaza and we know that a ceasefire does not mean peace. It does not mean an end to military occupation. It does not mean an end to apartheid. It does not mean an end to an illegal siege. So we must continue marching. We must continue boycotting. We must continue divesting.”
“We must expel the Israeli ambassador. We must shut down the Israeli embassy. Because you cannot have normal relations with a genocidal state.”
“I’ve called for a single state, because the two state solution is dead, it is a fallacy. It’s a singular, secular state with equal rights for all and that involves the right of return and all obligations under international law.”
Reform UK has fed off the weakening of the left
“We’ve seen Reform surging in the polls and that isn’t because they offer real answers. It’s because the establishment has smeared and silenced the left while leaving millions to rot in a broken system. The truth is millions of people or most people are not turning to Reform because they are hardened racists or fascists – these people, many of them, are disillusioned. They see a country that is failing them and they feel like they have nowhere else to turn. And for too long the left has simplynot been on the pitch.”
The Green Party
“There is a democratic deficit in the Greens where conference is not binding. And I ask ‘what’s the point if we all go to Bournemouth or Liverpool or Birmingham, clap our hands at some speeches, pass motions but your MPs can do absolutely whatever they like?’ That is not democratic.”
(For more on her thoughts about the Greens, see here.)
The experiences that led Sultana into politics
“Before I entered parliament, I actually worked in retail. I worked in Primark, and I worked in H&M. And I say that’s where I got my thick skin from. Because if you can survive Christmas sales working in Primark, Westminster is nothing compared to that.”
“My best job, I would say, was working as a community organiser, because that took me from an activist to an organiser before I became a politician, because I understand that true power lies in our communities.”
You can see the Canary‘s coverage of the 18 October march here. You can also listen to her speech from the march here. And you can watch our interview with her from later in the day here and here.
Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) media coordinator — and former Canary journalist — Emily Apple was stopped on the street by the Metropolitan Police in Whitehall last week, then arrested for breaching conditions imposed on a protest under Section 14 of the Public Order Act and detained for ten hours. Apple wasn’t part of any protest.
The Met officer harassing Apple claimed he was doing so because he believed she was planning to attend a protest – and arrested her because she asked him to explain his basis for that belief and why he was stopping her while allowing dozens of others to walk unmolested along the same street in the same direction:
The officer claimed he came to his conclusion because of a sticker on Apple’s phone — which he couldn’t see at the time he decided to stop her. Speaking out about the incident, Apple, who is Jewish, was clear that she was the victim of profiling because she was wearing a Palestinian scarf:
I know why I was stopped. It’s because I was wearing a kufiya. I wasn’t protesting. I was wearing headphones, and just walking. But I was deliberately targeted. Other people walking through were ignored.
I wanted to know why I’d been stopped. I wanted to know on what grounds the cop who stopped me believed he had reasonable suspicion that I was going to attend a protest. I wanted to know how it was even lawful for the police to stop and threaten me with arrest because I might protest.
I just wanted an answer to a very simple question. I just wanted him to admit that I was stopped because of the scarf I was wearing. But he refused to admit it. Instead I was arrested, handcuffed behind my back for over three hours, and detained for ten hours in total. I was charged with the offence, and am in court on 24th November, and I have nerve damage from the cuffs. Not because of any action I had taken. But because I might protest. I committed the “crime” of wearing a kufiya and refusing to just accept what the police told me without an explanation of why it was lawful.
“But this is the dystopian, authoritarian country we now live in – one where you can end up sitting in a cell because the police believe you might protest.
French national politics have once again cast a shadow on New Caledonia’s issues even though the French Pacific territory is facing a pressing schedule.
Debates in the French National Assembly on a New Caledonia-related Bill were once again heated and rocky yesterday, resulting in further delays.
The fresh clashes resulted from a game of alliances, mostly French national left-wing parties siding with the pro-independence FLNKS of New Caledonia (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front and the other side of the Lower House (mostly centre-right) siding with pro-France New Caledonian parties.
It is further evidence that French national partisan politics is now fully engaged on remote New Caledonia’s issues.
On the agenda in Paris was a Bill to postpone New Caledonia’s local provincial elections from the current schedule of not later than 30 November 2025 to the end of June 2026.
The purpose of the Bill (which was earlier approved in principle by New Caledonia’s local parliament, the Congress) was to allow more time for new negotiations to take place on a so-called Bougival agreement project, signed on July 12.
The Bougival process aims at turning New Caledonia into a “State” within the French State, as well as creating a New Caledonian “nationality”, also within the French realm.
It also envisaged transferring some French powers (such as foreign affairs) to New Caledonian authorities.
FLNKS rejected deal
But even though some 19 parties had originally signed the Bougival deal was signed, one of the main pro-independence parties — the FLNKS — has decided to reject the deal.
The FLNKS says their negotiators’ signatures was not valid because the text was a “lure of independence” and did not reflect the FLNKS’s conception of full sovereignty and short-term schedule.
The FLNKS is also clearly opposed to any postponement of New Caledonia’s provincial elections and wants the current schedule (not later than November 30) maintained.
The rest of New Caledonia’s parties, both pro-independence (such as moderate PALIKA -Kanak Liberation Party- and UPM -Progressist Union in Melanesia-) and those who want New Caledonia to remain part of France (such as Les Loyalistes, Rassemblement, Calédonie Ensemble), stuck to their signatures.
They have since held meetings and rallies to explain and defend the deal and its associated implementation process and steps to turn it into relevant pieces of legislation and constitutional amendments.
One of those pieces of legislation includes passing an organic bill to postpone the date of local elections.
The Upper House, the Senate, passed the Bill last week in relatively comfortable conditions.
But in a largely fragmented National Assembly (the Lower House), divided into far left (dominated by La France Insoumise -LFI-, centre left Socialists, centre-right — and influential far-right Rassemblement National, there is no majority.
A ‘barrage’ of amendments Hours before the sitting began on Wednesday afternoon (Paris time), National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet had to issue a statement deploring LFI’s tactics, amounting to “pure obstruction”.
This was because in a matter of a few hours, LFI, in support of FLNKS, had filed more than 1600 amendments to New Caledonia’s Bill (even though the text itself only contained three articles).
The barrage of amendments was clearly presented as a way of delaying debates since the sum of all of these amendments, if properly discussed, would have taken days, if not weeks, to examine.
In response, the government camp (a coalition of pro-President Macron MPs) resorted to a rarely-used technicality: it called for a vote to “kill” their own Bill and re-divert it to another route: a bipartisan committee.
This is made up of a panel of seven National Assembly MPs and seven Senators who will be tasked, next week, to come up with a consensual version and bring it back before the Lower House on October 27 for a possible vote and on October 29 before the Senate.
If both Houses of Parliament endorse the text, then it will have to be validated by the French Constitutional Council for conformity and eventually be promulgated before 2 November.
But if the Senate and the National Assembly produce different votes and fail to agree, then the French government can, as a last resort, ask the Lower House only to vote on the same text, with a required absolute majority.
If those most urgent deadlines are not met, then New Caledonia’s provincial elections will be held as scheduled, before November 30 and under the existing “frozen” electoral roll.
This is another very sensitive topic related to this Bill as it touches on the conditions of eligibility for New Caledonia’s local elections.
Under the current system, the 1998 Nouméa Accord, the list of eligible voters is restricted to people living and residing in New Caledonia before 1998. Whereas under the new arrangements, it would be “unfrozen” to include at least 12,000 more, to reflect, among others, New Caledonia’s demographic changes.
But pro-independence parties such as the FLNKS object to “unfreezing” the rules, saying this would further “dilute” the indigenous vote and gradually make them a minority in their own land.
‘Political response to political obstruction’ Pro-France MP Nicolas Metzdorf and Bill Law Commission Rapporteur Philippe Gosselin both said the tactical move was “a political response to (LFI’s) political obstruction”.
“LFI is barking up the wrong tree (…) Especially since the pro-independence movement is clearly divided on the matter (for or against the Bougival process),” Gosselin pleaded.
“It was necessary to file this rejection motion of our own text, because now it will go to the bipartisan committee to be examined once again. So we’re moving forward, step by step. I would like to remind you once again that (the Bill) is coherent with about eighty percent of our political groups represented at New Caledonia’s Congress”.
The “Prior rejection motion” was voted by a large majority of 257 votes (and the support of Rassemblement National, but without the Socialists) and the sitting was adjourned without further debates.
When debates resume, no amendment will be allowed.
Moutchou ‘open to discussion’ In spite of this, during debates on Wednesday, newly-appointed French Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou assured she remained open to discussion with the FLNKS so that it can re-join talks.
She admitted “nothing can be done without the FLNKS” and announced that she would travel to New Caledonia “very soon”.
During question time, she told the Lower House her mantra was to “build” on the Bougival text, to “listen” with “respect” to “give dialogue a chance” and “build New Caledonia’s future”.
“The signature of the Bougival deal has revived hope in New Caledonia’s population. It’s true not everyone is now around the table. (My government) wishes to bring back FLNKS. Like I said before, I don’t want to do (things) without the FLNKS, as long as FLNKS doesn’t want to do things without the other parties”, she said.
FLNKS chief negotiator at Bougival, Emmanuel Tjibaou and pro-France Metzdorf also had a brief, sometimes emotional exchange on the floor, Wednesday.
They both referred to their own respective interpretations of what took place in July 2025 in Bougival, a small city west of Paris.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Draw the Line action, Ottawa, September 20, 2025, part of a country-wide day of action against the Carney government’s anti-social pro-war agenda.
The measures taken by the Carney government since it took over power after the last election confirm this government’s adherence to the methods Carney and several of his ministers and point men of the state learned at Goldman Sachs. Previous employment in that institution seems to be in fashion at this time.
To see how Carney rules over not only his cabinet, but also the Liberal caucus, the House of Commons and Canada as a whole, it is enough to look at the “One Goldman Sachs” approach: “Leveraging its collective intellectual capital and diverse talent to serve clients. Key principles include prioritizing client interests above all else, upholding the highest ethical standards [as per his British colonial values of course — TML Ed. Note], striving for superior results, fostering a culture of teamwork and professional growth, and cultivating a diverse workforce.”
All of the above is what Carney claims represents the interests of the polity and Canada’s raison d’état – reason of state. Carney is proudly restructuring the state at the fastest speed possible, serving the interests of what are called “stakeholders,” which match his own.
He deprives the many and varied different interests which exist in the society of meaning and renders them as values directed at identifying with whatever he says is the national interest at this time. The people are told that the national interest of the U.S., or Britain, or Canada, or the European Union, is the interest of the world’s people for peace, democracy, and rights. The conception is that there must be no challenges whatsoever to the direction of this raison d’état and its national interest. That is how talk about values and identity become about raison d’état.
Carney’s rendering of democracy is one of passive individuals who have no claims on society. Individuals and collectives are effaced while what are called are given recognition and the interests said to serve these “stakeholders” are validated; collectively aggregated to uphold the legitimacy of Carney’s reasoning of state, for what is called capitalist democracy.
It underscores the important challenge currently facing the working class and people of this country. Among other things, it is important to discuss how Carney’s definition of national interest is used to trump the public interest. There is a process on the basis of which, through sleight of hand, talk about values and identity become about raison d’état (reasoning of the state). Talk about values and identity are used to establish a nation-wrecking definition of national interest. To see through the actions of the Carney government, look at this definition of national interest which discards the legitimate claims of the working class and people on society. By creating all kinds of advisory groups comprised of “stakeholders,” this government is denying the peoples’ right to conscience and to speak, thereby denying the existence of the peoples’ right to self-determination itself.
Carney’s neo-liberal banker’s mindset is stuck in the Covenant Thesis expounded by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century which defined the Supreme Power above the rule of law. It is stuck in the 18th century philosophy expounded by the Philosophes in France which established the relationship of individuals to the state in pre-revolutionary France to favour a raison d’état and “civilized” rule of law over the “noble savage.” It is also stuck in dogmas rendered by the Vatican and various Popes in the past 80 years to maintain the Catholic Church’s anti-communist and pro-Nazi crusades against the movements of the peoples to empower themselves.
Finally, besides treasuring the “do or die” values of empire espoused by 19th century Victorian England, despite his talk about a “rupture” that the world faces at this time, his government pursues Cold War policies, practices and forms of organization, wrapped in pretentious bafflegab. It ignores that the conditions are no longer those imposed on the world under the auspices of the Anglo-American imperialists with the U.S. leading the way after World War II.
What is called for by the situation, especially amidst all the threats of war, environmental crises and impoverishment of the whole society, is a modern definition of democracy. This does not mean looking up the definition from some dictionary. Definition has to do with the actual functioning and sorting out of the real problems that exist in society as a result of the people’s disempowerment. The sorting out is how one harmonizes the individual and collective interests that are in conflict with one another — the interests of individuals in their collectives, and of the collectives within the ensemble of the general interest. This problem must be argued out. By exercising freedom of speech — speaking freely — modern definitions and the arguments which bring them into being are brought to centre stage.
Human reasoning and arguing have to be brought forward. A logic must be provided that it is possible to sort out the relations which exist and which create a clash between conditions and authority. It requires people having their own agenda, their own organizations, their own outlook, writing their own constitutions which guarantee their rights so that they can resolve problems, and express their own conscience against all the assaults of a state power whose raison d’état is to deprive them of power. It entails finding the ways and means to deprive those in positions of power and privilege of the power to forbid discussion by citing the arrogance that they, not the people themselves, represent what the people want.
A modern definition of democracy is required which is in line with the requirements that are created by the mighty productive forces and the relations that have come from them, which underlie the interests in conflict. This is where the real transition lies which is inherent in the ensemble of relations between humans and humans and humans and nature.
Without blinking an eye, the Carney government’s pursuit of a government run like a boardroom comprised of those who represent narrow supranational private interests suppresses the right to speak of workers and people in this country. Doing so in the name of the national interest, of raison d’état, of high ideals, will not wash. Workers and democratic and anti-war forces from coast to coast to coast are seeing to that.
Toronto, September 20
Sudbury, September 20
Montreal, September 27
Thousands have marched through major city streets and rallied in small towns across Aotearoa New Zealand as part of today’s “mega strike” of public workers.
More than 100,000 workers from several sectors walked off the job in increasingly bitter disputes over pay and conditions.
It was billed as possibly the country’s biggest labour action in four decades.
Strike action in Auckland’s Aotea Square. Video: RNZ
Among those on strike were doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers and primary and secondary school teachers.
Several rallies were cancelled by severe weather in the South Island and lower North Island.
Auckland One of the day’s main rallies got underway shortly after midday with thousands of protesters gathering in Aotea Square for speeches, before marching down Queen Street.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down.
“Mega strike” protesters in Auckland today. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ
“Of course this is political. Politics is about power and it’s about resources and it’s about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives,” she said.
There was a smaller, earlier rally in the morning in Henderson.
Tupe Tai from Western Springs College, who has been teaching for several decades, said the situation had become untenable.
“We’ve got really underpaid and overworked teachers, they need that support.”
She also said teachers needed an environment where they could work on the curriculum, have time to do it, but also have a life.
Protesters in the “mega strike” in Hamilton today. Image: Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Hamilton The crowd swelled to an estimated 10,000 in Hamilton’s rally.
Kimberly Jackson and her daughter were at the rally on behalf of her husband, a senior doctor who had to be at the hospital working as part of lifesaving measures.
“For us it is personal, but it’s also about this country that I love, that I’ve grown up in, and I can see terrible things happening in this country and I feel really passionate about public health care,” she said.
Jackson said she had seen the system deteriorate over her lifetime.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down Auckland’s Queen Street today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Chloe Wilshaw-Sparkes, regional chair of the Waikato PPTA said teachers were on strike because the offers from the government were not good enough.
“They’ve been saying ‘get round the table, have a conversation,’ but a conversation goes two ways and I think they need to be reminded of that,” she said.
Principal of Hamilton East School, Pippa Wright, was at the rally with some of the school’s teachers.
She said she believed in the NZEI’s principles, and she wanted changes which would ensure schools had really good teachers in front of students.
Wright also said pay rates needed to rise.
“So they’re not treated like graduates, and we need better conditions for teachers, and nurses, and all the public sector,” she said.
“Mega strike” protesters in Whangārei today. Image: Peter de Graaf/RNZ
Northland In Whangārei, the weather was sweltering and a stark contrast from conditions further south.
About 1200 people marched through several city blocks, after leaving Laurie Hall Park.
As well as teachers, nurses and other union members there were students and patients showing support.
Sydney Heremaia of Whangārei had heart surgery a few weeks ago but said he was marching to show his concern about staffing levels and creeping privatisation.
Deserei Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, feared there would be no new teachers soon if pay and conditions were not improved.
“We’ve voted to strike because we feel that the government hasn’t been addressing our issues, and especially at bargaining,” she told RNZ.
“The government scrapped pay equity claims. And that was a shocking blow to women in general, but an absolute shock and a blow for us women in education. And it’s completely scrapped it.
“More importantly, we are standing up for our tamariki, who are really poorly resourced in schools, in terms of support and the requirements coming down on teachers on a daily basis, on a monthly basis.
“It’s burning out our teachers. We’re fighting for our support staff, our teacher aides, the most vulnerable of all our staff who don’t have job security.”
She said the ministry’s offer was “absolutely atrocious”.
“$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”
Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda told RNZ it was “pretty important to support our essential public services”.
“We don’t like what’s been going on. Then the understaffing, the refusal to acknowledge the severity of the understaffing and then, of course, pay offers that are below the cost of living, which means . . . pay cut. None of those things seem fair to the group of public workers that are working harder than ever under huge demand.”
Striking staff called in after power outage A union organiser said striking staff returned to Nelson Hospital to care for patients after its backup generator failed in a power outage.
The top of the South Island lost power on Thursday as wild weather hit the country. It began to be restored from 9.30am.
PSA organiser Toby Beesley said the generators at the hospital started, but it’s understood they blew out an electrical board, which led to a 45-minute total power outage.
“The senior leadership at Nelson Hospital reached out to us under our pre-agreed crisis management protocol that we’ve been working on with them for the last three weeks for an event of this nature, and they asked for additional PSA member support, which we immediately agreed to to protect the community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Thousands have marched through major city streets and rallied in small towns across Aotearoa New Zealand as part of today’s “mega strike” of public workers.
More than 100,000 workers from several sectors walked off the job in increasingly bitter disputes over pay and conditions.
It was billed as possibly the country’s biggest labour action in four decades.
Strike action in Auckland’s Aotea Square. Video: RNZ
Among those on strike were doctors, dentists, nurses, social workers and primary and secondary school teachers.
Several rallies were cancelled by severe weather in the South Island and lower North Island.
Auckland One of the day’s main rallies got underway shortly after midday with thousands of protesters gathering in Aotea Square for speeches, before marching down Queen Street.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down.
“Mega strike” protesters in Auckland today. Image: Nick Monro/RNZ
“Of course this is political. Politics is about power and it’s about resources and it’s about who gets to make decisions that saturate and shape our daily lives,” she said.
There was a smaller, earlier rally in the morning in Henderson.
Tupe Tai from Western Springs College, who has been teaching for several decades, said the situation had become untenable.
“We’ve got really underpaid and overworked teachers, they need that support.”
She also said teachers needed an environment where they could work on the curriculum, have time to do it, but also have a life.
Protesters in the “mega strike” in Hamilton today. Image: Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Hamilton The crowd swelled to an estimated 10,000 in Hamilton’s rally.
Kimberly Jackson and her daughter were at the rally on behalf of her husband, a senior doctor who had to be at the hospital working as part of lifesaving measures.
“For us it is personal, but it’s also about this country that I love, that I’ve grown up in, and I can see terrible things happening in this country and I feel really passionate about public health care,” she said.
Jackson said she had seen the system deteriorate over her lifetime.
Many carried signs and chanted, cheered and danced as they made their way down Auckland’s Queen Street today. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Chloe Wilshaw-Sparkes, regional chair of the Waikato PPTA said teachers were on strike because the offers from the government were not good enough.
“They’ve been saying ‘get round the table, have a conversation,’ but a conversation goes two ways and I think they need to be reminded of that,” she said.
Principal of Hamilton East School, Pippa Wright, was at the rally with some of the school’s teachers.
She said she believed in the NZEI’s principles, and she wanted changes which would ensure schools had really good teachers in front of students.
Wright also said pay rates needed to rise.
“So they’re not treated like graduates, and we need better conditions for teachers, and nurses, and all the public sector,” she said.
“Mega strike” protesters in Whangārei today. Image: Peter de Graaf/RNZ
Northland In Whangārei, the weather was sweltering and a stark contrast from conditions further south.
About 1200 people marched through several city blocks, after leaving Laurie Hall Park.
As well as teachers, nurses and other union members there were students and patients showing support.
Sydney Heremaia of Whangārei had heart surgery a few weeks ago but said he was marching to show his concern about staffing levels and creeping privatisation.
Deserei Davis, a teacher at Whangārei Primary School, feared there would be no new teachers soon if pay and conditions were not improved.
“We’ve voted to strike because we feel that the government hasn’t been addressing our issues, and especially at bargaining,” she told RNZ.
“The government scrapped pay equity claims. And that was a shocking blow to women in general, but an absolute shock and a blow for us women in education. And it’s completely scrapped it.
“More importantly, we are standing up for our tamariki, who are really poorly resourced in schools, in terms of support and the requirements coming down on teachers on a daily basis, on a monthly basis.
“It’s burning out our teachers. We’re fighting for our support staff, our teacher aides, the most vulnerable of all our staff who don’t have job security.”
She said the ministry’s offer was “absolutely atrocious”.
“$1 extra an hour over a period of three years. Like let that sink in. 60 cents one year, maybe 25 cents the following and 15 cents the following year. How does that keep up with the rate of inflation?”
Northland emergency doctor Gary Payinda told RNZ it was “pretty important to support our essential public services”.
“We don’t like what’s been going on. Then the understaffing, the refusal to acknowledge the severity of the understaffing and then, of course, pay offers that are below the cost of living, which means . . . pay cut. None of those things seem fair to the group of public workers that are working harder than ever under huge demand.”
Striking staff called in after power outage A union organiser said striking staff returned to Nelson Hospital to care for patients after its backup generator failed in a power outage.
The top of the South Island lost power on Thursday as wild weather hit the country. It began to be restored from 9.30am.
PSA organiser Toby Beesley said the generators at the hospital started, but it’s understood they blew out an electrical board, which led to a 45-minute total power outage.
“The senior leadership at Nelson Hospital reached out to us under our pre-agreed crisis management protocol that we’ve been working on with them for the last three weeks for an event of this nature, and they asked for additional PSA member support, which we immediately agreed to to protect the community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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.
Veteran activist Salma Yaqoob thinks challenging the lie of ordinary people’s powerlessness is key to progress. At a recent rally, she called on Your Party supporters to resist elite distraction tactics and remember how powerful we can be when we come together.
“Refuse to be divided… remember our power”
Salma Yaqoob has spent “literally over a quarter of a century” campaigning against imperialist wars abroad and the class war at home. And at a Your Party event in Leeds on 8 October, she reminded hundreds of attendees that:
nothing will happen without the actual grassroots making it happen
The ordinary people fighting for change, she said, need to avoid the division that the rich and powerful want to sow. And they need to realise that the economic establishment has “hoodwinked” many working-class people by diverting their attention towards refugees and Muslims to distract from “the real theft, the real exploitation” by the super-rich. She explained:
They tell us day in, day out, that you don’t make a difference, that you are powerless. But they do this because they are scared. They’re scared that we will remember our power. They’re scared that we will come together, that our movements, which are rooted in our solidarity, in our working-class communities, actually will refuse to be divided.
She added:
They want to tell those lies – that ‘your rent is going up, that you’re finding it difficult to get an appointment in the NHS, because of migrants and Muslims’ – when we know it’s because of the rising inequality due to the rise in the billionaire class. So of course they’re going to spend some of their fortune in diverting attention away.
There are examples of local organising power working in the past, she pointed out. In particular, she mentioned the municipal socialism of Birmingham.
Salma Yaqoob: building “the biggest possible movement”
The ‘divide and conquer’ tactics aren’t just about scapegoating refugees or Muslims. They’re not just about making us focus on Reform voters rather than the economic and media establishment that has fooled them. They’re also about fostering destructive debate among the grassroots left.
Salma Yaqoob insisted that the challenges Your Party has faced so far haven’t put her off:
I’m a bit sanguine with some of the teething problems. I’m a mum as well, so don’t get disheartened and get put off. When you do something real, it’s going to be messy.
And while it’s important to assert your principles clearly, there also needs to be humility and openness. As she said:
Of course I’m against austerity. Of course I’m against privatisation. Of course I’m against imperialist wars. But I want this party to be a place of welcome for genuine discussion and debate.
While opposing big “corporate profiteers”, she argued, “welcoming perhaps small business owners” may be necessary because:
We’ve got to build a party of unifying the biggest possible movement.
She added:
unapologetically, this has got to be a working-class-led party. But in that, I don’t want a barrier put up against including people who want to join us in solidarity.
Your Party, she asserted, has “got to be clear about who the real enemy is”. And that’s the people who’ve:
become billionaires on the back of exploiting workers… on the back of privatising our energy resources, making huge profits while our bills go up.
It’s also the establishment politicians from the likes of the Tories and Labour that have been doing the bidding of the super-rich by pushing austerity, inequality, and warmongering on the rest of us.
Salma Yaqoob’s main message was clear: focus on the real enemy – the millionaires and billionaires waging a brutal class war against ordinary people. Because the less we let the super-rich distract and divide us, the more effective our resistance will be.
In a powerful speech in Huddersfield at the weekend, Zarah Sultana said millions of people around Britain are angry, and justifiably so. Not only are the political class and their super-rich backers “laughing at us”, she said. But “our media class is rotten to the core” too. And as she stressed:
They are class enemies. They fight for the super-rich.
The establishment tried to “drive the left out of public life”, but “we’re done begging for the crumbs”
millions are fed up, and so they should be. In fact, they should be fucking furious: furious that life is getting harder while wages stagnate, furious at privatised water companies, profiteering energy firms and landlords squeezing us dry, furious at waiting for weeks for a GP appointment, furious at being made to pay for the crises we did not cause, and furious at being told there is simply no alternative to this broken system.
We know that millions of people are crying out for real change. And when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party it finally gave us hope that politics could be about honesty, decency, it could be about solidarity and working-class power. But the establishment attacked him and what he stood for, trying to drive the left out of public life.
Yet here we are and we are not going anywhere. If you knock on doors in Huddersfield, if you knock on doors in Coventry, you will know that millions of people have lost faith in democracy. They see politicians in Westminster as self-serving, more interested in freebies like Sabrina Carpenter gigs and free clothes than the struggles of working-class people.
The remedy to that, she insisted, is a bold plan:
We’re fighting for a thing called socialism. Not tweaks to a broken system, not a wealth tax here and lowering of bills here. We are calling for a fundamental transformation of society…
We see the political class and we see the super-rich laughing at us. Well, we’re done begging for the crumbs. We’re taking the fucking lot!
Zarah Sultana: “our media class is rotten to the core”
The mainstream media, meanwhile, has participated in the rich and powerful’s attempts to silence the left. And in doing so, it has enabled and empowered fascists. But as Zarah Sultana insisted:
Reform is not the answer. It is just another wing of the establishment. Funded by billionaires and aristocrats, fronted by a millionaire stockbroker, it is peddling racism to distract us from its real agenda: more privatisation, more deregulation, more handouts for the super-rich, more cuts for everyone else. We are told that there is no money for our schools, for our homes, for our hospitals, yet somehow there is always money for war, corporate bailouts and tax giveaways for the super-rich.
She added:
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the anti-Tommy Robinson demonstration. Because we have a duty to fight back. And I’ve had my fair share of abuse. Tommy Robinson is constantly tweeting me abuse, and a so-called journalist from the Daily Express has supported calls for me to get deported.
Fuck off! I’m staying right here and fighting for the country we all deserve.
We understand that our media class is rotten to the core. They are class enemies. They fight for the super-rich.
The Express propagandist in question has since sought to squirm out of his comments and turn himself into the victim, but Sultana’s having none of it:
There’s no solidarity quite like that between client journalists, politicians and their billionaire backers. It’s all one big club.
This so-called “journalist” called for me — a British MP — to be deported because I’m Muslim.
“Radically democratic” and anti-fascist to the core
Zarah Sultana praised the history of Huddersfield, saying:
From the textile mills to the railways, from the quarries to the classrooms, this town has always been powered by the working class.
The radicalhistory of Huddersfield and surroundingareas “helped lay the foundations of the labour movement across Yorkshire and beyond”, she said.
This town has always understood that progress isn’t handed down from above, it is fought for, won from below, through collective action and struggle.
Dealing with “deindustrialisation, austerity, [and] cuts to public services”, she argued, the town’s “strength lies in your diversity”:
From the Irish migrants who built the canals and railways, to the Caribbean and South Asian communities who revitalised towns and industries after the war.
She noted its “proud anti-racist tradition”, insisting:
When the far right tried to spread their hate and division here, Huddersfield stood up and said, not in our streets.
And she stressed that, like in the past, the country now needs “an anti-fascist league for the 21st century”. Trade unions need to be organising coaches to get “people on the streets whenever the fascists turn up”, she said. That needs to be a key part of left-wing politics in the coming months and years, alongside:
A party rooted in our working-class communities, proudly socialist, radically democratic, a party that builds power from below.
Huddersfield’s march on 18 October absolutely represented that vision. And that unity and energy now needs to grow and transform into a mass movement that can stop the far right in its tracks and overturn the economic, political, and media establishment that has enabled its growth.
Key ministerial meeting data for Labour cabinet member Steve Reed is currently missing from the government’s transparency register. The missing information concerns three month’s worth of meetings between January and March 2025, that the Streatham and Croydon North MP held with external organisations and individuals while acting Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
The department has now been aware of the missing data for two months. To date however, it has failed to publish the details of these meetings. Of course, in the context of revelations over Reed’s shenanigans as previous director of shady think tank Labour Together – it also raises some potentially troubling questions as well.
Steve Reed’s mysterious missing ministerial meetings
The Canary first noticed that Defra was lacking any ministerial meeting entries for the environment secretary towards the end of July. We originally contacted the department to query the missing data on discovering this. However, after the department failed to respond for over four weeks, we followed this up again at the end of August. At this point, Defra told us it had purportedly never received our original email. This was alongside two Freedom of Information (FOI) requests the Canary submitted to the department within a day of this query – both of which Defra claimed it had also never received.
The delay meant that the Canary only heard back from the department on 23 September. This was within 20 working days of reissuing the query, that Defra interpreted as a FOI request.
In this, the Canary pointed Defra to at least two departmental press releases detailing meetings Reed had attended with external organisations during the reporting period. The email highlighting this also questioned why this information was absent from Defra’s register.
In its response to the Canary’s query on 23 September, the department put the missing entries down to an “administrative error”.
Defra did not disclose the data to the Canary because it explained that it would be updating the register “imminently”. Evidently, the Canary has a very different perception of the word “imminently”. Because, at the time of writing, almost three months later, this information is still not available to the public.
Curious omission…
But of course, it’s one of those conveniently ambiguous “how long is a piece of string” terms. Defra could easily claim in data transparency time-scales, four weeks is in fact rather ‘imminent’. Nevertheless, the point is still that we’re nearly at the end of October and the department has failed to publish the transparency data. Notably, this was originally due for publication at the end of June. In short, the information is nearly four months late. Moreover, it has (verifiably) known about its absence for nearly two of those months.
The Canary contacted Defra, but the department refused to comment.
The ministerial data’s curious and continued omission is enough to make you wonder if there just might be something among those entries the former environment secretary and now housing sec may not want the rest of us to see.
Of course, while the Canary (currently) has no evidence to prove any impropriety on the part of the former Secretary of State in this instance, it’s hard not to note the parallels with a certain organisation Reed was also front and centre of, namely, the controversial Labour Together.
‘Admin error’: now where have we heard that before?
The think tank knows a thing or two about purported ‘admin errors’. Just ask Reed’s fellow former Labour Together director and current chief of staff to the prime minister, Morgan McSweeney. In 2021, the Electoral Commission fined the think tank over £14k in undeclared donations. Naturally, the think tank had put this breach down to an “admin error”.
Dogged investigation by journalist Paul Holden has cast extreme doubt on this. In his new book The Fraud, Holden lays out a swathe of evidence that points to the genuine possibility that the “admin error” was nothing of the sort. In a detailed timeline of events, Holden shows how with precedent – specifically, the think tanks “appetite for misdirection and subterfuge” – the evidence could:
just as plausibly give rise to the suspicion that McSweeney’s failure to report donations was intentional.
And let’s not forget Reed was co-director at the time of this electoral law breach.
Missing data, hacked data: not Reed’s first rodeo
As it happens, we also know, once again thanks to Holden, that Reed has previous for potential data criminality. Reed had the editor of independent local news site, Inside Croydon, in his sights for holding his political allies in local government to account. As Holden’s book noted, Inside Croydon revealed how the council had become “so dysfunctional” under its Labour Party leadership that it had required a:
£120m bailout to remain afloat after declaring bankruptcy in 2020.
It was amid this context that an anonymous individual hacked Inside Croydon’s news site to identify informants. As the outlet has since reported on Holden’s revelations:
This stolen information was then used to launch Labour Party disciplinary proceedings against the site’s sources. All of this was known to some of the most powerful people in the Labour Party bureaucracy — General Secretary David Evans and Alex Barros-Curtis [the party’s executive director of legal affairs; since 2024, a Labour MP] most notably — who were copied in, allegedly with the approval of Steve Reed.
So, Reed certainly has form on rule-breaking to eschew public scrutiny.
Something to hide?
What could the Croydon MP possibly have to hide?
Meetings with fishing lobby figures to mothball a full bottom trawling ban in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)? Kicking back with water company cronies to discuss their united front against water renationalisation?
If the Canary had to hazard a guess, it seems very likely it could have something to do with Labour’s weak response to the profiteering water suppliers. That would be the privatised water racket ripping off the public, spewing sewage into waterways, and operating an all-round shoddy service. Labour’s flagship ‘bonus ban’ hasn’t stopped companies dishing out eye-watering pay packets to its fat cat executives. Who’d have guessed?
Incidentally, Inside Croydon has continued holding the unscrupulous cabinet secretary to account in his government roles. Because funnily enough, the outlet found in November 2024 that Reed hadn’t been taking minutes at a number of his meetings with the water industry. Go figure. In other words, the public has no way of knowing what Reed and water company lobbyists were talking about. This is the same Reed who last year enjoyed £1,786 football tickets courtesy of the parent company of Northumbrian Water. We’re sure this has nothing to do with any of this.
Obviously, we can only really speculate about reasons for this transparency data “admin error”. However, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that there are meetings this government would rather the public didn’t know about. Once the data goes live, it certainly does warrant extra scrutiny. And that’s not least because – this is accountability-dodging Labour right miscreant Steve Reed we’re talking about after all.
If we’re wrong, then let’s see the information on the missing meetings. Otherwise, what can we do but speculate?
The Canary contacted Steve Reed for comment, but his office had not responded by the time of publication.
Speaking to the Canary at the weekend, Your Party’s Zarah Sultana didn’t just demand a platform of socialism and peace. She also insisted on democratising Britain’s banking system. That, she said, has to be part of Your Party’s plan to transform the economy into one that serves ordinary people rather than corporate profits.
She added that the political corruption surrounding the arms industry must end too. And the skills of the sector should be harnessed for social good instead:
Zarah Sultana calls for a democratic economy of peace and public service
Zarah Sultana asserted that:
Our party’s position must be in democratic control and ownership of banks, of the arms industry, so we can put those towards social good, not war and destruction. And, when it comes to banks in particular, redirect that money that is created by working-class people – that’s nurses, teachers, taxi drivers – into investments that promote the environment, that promote good jobs, that promote a well-funded public-service system.
Calling the current British establishment “a poodle to the US”, she stressed that:
Our arms industry has a very cosy relationship with this Labour government… [and] that cosy relationship has to be dismantled.
Your Party should also end Britain’s participation in NATO, she said. And that’s not just because it’s a tool for US interests that causes immense destruction. It’s also because:
Every penny that this Labour government spends on missiles, tanks and bombs is taken out of healthcare, housing, and our future and addressing the climate catastrophe
Party democracy and national democracy
Zarah Sultana told the Canary that Your Party’s communication strategy and membership system need to improve. She called the briefing of establishment gatekeepers like the Guardian “disappointing”. And she insisted that she wants Your Party to be:
more democratic than any other party
It should show “solidarity to our migrant – our refugee – communities” by opening membership up to them, for example. As she stressed:
We need to centre building a mass-movement party, mobilising everyone, having low barriers to entry. That means having an international section so people who are living abroad can get involved and become members, that involves lowering the age from 16 to 14, that means also allowing people who already have membership of another party to get involved. Because our job has to be to unify the left.
Regarding unity on the left, she stated very clearly that:
The goal in 2029 is going to be stopping Nigel Farage from getting the keys to Downing Street.
She asserted that there are differences between Your Party and Zack Polanski’s Green Party. “We are an explicitly socialist, anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist party”, she said, which favours severing “all diplomatic relations with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel”. (The Greens havelongcalledout Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but their stance on ongoing diplomacy with Israel has come under scrutiny recently.)
Polanski, however, has favouredcarefully moving the current Green position on NATO closer to Sultana’s. And he has called the Greens “an eco-populist and a socialist movement”, expressing his openness to cooperate with others on the left.
Zarah Sultana emphasised that “there’s enough space on the left for all of us” and that “electoral alliances have to be democratically voted upon by our respective memberships”. But she also insisted:
We will work together, unite to fight Farage and to fight fascism.
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 Newsdescribed 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.
This lecture“Requiem for Gaza” was delivered to a sold out audience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide after journalist Chris Hedges’ appearance was cancelled by the Australian National Press Club.
EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE:By Chris Hedges
The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble.
My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.
The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church.
I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.
It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.
The Edward Said Memorial Lecture. The Chris Hedges Report
Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate.
Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.
Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.
Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned.
And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”
Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?
How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?
How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?
Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?
By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?
Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?
How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?
How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?
Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?
What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?
And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?
Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, bellowed:
“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death. I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”
Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.
The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.
Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.
The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force.
Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed.
Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.
As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favour of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.
The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.
The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo:
“A sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”
Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept.
The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.
This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.
The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.
History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabise an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions.
It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism.
This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures — the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The incursion on October 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.
Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II.
German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.
This tactic is as old as warfare itself.
Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies.
It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of October 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.
The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.
The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1700 and injuring thousands more.
The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists”. The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.
The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.
But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the US in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The US and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation — Yemen — which has tried to halt the genocide.
The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
The militarised drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.
Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book Rise and Kill First in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation”.
Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.
Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”
The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “Western civilization”.”
The moral philosophers who make up the Western canon — Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke — excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonised people, women of all races and the criminalised from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.
So, when you hear that the Western canon is an imperative, ask yourself for whom?
“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.
American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.
The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.
The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers”.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.
Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018:
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. [W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites.
Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.
There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.
Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.
Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.
Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”
The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.
Pankaj Mishra writes:
“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.”
We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialised nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable.
It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This Edward Said Memorial Lecture was hosted by the Australian Friends of Palestine and delivered at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, on 18 October 2025.
More To The Story: On October 18, roughly 2,700 No Kings demonstrations took place around the US. Organizers estimated that 7 million protesters came out to denounce what they described as America’s slide toward authoritarianism under President Donald Trump. That’s right where More To The Story’sAl Letson found himself this weekend. Al spoke with a handful of the thousands of protesters who attended to get a better sense of why they came out. Some had creative posters. Others wore inflatable costumes. But all of them told Al they were concerned about the direction of the country in a second Trump term. On a special episode of More To The Story, Al talks to No Kings protesters about Trump’s immigration raids, threats to free speech, federal workers being fired, and fears about the future of democracy in America.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Daniel King | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
New Zealand’s opposition parties have promised to repeal the coalition government’s changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act (MACA) if re-elected in the face of criticism over “mindsets of colonisation”.
It has been contested in the courts, with a key Court of Appeal ruling making it easier for groups to win customary title in 2023.
The Supreme Court went on to overturn that decision last year, though the government considered it and said the test remained too broad.
National had agreed to tighten up the legislative test, making it harder for Māori to secure titles, in its coalition agreement with New Zealand First.
It has been contested in the courts, with a key Court of Appeal ruling making it easier for groups to win customary title in 2023.
The Supreme Court went on to overturn that decision last year, though the government considered it and said the test remained too broad.
The coalition has pitched changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act as restoring the legislation to its original intent, while critics argue they diminish Māori rights. Image: RNZ/Nick Monro
National had agreed to tighten up the legislative test, making it harder for Māori to secure titles, in its coalition agreement with New Zealand First.
‘This is not something that we’ve done lightly’ – Justice Minister Speaking in the third reading last night, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said the courts had interpreted the test in a way that “materially reduced” its intended effect.
“The bill clarifies the wording of the current test and provides additional guidance to decision makers in interpreting and applying the test,” he said.
Justice Minister Dr Paul Goldsmith . . . “more tightly defining what exclusive use and occupation means.” Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
“Key elements include more tightly defining what exclusive use and occupation means, requiring decision makers to base any inferences on a firm basis of physical evidence, not just cultural associations in that second part of the test, and thirdly placing the burden of proof more squarely on applicants to demonstrate that they meet both legs of the test.”
Goldsmith said the legislation was retrospective, overriding court decisions made after 24 July 2024, and the government had provided $15 million to support Māori groups to cover the costs of going back to court.
“I recognise that this will be very disappointing to groups who have been through the process. This is not something that we’ve done lightly but there is a long way to go and much of our coastline still to be considered and we believe as a government that it’s important to get that right.”
New Zealand First’s Casey Costello . . . “This is not removing the rights for Māori.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
New Zealand First’s Casey Costello said her leader Winston Peters had been a “champion of equal citizenship and protecting the legitimate interests of all New Zealanders and the marine and coastal area of New Zealand”.
“This is not removing the rights for Māori. Māori, like any New Zealander, have the opportunity to enjoy their coastline and enjoy their benefits.”
The ACT party’s Todd Stephenson said the bill restored the exacting test to establish customary marine title that had been undermined by a number of court decisions.
“We will be supporting this because it does restore what Parliament intended.”
ACT’s Todd Stephenson . . . restored the exacting test to establish customary marine title. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Labour says bill ‘treating Māori as second class citizens’ Labour’s Peeni Henare said the bill’s third reading continued a “long legacy” of Parliament “treating Māori as second class citizens”.
“For whatever reason, this government continues to say co-governance, co-management, or working alongside Māori is not the thing to do and would rather score political points instead of underscoring the good frameworks that are already in place that allow management of places like the marine and takutai moana.”
The Green Party’s Steve Abel said New Zealand had no decent future if Parliament kept doing “shitty legislation like this”.
“No good can come from a bill of this character. It is a bill that explicitly leads in to those worst mindsets of colonisation; that at every turn Māori are cut against and undermined and undone and for all the efforts of this chamber and this house to make amends for those cruel histories of colonisations, this bill forces the Crown back into a position of dishonorability.”
The Green Party’s Steve Abel . . . “this bill forces the Crown back into a position of dishonorability.” Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Te Pāti Māori’s Tākuta Ferris said Māori would mobilise, given no government in history had ever had the right or authority to extinguish the Tiriti-based rights of Māori.
“What this government is doing now guarantees that the fight for Te Tiriti justice only deepens from this point on and continues on into the next generations.
“They’ve set the playing field for generations to come, condemning our children, our tamariki to needless, endless, perpetual fighting, costly court cases, societal disharmony and time, energy and money-wasting on a staggering scale.”
Te Pāti Māori MP Tākuta Ferris . . . “the fight for Te Tiriti justice only deepens from this point on.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Manoa Kamikamica has stepped down from his position on the eve of his court appearance for corruption-related charges.
Kamikamica has been charged by the country’s anti-corruption office with perjury and providing false information in his capacity as a public servant.
Kamikamica, who also serves as the Minister for Trade and Communications, informed Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka yesterday that he would focus on clearing his name in relation to the charges laid against him by the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC).
He is one of three deputy prime ministers in Rabuka’s coalition government.
“I have accepted his decision to step down, and he has assured me of his unwavering commitment to the government and the people of Fiji,” Rabuka said in a statement.
“I will be overseeing his portfolio responsibilities for the foreseeable future.”
The deputy prime minister was overseas on official duties and was returning to the country.
His case is scheduled to appear at the Suva Magistrates Court today.
FICAC has not publicly commented on the specifics of the case.
The charges were filed following investigations related to the Commission of Inquiry report into the appointment of Barbara Malimali as FICAC chief, according to the state broadcaster FBC.
FBC reported that FICAC officers had seized Kamikamica’s mobile phone in July during the execution of a search warrant.
Kamikamica is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
FBC reports that Kamikamica’s legal representative, Wylie Clarke, appeared before the court today and raised serious concerns about the validity of the charges.
Clarke told the court that the case was fundamentally flawed, both in its legal foundation and in the evidence supporting it.
Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly 200 years ago, cited extreme individualism as the potential Achilles heel of America democracy. He was struck by a pervasive self-regard that was a cardinal feature of the national personality – a fixed reference mark for how people saw the world and acted in it. The most evident risk, to his mind, was that this condition could erode the sense of common values which was the crucial software for the institutional hardware of public bodies. Tocqueville also was an uncommonly perceptive ‘psycho-anthropologist.’ He noted that there existed within the American psyche uneasy feelings of incompleteness rooted in frustrated ambition, status insecurities, an unhealthy preoccupation with a quest for a better place, a better time, something better despite unprecedented freedom and material well-being. In short, a sort of free-floating low-grade neurosis.
Here are excerpts from Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy In America Book II, Translated by Henry Reeve Ed. Henry Steele Commager (Oxford University Press 1955):
Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to form of society or another; individualism is of democratic origin. The conditions of life on an untrammeled continent have crystallized this sentiment…. Consequently, Americans believe that they owe nothing to any man. (368)
American individualism throws for ever each man back upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart” (Read smartphone) There, each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely, himself. (213)
The individual’s sense of being unfulfilled is a hallmark of today’s American. It is more pronounced now than ever before.
A related cause is the absence of rites of passage, of marks of distinction, of settled status – now exacerbated by economic dislocation (the gig economy) – which deepen diffuse feelings of disappointment and discouragement. All the more so when we are subjected to graphic images of those who have “made it,” i.e. the celebrity culture along with the money mania.
A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, but holds nothing fast, and soon loosens his grip to pursue fresh gratifications. (396)
They encounter good fortune nearly everywhere, but not happiness. With them the desire for well-being has become an uneasy burning passion that keeps on growing even while it is being satisfied. (215)
BINGO!
The Darkening Horizon (579)
At the very end of Tocqueville’s second book, his guarded optimism about American democracy, and what it portends for the inexorable spread of democracy everywhere, yields to a different, troubling vision of the future. He vividly describes a benign dystopia:
In America I saw the freest men, placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords; it seemed to me as if a cloud hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad in their pleasure…. Endlessly they are going to seize it (happiness), and endlessly it escapes their grasp. They see it from close enough to know its charms, but they never get close enough to enjoy them, and they die before fully tasting its delights. These are the reason for the singular melancholy … they sometimes experience in the bosom of abundance, and for the disgust with life that often seizes them in the midst of their easy and tranquil existence.
The Pursuit of Happiness – to coin a phrase. Thereby, Tocqueville discerned the seeds of what has become the fatal, mutual reinforcing mix of Narcissism and Nihilism that have cleared the way for American Fascism.
This state of affairs was alleviated over time – by urbanization, by the influx of immigrants from other cultural backgrounds – Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe; by revolutions in communication and transportation, and – above all – by the steady trend toward recognizing government as the custodian of nation well-being – society’s collective agent performing critical functions which, thereby, foster obligations and bonds that transcended individuals. The reactionary counter revolution of the past 40 years or so has entailed a frontal assault on those constructions and their attendant social ethos. Hard-headed special interests along with the dogmas they’ve spread have been the spearheads. Others have contributed. Democratic so-called reformers promoted Charter schools. Declarations made that “the era of big government is over” (Bill Clinton) in the name of ‘privatization.’ The cosseting of rapacious, predatory finance (Barack Obama). Academia has placed its oar in the water to propel thinking in the same direction: an economics profession that is wedding to an intolerant “market fundamentalist” model that presumes that it is human nature to live by utility calculations; prominent social philosophers who propagate the idea that we are programed to think only of oneself and one’s immediate narrow needs.
This essay addresses the last.
Altruism vs Selfishness
I.
What’s this all about? A high-powered team of psychologists from Yale and Harvard has made a splash with a well publicized claim that moral indignation is usually an affectation aimed at enhancing reputation and, thereby, gaining personal advantage. It is nothing more than a compulsive desire to proclaim how virtuous you are, to “advertise” yourself to others. Rarely does it have anything or little to do with moral responsibility or ethical concerns. Indignation over alleged wrongs and injustices is merely another form of self-righteousness whereby the insecure individual strives for a sense of worth by showing that (s)he is better than other people. The reputation for virtue thereby acquired is exploited to advance personal needs and wants. All of this, it is argued, accords with inherent human instincts and the survival of the fittest.
These radical assertions are based on an extensive research project well-funded by reputable sources, mainly the Templeton Foundation. The study is grounded in an elaborate set of contrived laboratory experiments whose relation to real world circumstances is purely coincidental. The accumulated testing data is then subject to statistical analysis. Results were published in a scholarly article that appeared in the distinguished journal Nature.1 The authors neatly explain their conclusion this way:
…an evolutionary mystery: Why would a selfless tendency like moral outrage result from the self’s process of evolution? One important piece of the answer is that expressing moral outrage actually does benefit you, in the long run, by improving your reputation…..We suggest that expressing moral outrage can serve as a form of personal advertisement. People who invest time and effort in condemning those who behave badly are trusted more.” That trust then can be exploited for personal gain/advancement – “without much care for what it means for others.
This is a specious argument rooted in assumptions about human nature and the evolutionary process that simply are untrue. Moreover, it reflects a philosophical bias toward fashionable varieties of the selfishness creed that is sweeping our society. Scholars are now engaged in justifying and propagating those pernicious doctrines – wittingly or otherwise. The Harvard/Yale psychologists give the game away without even realizing it by exposing their own distorted view of human behavior and society. They manifestly are creatures of their culture and their times.
Let us examine those biases. First, their conception of evolutionary dynamics is simplistic. Survival of the fittest entails more than a tooth-and-nail fight of all against all. There are collective, mutually supportive needs within groups of individuals that are imperatives for survival. Even a cursory knowledge of the mammal world as a whole makes this unmistakably clear – leaving aside homo sapiens for the moment. Most mammals are communal; they live in packs, herds, whatever. That applies to predators as well as to herbivores. Think of the wolf pack or lion pride – exemplars of an extended family. Its internal division-of-labor is associated with a sense of collective identity and collective interest. The male alpha role usually is shared by two, three or even four dominant males. Genetic identity of the progeny itself can be obscure.
Among mammals, survival instincts generate behavior that can extend beyond the directly instrumental, i.e. it becomes independent of the originating need. Hence, we have seen video evidence of how the maternal instinct can apply across clans – and even across species. It’s right there, in the wild. Most striking are those that show zoo gorillas coming to the rescue of toddlers who have fallen into the enclave and lifting them to their mothers – in one instance, a male gorilla. According to the ‘Pinker logic,” he immediately saw an opportunity to earn an extra big banana provision from the keeper impressed by his valorous act. Well, ….
In other words, the behavior driven by the survival imperative can lead to a generalized tendency to produce conduct that serves no direct survival need.
Consider this situation. An adult is walking on the beach off-season fully clothed. Scattered groups of people are enjoying the fall sunshine. The person in question sees that a toddler, escaping the care of his parents, has wandered into the water where he is about to be swept away by a wave. The stranger dashes into the surf to carry the child out of danger. Why? Self-promotion in the eyes of onlookers? Reward expected from grateful parents? Enhanced self-esteem from doing a life-saving good deed? The Harvard-Yale team most certainly would offer these explanations. What drivel! The obvious answer is that it was an instinctive action involving nothing of a self-referential nature.
Human social groups constitute many orders of magnitude of collective, mutually supportive living beyond these examples of mammalian solidarity. The most rudimentary Neolithic tribes lived a communal existence. We know little about their organization and modes of social functioning except from what has been observed in the Amazon Basin and the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Some things are readily observable. One, the underlying principle was a sort of primitive communism. Two, to the extent that alpha male roles existed, they did not dictate fully the terms of genetic survival. Three, there were strong bonds and a deep sense of collective identity.
A stunning archeological find has revealed that at least some of these attributes were present even in Homo Erectus communities. It involves the skeleton of a female approximately 50 years old that shows severe physical infirmities – some seemingly congenital. The implication is that the woman could not have survived without attentive care from her family/group for a period of decades. In other words, the community felt bound to her welfare to a greater extent than does the state of Texas today toward its impoverished infirmed. That is devolution in the homeland of primitive Darwinian individualism.
The implication of this accumulated evidence is that the evolutionary dynamic is far more complex than the rather primitive understanding built into the Yale/Harvard thesis. Human beings have a more highly developed sense of communal well-being and its link to individual survival/advancement than that evident among hedge fund managers or careerist academics who implicitly seem to be the main outside-the-lab empirical reference points for these authors. Homo sapiens have the exceptional attribute of self-awareness along with an environmental awareness that includes the social environment. That leads to the formulation of codes of conduct that conform to the logic of evolutionary symbiosis.
Those codes of conduct, in turn, are intimately associated with the emergence of a sense of right-and-wrong. Ethics and practical benefit have become intertwined. Violation of fundamental ethics, in egregious ways, is perceived simultaneously as a practical danger to the community and an insult to its shared sense of identity. Those behavioral codes often are sacrilized – adding to their force by ritualizing them and imprinting them on the group’s collective consciousness. Hence, a specific act is condemned not only for that single transgression of a societal norm but also because it constitutes an implicit danger to the group’s entire normative structure. Indignation is the natural reaction to such a violation.
As persons mature, collective norms fuse with individual life experience to form an ethical character. Progressively over a life span, primitive personal needs and wants are incorporated into what has been called “the altruistic self’ wherein the ‘selfish’ and the collective are balanced. These well-established ideas have faded in the age of narcissism.
Then there is this uncomfortable fact of life. Millions of people experience feelings of moral outrage when they are alone – when there is no one to whom they might “advertise” themselves and on whom they might gain leverage. I guess that they may be “practicing” their outrage on the off-chance that they run into an editor of the NYT Week in Review in Zabar’s some Sunday morning. All of this is beyond the comprehension of the Harvard/Yale team. They prefer to see indignation as posturing – a calculated attempt to make oneself look good in the eyes of others. That judgment says more about the researchers than it does about human nature.
What they see as a puzzling “investment of time and energy” in condemning an “offense…that does not concern (them) directly” is in fact natural and healthy human behavior. The practical implications are profound. Should we celebrate that some of us still are able to feel moral outrage about a son or neighbor crippled in Falluja for the sake of George W. Bush’s low self-esteem, about seeing thousands of the nation’s children knowingly poisoned in Flint by Governor Snyder and other high officials, about dirty dealing on Wall Street that promises another financial collapse, about the American Psychological Association’s hidden program to instruct the CIA in the most effective torture techniques? Or, is the normal, emotionally well-adjusted thing to do instead constraining the indignation one might feel? Is it really the normal, survival oriented behavior to devote one’s energy to working out the latest insider trading deal or market rigging scheme over drinks, or plotting to elbow into retirement that colleague whose funding and doctoral students you covet – or, exercising admirable restraint in avoiding self “advertisement” by condemning your profession’s leaders abuse of their position?
We know which type will come out ahead in contemporary American society. What that means for the welfare and sustainability of humankind is quite a different question.
In effect, this scholarly quartet are formulating a behavioral model wherein the most advanced parts of the brain (cerebral cortex) that permit consciousness of one’s environment, and at the highest stage, self-consciousness, are servants of the primitive R-complex — or reptilian brain. The reptilian brain produces only one type of behavior: that driven by basic needs and wants. If all social actions serve individual needs in the struggle for survival of the fittest, then any social conduct that appears superficially altruistic or ethically driven is in fact selfish at its motivational core if properly interpreted.
This is an extremely important article. Not for its explanatory value; but for its near perfect representation of multiple pathologies in contemporary society that carry pernicious consequences.
There is an old Italian saying: Latin masks the ignorance of the Priest. So, today: digits mask the ignorance of the Social Scientist. It was said that German philosophers dove deeper than anyone else and came up muddier. Behavioral psychologists make the shallowest of dives and surface beaming with smug self-satisfaction.
*This is the argument of four highly reputable scholars from Yale and Harvard. Two are standard psychologists; two, who do behavioral research, are called ‘mathematical biologists.’ All four Professors are disciples of the distinguished Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker who is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. This prize-winning scholar has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Pinker characterizes this work of his proteges and collaborators as “brilliant.”
They were given premium space in the Sunday New York Times to present this radical reconceptualization of what behaviors are praiseworthy and which aren’t. At first glance, it might seem odd that our august newspaper of record would go out of its way to promote such a radical viewpoint – especially at a time when a greatly diminished capacity for moral indignation has left the American body politic drifting into precarious waters. Normally, the NYT devotes its Sunday sections to purveying trendy themes that titillate its readership. Sexuality in all its many forms, for example, which receives abundant attention from the Business Section to the Magazine. Or Style Sections. Or lifestyles of the Rich & Famous – interspersed of course with the occasional graphic photo spread on the wretched of the Earth.
Its Editors’ motivations are unknown. We can be quite sure, however, based on its record in recent years, that the Times was seeking to reassure and comfort rather than to provoke. The question, therefore, is what exactly were they trying to reassure us about? Well, likely it was the same peculiar anxiety that preoccupies the authors of this ultimately rather silly paean to smug complacency; that is, those who call us to account in observing a humane ethical standard are not serving our species’ well-being.
II. Rand & Altruism October 2014
Ayn Rand – of Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged fame – regained prominence when one of her prize disciples, Alan Greenspan, proclaimed her as the inspiration for a way of thinking that brought the world financial system to wrack and ruin. Rand spawned a juvenile creed of unmitigated selfishness that resounded with young egoists who fantasized that they were ‘supermen’ who should distain the social ethics that enslaved lesser men. She, and her dogma, now have reemerged as the model for inchoate thoughts about the evil of government, and the virtue of getting rich at any cost – among other brilliant ideas for rescinding the social policies of the 20th century.
The phenomenon’s significance lies not in the anthropological curiosity item that is the sociopathic Randian sect. More compelling is its melding with atavistic elements of American tradition into a movement of the disaffected, the deluded, the status deprived, and the cynical which is endangering the humane decency of the country we have worked to perfect over 225 years. The sect’s component groupings, in their various modulations, having annexed the Republican Party, and are on the verge of seizing control of the entire federal government. Once in their hands, the levers of power will be used to restore the free-wheeling, government-lite America of the 19 century only in the economic sphere where the domination of financial elites will be consolidated. In the social and cultural spheres, they will be used to impose codes of conduct that cripple liberties. The latter was not the aspiration of Ayn Rand (she favored unrestricted abortion rights), but rather confirmation of the inescapable destination to which a mutant form of her doctrine leads when all sense of community is denigrated.
For narcissism is now the national religion. That is to say, a religion that recognizes only one sovereign power and worships at only one altar – the all-demanding and all-consuming self. Narcissism is dressed out in a multiplicity of styles – masquerading as enlightened Reform (doing away with the rights of salaried workers and their access to public services, deregulation, privatization); as Old Time religion (God and his prophet as a spiritual Swiss army knife that justifies prejudice and encourages fearful, sweaty egos in their relentless search for ‘meaning’); as family responsibility (looking after the extended Number 1 menaced by those anonymous forces who would steal your comfort and transfer it to the unworthy); as defense of a ‘Liberty’ for true, rugged individualistic Americans whose gun collection is the only thing that stands between freedom and Socialists, aliens, terrorists, and other assorted hobgoblins imagined by insecure and fevered personalities.
The extent to which a narcissistic perspective on life has permeated our consciousness is evident in the current discourse about ‘altruism.’ How do we explain something that is counter to common sense and direct experience? What social influences lead some people some of time to behave in this odd way? Is it religious dicta inscribed in holy books whose lessons have been drummed into us in houses of worship? It may be inborn in mothers sacrificing for their offspring but why should it include ‘others’ who are natural competitors of their progeny?
This mysterious thing called ‘altruism’ covers a wide range of behaviors: freely giving away money and goods (i.e. philanthropy); lending a helping hand to strangers; worrying and carrying about groups in society that you have no direct connection with; coming to the assistance of the vulnerable who could be viewed as burdens on productive members of society and/or simply the losers in the game of natural selection. These questions today are earnestly debated in serious journals, on the web, in scholarly circles, and in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times – the ultimate arbitrator of upper middle-brow thinking.
The fundamental point is that the question is almost universally considered legitimate and puzzling. For it is widely taken as given that “altruism” is an aberration from the norm. In truth, it indeed has become an aberration in terms of how vast numbers of people relate to their fellows. We have lost track of who we are. We have lost track of human identity as a social being. We have lost track of our evolution as members of communities – immediate and abstracted. We overlook some elementary facts about ourselves.
Humans have an instinct to bond – in families, in extended families, in small tribal groupings, in larger tribes. We have a further capacity for empathy that extends beyond those groupings. It doesn’t take social learning, much less instruction, to feel the impulse to protect an endangered relation – or any other member of the species for that matter. In fact, these instincts are readily observable among higher mammals, primates surely and also others, e.g. an elephant herd, a lion pride. Even a rogue elephant, the pachyderm counterpart to the Randites’ ‘superman,’ has been filmed coming to the rescue of a stray baby stalked by predators — oblivious to the risk he is running the risk of weakening the moral fiber of the elephant community by this unseemly act of altruism. Yet for many, similar behavior among humans is interpreted as requiring a special explanation. They get nothing from Animal Kingdom while grasping for convenient verities in the prolix pages of Ayn Rand and the like.
This narcissism grounded pathology is most widespread in the United States. More qualified variations are surfacing in Western Europe, especially within the copy-cat governments of Britain’s current and recent Prime Ministers. But only a doctrinaire few over there can contemplate repealing the great advances of the past century that have extended the logic and sentiment of human solidarity to entire countries. Only a few can imagine a society that upends the admonition that “humanity is the ultimate measure of what we do” while embracing a doctrine of all against all with the privileged getting a head start. Only a few can see no connection between implementing a plan of greedy individualism and the reversion of relations among countries to the conflict mode of yesteryear. America, unfortunately, is the trailblazer and pacesetter — and it is American politicians and journalists and intellectuals who are having a powerful influence on how the rest of the world thinks about all this.
That is a great pity.
The developed world, in the second half of the 20th century, achieved something historic; something that only visionaries in an earlier era could have imagined. Societies build on practical principles of mutual obligation and individual dignity enjoying unprecedented domestic peace and material well-being. That required acts of intellectual, ethical and politically creativity. Positive inertia kept them going. For the past 40 years or so, that positive inertia has given way to a combination of complacency about the fruits of our great achievement and disparagement of its mainspring.
Today, especially in the United States, a new class of ambitious strivers are making their mark by destruction – not by creation. It is an odd alliance of the powerful and power hungry, the insecure comforted by fanciful nostrums, and the opportunists. The last is a broad, heteroclite assemblage – in academia, media, politics and the professions. They will have the most to answer for as the reactionary project of destruction progresses.
1 Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom, & David G. Rand “Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness” Nature, Volume: 530, (25 February 2016), p 473–476.
Israel and the West pretend they want a real peace in Israel-Palestine yet the Israelis have beaten unconscious the man most likely to help realise a sustainable end to the conflict: Marwan Barghouti.
The ethnocentrism of Western culture is such that 20 Israeli hostages received vastly more coverage than thousands of Palestinian hostages, nearly 2000 of whom were released as part of the recent exchange.
These prisoners, physically emaciated, most emotionally shattered, many children, most having never been charged, some held for decades, emerged from the Dantesque Inferno of the Israeli prison system. Most had some kind of disease, commonly scabies, due to the infested and infected conditions of the gulag.
Five Palestinian detainees released and exiled to Egypt brought with them terrible news: the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti — the person most likely to lead a free Palestine — had recently been beaten unconscious by his captors.
According to the Times of Israel, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who oversees the Israeli Prison System says he is “proud that Barghouti’s conditions have changed drastically”.
What Nelson Mandela would say about the beating of Marwan Marwan Barghouti — Palestine’s most loved and revered leader, a living symbol of the resistance — was beaten unconscious by 8 Israeli guards, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners on arrival in Cairo. The attack left the 66-year-old with broken ribs and head injuries.
When called on to demand his protection, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western leaders yawned and looked the other way. That response defined the depths that the Western world has reached in its permissiveness of violence towards Palestinian prisoners.
Marwan Barghouti is commonly referred to as the Palestinian Mandela, a man who has the attributes to not only unite the many Palestinian factions but also negotiate a lasting peace, if given the opportunity.
Mandela couldn’t have been “Mandela” without him surviving and being released — which is a tribute to the ANC and other fighters for freedom, as well as to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns that finally convinced the regime to negotiate.
The same was true of the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland which saw the release of prisoners that one side considered terrorists. The British also came to accept that negotiation with leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the IRA was essential precisely because they had the street credibility to deliver peace.
It is worth pointing out that Mandela said he was not personally beaten during his 27 years of captivity by the racist South African apartheid regime.
Barghouti, who has spent the last 23 years in prisons has had at least four beatings by the Israelis in the past three years alone. The Israelis have shown nothing but contempt for the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, Red Cross requests, or any benchmark of human decency.
They are our “friends and allies” with whom we share values.
‘He has been in a struggle for 50 years’. Video: TRT News
Rules on prisoner treatment
After leaving Robben Island to eventually become South Africa’s first black President, the convicted terrorist and revolutionary Prisoner 46664 helped author the Nelson Mandela Rules on prisoner treatment, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. He had seen the mistreatment of many of his comrades by racist white South Africa, a close ally of most of our governments.
The scale of what is being done by Israel in its mass torture centres would be beyond anything Mandela could have imagined. Unlike morally repellent leaders like New Zealand’s Luxon, UK’s Starmer, France’s Macron or Germany’s Merz, he would never have failed to act.
A central tenet of the Mandela Rules is that people behind bars are not beyond human rights. Countries — and, yes, that includes Israel — must adhere to minimum standards such as, “No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”
Recently released Palestinians, most in shocking physical condition, talked of having to drink toilet water, beatings, being denied medical treatment, constant humiliations, including sexual violence, committed by the Israelis.
This kind of behaviour has long been documented by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and largely ignored by the mainstream media.
The Israelis, never forget, are our close friends, with whom we share “values”.
I have written a number of articles about Marwan and, to avoid repetition, I recommend those unfamiliar with his astonishing story to read them. My last article, Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty, in August, was part of a global push to prevent Marwan facing further mistreatment. I was shocked at the time to see the video that Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir posted to show the power he personally had over Marwan whose physical condition had obviously deteriorated to a terrible extent. Now he has been beaten, for the fourth time.
“It is a clear declaration that they are threatening my father’s life,” his son Arab Barghouti said this week.
Prisons are ‘Israeli sadism in a nutshell’ One person who watched the release of the prisoners last week was veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, correspondent on the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz.
“It was a kind of parade of skeletons,” Hass said. “These last two years, it’s like the Israeli prisons have become Israeli sadism in a nutshell,” she told Democracy Now!.
“The way that prisoners were treated during these two years is unprecedented in Israel. They didn’t only come out emaciated; they came out ill, sick. Some of them have lost limbs. It’s indescribable.”
Hass’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, her mother surviving nine months in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now, along with all of us, she is witness to genocide.
She makes the fine observation that people aren’t born cruel; they become so. I would add: we in the West helped the Israelis become so depraved by ignoring their abuses for so long. Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is a case in point.
“Can I ask the Prime Minister what recent representation his government has made in the last few days to secure the immediate release of Mr Barghouti, given his widespread popularity as a unifying voice for Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom, and therefore his potential crucial role in securing a meaningful and lasting peace in the region?”
Starmer is an avatar for the West: complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Starmer is an avatar for the West . . . complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Starmer, who has less human decency in his entire being than Nelson Mandela had in one nostril hair, refused to even mention Barghouti by name. His lawyerly reply:
“Thank you for raising the individual case. We offer to provide such further information as we can, as soon as we can, in relation to that particular case.”
Western leaders, including in my own country, have refused to even reply to requests that petitions/insistences be made to the Israelis to save the great Palestinian leader. They have shown more empathy for the remains of deceased Israeli hostages crushed under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis, hypocritically blaming Hamas for not releasing the remains fast enough!
Such is the moral calibre of our leaders.
None of them, it should be pointed out, had anything to say when footage appeared of Israeli soldiers committing gang rape at Sde Temein Prison last year. Not only were the men not punished but by week’s end they had been blessed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Meir Mazuz who assured one of the rapists that he had done “no wrong” and “In another country they would have given him an award”.
Never forget, the Israelis are our close friends and allies with whom, our leaders tell us, we share values.
‘Israel doesn’t want peace – they want ethnic cleansing’ Such is Marwan Barghouti’s standing that he is respected by all Palestinian factions and acknowledged as a unifying figure, a peacemaker and someone who should be leading Palestine not getting his head punched by Israeli thugs.
“That’s why they see him as a danger,” says his son, Arab Barghouti. “Because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence.
“He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community as well. But they’re [Israelis] not interested in any political settlement; they’re only interested in ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.”
True words, those — and they demolish the fake narrative peddled by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.
The Israelis have killed so many Palestinian negotiators, so many Palestinians leaders that the opposite is now clear: the Israelis and the West are the true enemies of peace.
I’ll give the last word to another Palestinian. I dedicate it to Keir Starmer, Christopher Luxon, Anthony Albanese and all those other leaders who stand deaf, dumb and blind to Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of Palestinian souls still suffering in Israeli captivity:
“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
– Matthew 25, King James Bible
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.
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 Guardianran 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 entitledDon’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.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed “deep gratitude” for Papua New Guinea’s support to his country over many years and during the Middle East conflict.
Prime Minister James Marape was given the message directly yesterday by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel during a courtesy call at Melanesian House, Waigani.
The support by PNG, Fiji and a handful of other Pacific nations is controversial in the face of Israel’s growing global pariah status over its two-year genocidal war on the besieged enclave of Gaza that has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians.
A fragile ceasefire is in place between Israel and the liberation movement Hamas with the last 20 living Israeli captives being released last week in exchange for almost 2000 Palestinian prisoners, most of them held without charge.
Ten countries voted against, half of them from the Pacific — Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, PNG, and Tonga — while the only other countries supporting Israel and its backer United States, were Argentina, Hungary and Paraguay. Twelve countries abstained.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Haskel highlighted Prime Minister Marape’s earlier decision to open the PNG embassy in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv — the first Asia Pacific country to do so — and for supporting Israel at the UN, report the Post-Courierand the PNG Bulletin.
“My visit here was specifically addressed by the Prime Minister [Netanyahu] to see how we can strengthen our friendship further, and to say ‘thank you’ for standing beside us especially in the last two years,” she said.
‘Darkest hours’
“These have been some of our darkest hours since 7 October 2023 . . .
“And you have been one of the most outstanding friends we have standing together on the international front, on bilateral relationship, and in international forums.
She said the people of Israel were “extremely grateful” for the opening of the PNG embassy in Jerusalem.
“This is acknowledgement of our history, our tradition, and of us — the Jewish people — who are the indigenous people of the land of Israel; that we are able to return to revive our religion, culture and language in our ancestral homeland,” Haskel claimed.
She said Netanyahu had requested that the visit to PNG and the Pacific should proceed without delay.
Prime Minister Marape reaffirmed Papua New Guinea’s commitment to the bilateral relationship, highlighting that PNG recognised Israel’s “rights to the land of Israel through its Judeo-Christian worldview”, and continued to recognise Jerusalem as the “eternal” capital of Israel through the PNG embassy.
He added that the embassy opening had encouraged other Pacific countries — such as Fiji — to also establish their diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.
Only four other countries have done so.
Haskel reconfirmed Israel’s commitment to continue assisting PNG in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, health, small business development, and women’s empowerment.
During her two-day visit to PNG, Haskel and her delegation are meeting with ministers in respective fields.
President Donald Trump struck a dismissive and threatening tone over No Kings protests that took place on Saturday, suggesting that he may use federal resources to investigate the demonstrations. Over 7 million people took part in No Kings protests across the country, exceeding the previous No Kings protests in June by 2 million more participants. Some analyses suggest this weekend’s protests…
A Paris appeal court has confirmed that Kanak pro-independence leader Christian Téin is now cleared to return to New Caledonia.
In September, a panel of judges had pronounced they were in favour of Téin’s return to New Caledonia, but the Public Prosecution then appealed, suspending his return.
However, in a ruling delivered on Thursday, the Paris Appeal Court confirmed the Kanak leader is now free to travel back to the French Pacific territory.
In June 2024, at the height of violent riots, Téin and other pro-independence leaders were arrested in Nouméa and swiftly flown to mainland France aboard a specially-chartered plane.
They were suspected of playing a key role in the riots that broke out mid-May 2024 and were later indicted with criminal charges.
The charges for which Téin remains under judicial supervision include theft and destruction of property involving the use of weapons.
His pre-trial conditions had been eased in June 2025, when he was released from the Mulhouse jail in eastern France, but he was not allowed to return to New Caledonia at the time.
Téin’s lawyers react to the decision Téin’s lawyers said they were “satisfied and relieved”.
“This time, Téin is allowed to go back to his land after 18 months of being deprived [of freedom],” one of Téin’s counsels, Florian Medico, told French national media.
One main argument from the Public Prosecution was that under “fragile” post-riot circumstances, Téin’s return to New Caledonia was not safe.
Public Prosecutor Christine Forey also invoked the fact that an investigation in this case was still ongoing for a trial at a yet undetermined date.
Previous restrictions imposed on Téin (such as not interfering with other persons related to the same case) were also lifted.
The ruling also concerns four other defendants, all pro-independence leaders.
Case not closed yet “It’s now up to the investigating judges, in a few months’ time, to decide whether to rule on a lack of evidence, or to bring the indicted persons before a court to be judged . . . But this won’t happen before early 2026,” lawyer François Roux told reporters.
Téin is the leader of a CCAT “field action co-ordinating cell” set-up by one of the main pro-independence parties in New Caledonia — the Union Calédonienne (UC).
Although jailed at the time in mainland France to serve a pre-trial term, he was designated, in absentia, president of the main pro-independence umbrella, the FLNKS, during a congress in August 2024.
However, during the same congress, two other pillars of the FLNKS, the moderate pro-independence UPM (Union Progressiste en Mélanésie) and PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party), distanced themselves and de facto split from the UC-dominated FLNKS.
The two parties have since kept away from FLNKS political bureau meetings.
Meanwhile, in January 2025, the case was transferred from a panel of judges in Nouméa to another group of magistrates based in Paris.
They ruled on June 12 that, while Téin and five other pro-independent militants should be released from custody, they were not allowed to return to New Caledonia or interfere with other people associated with the same case.
Now allowed
But in a ruling delivered in Paris on September 23, the new panel of judges ruled Téin was now allowed to return to New Caledonia.
The ruling was based on the fact that since he was no longer kept in custody and even though he had expressed himself publicly and politically, Téin had not incited or called for violent actions.
He still faces charges related to organised crime for events that took place during the New Caledonia riots starting from 13 May 2024, following a series of demonstrations and marches that later degenerated, resulting in 14 dead and over 2 billion euros (NZ$4 billion) in damage.
The 2024 marches were to protest against a plan from the French government of the time to modify the French Constitution and “unfreeze” restrictions on the list of eligible voters at local provincial elections.
The Indigenous pro-independence movement says these changes would effectively “dilute” the Kanak Indigenous vote and bring it closer to a minority.
Back in New Caledonia, the prospect of Téin’s return has sparked reactions.
Outrage on the pro-France side On the pro-France side, most parties who oppose independence and support the notion that New Caledonia should remain part of France have reacted indignantly to the prospect of Téin’s return.
The uproar included reactions from outspoken leaders Nicolas Metzdorf and Sonia Backès, who insist that Téin’s return to New Caledonia could cause more unrest.
Le Rassemblement-LR leader Virginie Ruffenach also reacted saying she wondered whether “the judges realise the gravity of their ruling”.
“We’re opposed to this . . . it’s like bringing back a pyromaniac to New Caledonia’s field of ashes while we’re trying to rebuild,” she told local media.
Meanwhile, a “non-political” petition has been published online to express “firm opposition” to Téin’s return to New Caledonia “in the current circumstances” because of the “risks involved” in terms of civil peace in a “fragile” social and economic context after the May 2024 riots.
Since 30 September 2025, the online petition has collected more than 10,000 signatures from people who describe themselves as a “Citizens Collective Against the Return of Christian Téin”.
“Immense relief”: FLNKS Reacting on Friday on social networks, the FLNKS hailed the appeal ruling, saying this was “an immense relief for their families, loved ones and the whole pro-independence movement”.
“The struggle doesn’t stop, it goes on, even stronger”, the FLNKS said, referring to the current parliamentary battle in Paris to implement the “Bougival” agreement signed in July 2025, which FLNKS rejects.
Within the pro-independence movement, a rift within FLNKS has become increasingly apparent during recent negotiations on New Caledonia’s political future, held in Bougival, west of Paris, which led to the signature, on 12 July 2025, of a text that posed a roadmap for the French territory’s future status.
It mentions the creation of a “State of New Caledonia”, a short-term transfer of powers from Paris, including in foreign affairs matters and the dual French-New Caledonian nationality.
But while UPM and PALIKA delegates signed the text with all the other political tendencies, the UC-dominated FLNKS said a few days after the signing that the Bougival deal was rejected “in block” because it did not meet the party’s expectations in terms of full sovereignty.
Their negotiators’ signatures were then deemed as invalid because, the party said, they did not have the mandate to sign.
In a letter to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, and copied to French President Emmanuel Macron and Speakers of both Houses of Parliament, in early October 2025, the FLNKS reiterated that they had “formally withdrawn” their signatures from the Bougival deal and that therefore these signatures should not be “used abusively”.
Bougival deal continues
However, despite a spate of instability that saw a succession of two French governments formed over the past two weeks, the implementation of the Bougival deal continues.
In the latest cabinet meeting this week, the French Minister for Overseas, Manuel Valls, was replaced by Naïma Moutchou.
France’s newly-appointed Minister for Overseas Naïma Moutchou . . . there “to listen” and “to act”. Image: Assemblée Nationale
Last Wednesday, the French Senate endorsed the postponement of New Caledonia’s provincial elections to June 2026.
The same piece of legislation will be tabled before the Lower house, the French National Assembly, on October 22.
In a media conference on Wednesday, Union Calédonienne (UC), the main component of FLNKS, warned against the risks associated with yet another “passage en force”.
“This is a message of alert, an appeal to good sense, not a threat”, UC secretary-general Dominique Fochi added.
“If this passage en force happens, we really don’t know what is going to happen,” Fochi said.
“The Bougival agreement allows a path to reconciliation. It must be transcribed into the Constitution,” Lecornu told the National Assembly.
Also speaking in Parliament for the first time since she was appointed Minister for Overseas, Naïma Moutchou assured that in her new capacity, she would be there “to listen” and “to act”.
This, she said, included trying to re-engage FLNKS into fresh talks, with the possibility of bringing some amendments to the much-contested Bougival text.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s major Palestine advocacy and protest group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned Defence Minister Judith Collins for “dog-whistling to her small choir” over Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza enclave.
Claiming that Collins’ open letter attacking teachers at the weekend was an attempt to “drown out Palestine” in discussions with the government, PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal said that it demonstrated more about her own prejudices than teacher priorities.
Teachers, who had devoted their lives to educating children in Aotearoa, would be “appalled at the wholesale slaughter” of Palestinian school children in Gaza, he said in a statement today.
Israel has killed at least 97 Palestinians and wounded 230 since the start of the ceasefire, and violated the truce agreement 80 times, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.
“Teachers who are committed to the education and development of the next generation of our country would feel a special affinity with the children of another nation, who are being killed by Israeli bombing in their tens of thousands, seeing all their schools destroyed, and who will suffer the consequences of two years of malnutrition for the rest of their lives,” Nazzal said.
He added that just two months ago, Collins had featured on television standing next to a damaged residential building in Kiev while condemning Russia for attacks which had killed Ukrainian children.
“But not a critical word of Israel from her, or her cabinet colleagues, despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza,” Nazzal said.
Children ‘deserve protection’
“Ukrainian, Palestinian and New Zealand school children all deserve protection and we should expect our government to speak up loudly in their defence, without having to have a teachers’ union raise government inaction on Gaza with them.
“But even after 24 months of genocide, Collins won’t find the words to express New Zealand’s horror at the indiscriminate killing of school children in Gaza.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . “not a critical word of Israel from her . . . despite Israel just now resuming its mass bombing in Gaza.” Image: Asia Pacific Report
“But she’s in her element dog-whistling to her small choir in the pro-Israel lobby.
“Collins has already been referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, for complicity in Israel’s genocide by facilitating the supply of military technology for Israeli use.
“It’s more than time for Luxon to pull back his Israeli fanatic colleagues and uphold an ethical rule-based policy, and not default to blind prejudices.”
A critique of the Collins open letter published in The Standard . . . “she makes a number of disturbing claims, as valued workers (doctors, mental health nurses, scientists, midwives, teachers, principals, social workers, oncologists, surgeons, dentists etc) ramp up to one of the biggest strikes in history”. Image: The Standard
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 calledThe 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 entitledIs 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.
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.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) has faced a barrage of criticism this week from those spied upon by police and security services. The UCPI is tasked with uncovering the truth about how a Met Police unit infiltrated and undermined peaceful campaigns on issues such as racial justice and animal rights. Solicitors for Blacklist Support Group (BSG) leader Dave Smith has hammered the investigation for not permitting the persecuted former construction worker to provide oral evidence. The BSG has also accused the UCPI, chaired by John Mitting, of failing to sufficiently broaden the scope of the inquiry to examine how spycops evidence was used by the likes of MI5, and how it may still be in use today to ‘vet’ job applicants at the likes of the BBC.
One particularly egregious shortcoming, however, is its continued policy of allowing the very cops at the centre of the scandal to escape scrutiny. A key figure still permitted to skulk in the shadows is HN86, the former Met Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) manager described by spycop turned whistleblower Peter Francis as “overtly racist”. Francis was tasked by HN86 with gathering information on the campaign for justice undertaken by the Lawrence family. It was headed by Doreen and Neville Lawrence, whose son Stephen was murdered on 22 April 1993 by a gang of racist white thugs. A statement produced by solicitors for Neville Lawrence said the killing “remains a stain on the national conscience”.
Racist senior police officer said about Lawrence campaign: “the monkeys were being organised”
Francis was one of four cops to spy on the Lawrences, though he is the only one to be definitively identified by his real name. Intelligence gathering on the Stephen Lawrence campaign was described by Francis as the “SDS’ number one priority”. He said he was instructed by HN86 to:
…report anything I could find out about the Lawrence family and/or the campaign that could fundamentally alter the perception of the public about the campaign.
HN86 also:
…made reference to ‘stopping’, ‘undermining’, ‘combatting’ and ‘smearing’ the campaign.
The still anonymous bigot was concerned about the progress of the Lawrences in seeking justice, declaring that “the monkeys were being organised”.
The former SDS leader has been able to remain concealed thanks to a 2018 restriction order placed on both his cover name and real name by Mitting, on the basis that it would enable HN86 to participate as fully as possible while “mitigating personal harm”. The inquiry chair explained that he viewed it as more important to receive his evidence – given he was a manager – than to reveal his identity.
However, the racist boss is still refusing to provide oral evidence even with the cloak of secrecy flung around him. Mitting has moved to compel him to appear, but solicitors for HN86 have launched a Judicial Review to block the inquiry’s demand, arguing that it has no powers to force an individual living overseas to appear. HN86’s current country of residence is unknown.
Spycop traumatised by his own crimes dodges giving evidence
Another formerly uniformed abomination who continues to dodge the harsh glare of public scrutiny is HN81, known to have used the codename ‘David Hagan’ while intruding on grieving parents. The statement from Neville Lawrence says he is:
…deeply disappointed that HN81 (“David Hagan”) has been excused from giving evidence in person. As we identify below, HN81 was one of the most significant officers reporting on the Lawrence family and their supporters, and his evidence goes to the heart of the issues of race discrimination this Inquiry must confront.
He is thought to have supplied evidence on the separation of Doreen and Neville in the aftermath of their son’s murder. Doreen Lawrence’s statement on this cuts to the heart of much of what the inquiry is supposed to be about, pointing out this focus on “intimate facts about a bereaved couple” says:
…something clear about institutional priorities: at the very moment when confidence required a relentless focus on racist violence, the state was gathering and rating personal information about the victim’s family.
Hagan attempted to justify this obscene intrusion by saying the anti-racist campaign group he infiltrated – Movement for Justice (MFJ), which was supporting the Lawrences – might “exploit” news of the separation to disrupt public order. This was a common justification for much of the illegitimate spying done by the SDS – the notion that entirely peaceful political campaigns were perennially on the verge of triggering some form of insurrection.
Police claim they were saving Lawrences from ‘white saviours’
Another absurd justification that officers have put to Doreen Lawrence is that the surveilling:
…was done to ‘protect’ her and her family from left wing or anarchist groups displaying a form of racism known as the ‘white saviour complex’.
As her solicitors point out, among other issues with this reasoning, this explanation “strips Baroness Lawrence of her autonomy and intellectual capacity” and:
Undermines the legitimacy of the justice campaign by associating it with perceived extremist or politically motivated elements, rather than acknowledging its foundation in genuine grief and a demand for racial justice.
‘Hagan’ is also known to have participated in brawling that took place on the day that the five men were accused of murdering Stephen Lawrence. He had involved himself in the disorder, which the police ultimately quelled with CS gas, to avoid having his cover blown. The former SDS man has been permitted to recuse himself from proceedings on medical grounds, having been diagnosed with “post traumatic stress disorder in 2001”, now characterised as “complex post traumatic stress disorder”, according to a letter provided to the inquiry by a Doctor Tehrani. The medical opinion asserted Hagan’s:
…condition is such that the giving of oral evidence would risk a significant impact upon his behaviour and well-being when doing so.
Tom Fowler, host of Spycops Info podcast, described Dwayne Brooks as “furious” at the continued non-appearance of Hagan/HN81. Brooks was a close friend of Stephen Lawrence, and was with him at the time of his killing. It’s fair to say Fowler also isn’t the biggest fan of inquiry chair Mitting.
Officers were mere foot-soldiers for an establishment out to crush the left
These persecutors of the Lawrences are just two of the cops at the centre of the inquiry’s current phase who will evade the spotlight. HN26 (cover name ‘Christine Green’) infiltrated animal rights groups from the mid 90s until early 2000s, before being exposed in 2017. She will not be called to give oral evidence. Likewise HN123, another to be excluded on mental health grounds.
More serious than this, however, is the prospect that senior politicians potentially involved in the scandal will not have their misdeeds accounted for. The solicitors for Doreen Lawrence raise the:
…reporting of ‘great sensitivity around the Lawrence issue with both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister extremely concerned that the Metropolitan Police could end up with its credibility …..completely undermined’.
They ask:
Who was this Home Secretary and Prime Minister? Baroness Lawerence is deeply concerned that little, to no attention, is being paid by this Inquiry to those who were ultimately accountable for the conduct at the heart of this Inquiry.
The statement calls out the “cowardly fashion” in which officers hide from their crimes, but ultimately they are mere foot soldiers for an entire establishment that sought to use police and security services to undermine the left more broadly. Until an inquiry tackles this and meaningfully holds to account those who truly wield the levers of power, there will likely be more cruel invasions into the private lives of those who campaign for a fairer world.
Lewis Nielsen is an anti-fascist officer at Stand Up To Racism. He spoke at a Your Party rally in Leeds on 8 October, stressing the importance of grassroots leadership in the movement. And referring to the growing confidence of the far right in mainstream politics and on the streets, he insisted:
the stakes are too high for us to mess this up
He added:
History will judge us if we throw away this opportunity… the rows that we’ve seen on social media and elsewhere – it has to stop.
And he stressed:
we have to say now, that the project of unity has to begin… If Jeremy and Zarah put out several videos on social media talking about what your party would do, the difference we could make, what we stand for, we could get this show back on the road.
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s joint appearance in Liverpool a day later showed progress on this front, as did a video Corbyn posted on 15 October featuring Sultana prominently. So it certainly seems the interim leadership understands supporters’ clamour for unity.
But at the same time, Nielsen argued, “the real point is there hasn’t been enough… democracy in Your Party”. And he asserted:
the truth is this, the leadership of Your Party is in this room. It’s in rooms like this… up and down the country.
What Your Party needs to meet this unprecedented moment in British history
“Private-school boy” Nigel Farage, Nielsen said, is “a stockbroker who became a millionaire”. And he gets “too much of an easy ride”. That’s in part because of the chaos in the Conservative and Labour parties, but also due to our useless mainstream media that’s enabled Farage’s rise to prominence. As Nielsen stressed:
This is unprecedented in British history – a far-right party on 30% of the polls
“This is the future we face”, he said, together with:
The biggest far-right demonstration in British history led by fascist Tommy Robinson [Stephen Yaxley-Lennon] who, by the way, was invited on a state visit to Israel this week.
To resist the increasingly confident far right, he insisted:
We don’t need a Labour Party mark 2. We need an insurgent party. We need a party that shakes up politics.
And he outlined what this would look like with a set of questions for Your Party:
Is it a party that lets landlords join? Or is it a party that fights for rent controls, supports tenants’ unions, and says we’re going to build council housing and reclaim the empty homes? Is it a party… that allows transphobes to join it? Or is it a party that sees the most scapegoated and most oppressed people in society and says ‘we stand with you 100%’? And is it a party… that, … faced with the pressure of Nigel Farage, of the Tories and Labour, will avoid the question of refugees and migrants? Or will it stand tall and say that migrants built this country and refugees are welcome here? …
Wouldn’t it be good if… Your Party councillors supported every strike for a pay rise in Britain? … Wouldn’t it be better if Your Party… seriously mobilised to the Palestine movement and said that we won’t let the genocide supporters in the Labour government get away with it? And wouldn’t it be better… the next time Tommy Robinson and his far-right thugs try and march through London… if Your Party said to everyone in the room tonight, the 800,000 supporters, it called them out on the streets and we outnumbered Robinson?
Nielsen’s spot on. Because not only are the stakes too high to let disunity derail the resistance to impending doom. The left also needs to be clear and bold with its diagnosis of the problem and proposal of the solution. And we need to remember that the real leaders are all the people who are willing to get active in the fightback.
Responding to the increasing authoritarianism of Donald Trump, Americans have taken to the streets as part of the latest ‘No Kings’ protests. And once again, these protests have demonstrated that there’s overwhelming opposition to what Trump and his cronies are doing.
Rather than disputing the claim that he thinks he’s a king, Trump posted the following AI slop video:
OMG…the President of the United States just posted himself piloting a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” on the side and dumping mud all over Harry Sisson and No Kings protestors
While the user above describes it as ‘mud’, there’s a distinctly turd-like quality to what Trump is dropping. Given that, we suspect the AI prompt was ‘visualise the impact of Trump’s policies’.
King Trump
People had already turned out in massive numbers at the start of the day:
HOLY SHIT!
Check out New York City’s turnout for the No King’s Protest.
HAPPENING NOW: Across the U.S. people hit the streets by the millions for No Kings Day, with some crowds estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. pic.twitter.com/NO6ciszIuO
the UK on his watch is going to snuff out the right to protest British collusion in the Gaza genocide, and thereby establish a precedent to ban any other future protests that might embarrass the British government. https://t.co/ioju224uSa
Mass mobilisation is the only answer to people like Trump and Starmer who seek to roll back the rights we’ve had for centuries:
A blind and disabled man has been arrested and charged under the terrorism act for holding up a sign that reads, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action” — you do wonder how these police officers can live with the shame of it all. pic.twitter.com/2Q3MT7MjS6
OMG…the President of the United States just posted himself piloting a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” on the side and dumping mud all over Harry Sisson and No Kings protestors