In the seventh installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, we look at how Labour Together embedded itself in the fake antisemitism crisis – including the infamous Angela Eagle ‘brickgate’ and homophobia crisis. This is the first part of Chapter Three.

What was the Labour Together Project doing with Labour Together’s huge pot of unlawfully undisclosed donations? Thanks to previously unseen Labour Party documents and more recent contemporary disclosures, we now know at least part of the answer: the project was fanning and fuelling the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ that would besmirch Corbynism’s reputation and enable the Starmer Project to impose an iron grip on the party.

Labour Together: seeding stories, starting astroturf campaigns against independent media

How did the Labour Together Project intervene in the ‘antisemitism crisis’? First, McSweeney and his allies, including Imran Ahmed, seeded and placed a raft of media stories alleging that the Labour Party under Corbyn had a serious antisemitism problem that a Corbyn-aligned bureaucracy was failing to properly address. Details of the Labour Together Project’s role in fuelling the controversy were only revealed in 2025 – a shocking lack of disclosure about a crisis that helped transform British politics.

Second, internal party documents and recent revelations confirm that Labour Together was directly involved in creating an organisation called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its deeply problematic astroturf campaign, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN played a frankly unforgivable role in inflaming the Labour ‘antisemitism crisis’ well beyond what the evidence warranted. SFFN also evinced a disturbing hostility to free speech and democratic media as it set out to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working journalists on the basis of claims that were at best contentious.

Third, even while SFFN was destroying the careers of journalists at left-wing news outlets with largely unfounded allegations of misinformation, McSweeney worked ‘secretly’ with the Jewish Labour Movement to ‘engineer’ the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation into the Labour Party over allegations of antisemitism. I deal with this aspect of the Labour Together Project’s involvement in the ‘antisemitism crisis’ in Chapter Eight.

The room where it happened

For many of the people who have been caught up in the antisemitism controversy, or witnessed how it disoriented and demoralised Labour’s briefly ascendant left wing, there was always a lingering sense that there was some hidden hand guiding and stoking a moral panic that raged for years in the media – much of it powered by claims that were misleading and, at times, absurd.

The truth is more complicated. There was no single organising force, no one smoke-filled room in which all conspirators met to plot their next move. Like most things in politics, the antisemitism controversy was propelled by diverse impulses and actors. Some of the furore was genuine and organic, as many people were authentically hurt and alarmed by evidence of undeniable antisemitism that was uncovered. Some of it, though, was disingenuous, as antisemitism claims were opportunistically exploited by people who treated a profoundly important issue as a cudgel to beat a political movement they opposed for other reasons and which they could not best through democratic means.

But we also now know, many years later, that there was at least one hidden hand orchestrating the ‘antisemitism crisis’: the Labour Together Project. And there was also at least one room in which plotting took place: Room 216 at the China Works hot-desking offices in South London, where McSweeney and his closest allies covertly inflamed the ‘antisemitism crisis’ and undermined the elected Corbyn leadership so that they might one day rule over the ashes of the party they had set alight.

And when the Starmer Project took up the baton as the Labour Together Project’s next act, it would cynically use the ‘antisemitism crisis’ – a controversy that the Labour Together Project had itself exacerbated – as a pretext to marginalise the Labour left while disempowering the party’s membership at large.

Factional bedfellows

McSweeney’s plot to undermine Corbynism and incubate its replacement was carried out in utmost secrecy. Only a handful of insiders were ever allowed access to the inner sanctum where McSweeney’s schemes unfolded. Indeed, the need for secrecy was so overwhelming that only a tightly controlled selection of people ever visited Labour Together’s office, the aforementioned Room 216. Only three people, besides McSweeney, were allegedly allowed to work from there. Two were junior staffers: Hannah O’Rourke and Will Prescott. The third was McSweeney’s contemporary and a man who shared his visceral antipathy to Corbynism: Imran Ahmed.

McSweeney, Ahmed, and Steve Reed MP would together establish CCDH and SFFN, both of which would declare war on what they dubbed online ‘misinformation’. Ahmed, now based in the US, is the current CEO of CCDH, in which capacity he rails against alleged misinformation in the New York Times and on CNN while endorsing censorship legislation that many human rights groups consider a draconian threat to democracy. Since 2020, CCDH has grown into one of the most influential groups tackling ‘misinformation’ on both sides of the Atlantic, supported by millions in donations (the sources of which CCDH often does not identify).

As I have extensively detailed elsewhere, Ahmed had a long history in the Labour Party – and a long history of butting heads with the Corbyn movement. After an initial stint with Andy Slaughter MP he went to work for Hillary Benn, another MP and son of the famous Labour left-winger Tony Benn. Hillary Benn had been drafted into Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet. When he defied Corbyn’s position by delivering an impassioned speech arguing for British bombing raids in Syria, in December 2015, he was reading words allegedly written by Ahmed. Corbyn eventually sacked Benn in July 2016 after it emerged that he had been encouraging ministers to resign if Corbyn refused to accede to a motion of no confidence.

Imran Ahmed: ‘an absolute agent of horror’

By then, Ahmed’s name was already the subject of dark whispers in Corbyn’s office. One LOTO insider described Ahmed to me, with admittedly knowing hyperbole, as ‘an absolute agent of horror’. Ahmed was widely suspected (albeit with no hard proof) of being the source of a raft of damaging leaks about the Corbyn project.

Ahmed’s career would appear to make him an unlikely choice for organisations claiming to fight misinformation. For example, while working for Hillary Benn MP, Ahmed collaborated with a Guardian journalist on a story that would run during the 2015 general election about Grant Shapps. Shapps was a prominent minister in the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government and co-chairman of the Conservative Party.

The article alleged that Shapps had created a fake Wikipedia profile (called Contribsx) to edit his own Wikipedia page. In an internal party email Ahmed claimed that the piece was based on a joint investigation by himself and the Guardian. Alas, the story fell apart in spectacular style a few months later after an investigation by Wikipedia’s arcane audit committees comprehensively repudiated the claims.

‘Brickgate’: fabricated for faux outrage

Ahmed then moved to work with Angela Eagle MP, who would soon challenge Corbyn for leadership of the Labour Party. During this period, Ahmed amplified an allegation that angry Corbynites had smashed Eagle’s window with a brick after she announced her leadership challenge. This incident had been dubbed ‘Brickgate’ in the media. In the midst of the resulting furore, Ahmed released a press statement on behalf of Eagle’s office that included numerous questionable claims for which he was later chastised by independent media. Ahmed’s statement, for example, alleged that a planned event at a Luton hotel where Eagle was slated to appear had been cancelled because the venue received threats.

Alas, the hotel quickly pooh-poohed the story. ‘Brickgate’, an entirely ludicrous affair, would nevertheless bolster the media narrative that left-wing members of the Labour Party who supported Corbyn were intolerant reprobates. It was a narrative that Ahmed and McSweeney would continue to foster, covertly, when they started working together in 2018.

Dogged investigations by independent bloggers and media outlets revealed that Eagle’s office window had not been smashed (it was instead a window on the ground floor in a shared office stairwell); the police had no evidence this incident was linked to Eagle; and there was no evidence the window had been broken by a brick. It eventually emerged that there wasn’t even a brick on the scene – just a stray piece of masonry on the road, which may or may not have played a role in the damage. Nobody knew, in fact, what had broken the window, or who had done it, or why – yet the incident still somehow retains its force as a shorthand for the alleged thuggishness of Corbynism.

Unsubstantiated accusations of homophobia

Brickgate was part of a broader attempt to defend Eagle’s position against the real prospect that her mostly leftwing constituency would organise and vote to deselect her. It coincided with an allegation made by Eagle’s supporters, and then by Eagle herself, that, at a critical meeting where left-wingers won control of the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP), members had engaged in rampant homophobia, including limping their wrists at a young gay man. The claim was never properly substantiated. It was also fiercely disputed by people who, unlike Eagle, were physically present at the meeting.

Emma Runswick, the self-identified ‘queer’ daughter of the CLP meeting’s chair Kathy Runswick, wrote in the New Statesman of how unimaginable it would be that her loving, accepting mother would ever tolerate such gross and blatant homophobia. In fact, the day after the meeting at which Kathy was said to have allowed homophobia to run amok (and at which she was elected chair of the CLP), she attended her daughter’s wedding – to another woman. Unsurprisingly, despite years of investigations and alarmist reporting, not a single individual was ever sanctioned or found guilty of homophobia in this case.

Nevertheless, Eagle’s supporters flooded the bureaucracy with complaints alleging that homophobia at the meeting, alongside a generalised air of left-wing menace, meant it was no longer safe or appropriate for the CLP to convene meetings. Of course, if the party agreed, the newly elected left-wing leadership of the CLP would be unable to move motions that could censure Eagle – or seek to replace her as an MP. Emails show that at this time, Labour Party bureaucrats opposed to the Corbyn leadership were working with Eagle to ensure her CLP remained suspended in order to prevent her deselection.

Working to undermine party democracy and expel journalists

The same emails show that Ahmed was frequently corresponding with Labour Party bureaucrats – including the now-infamous Sam Matthews, an official in the party’s internal disciplinary unit, whose activities are discussed in more detail later. Documents show that Matthews was frequently at the coalface of a bureaucratic fightback against the Corbynite left. In one email, Matthews acknowledged speaking to Ahmed and described how Ahmed was involved in desperately trying to manage processes in Eagle’s CLP to protect her position from the presumed wishes of local party members.

Even as he was working with Eagle and anti-Corbyn bureaucrats to undermine party democracy, Ahmed was also using his connections to try and convince the Labour Party to expel journalists who happened to be party members. By this point, Eagle’s office was framing expressions contesting the claims of homophobia as a form of- you guessed it – homophobic denialism.

Ahmed left Eagle’s office in late 2017 or early 2018. From there he went to work with Morgan McSweeney. Ahmed’s history in the party is important for three reasons: first, it showed that Ahmed was a factional, anti-Corbyn spin-doctor. He was responsible for seeding and amplifying contentious stories in the media that damaged the left by depicting it as a hotbed of hate, bullying, and abuse. Second, it revealed Ahmed’s intolerance of alternative media outlets that constrained the ability of the Labour right to foster political narratives unhindered. Third, it illustrated Ahmed’s uncanny ability to recode the legitimate contestation of controversial controversial claims as ‘bullying’ and ‘libelous’ conduct spread via ‘conspiracy theory channels’. Ahmed would bring all of these qualities to the table when he joined McSweeney in Room 216.

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

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

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

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

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

Labour Against Antisemitism and the Zionist fringe

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

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

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

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

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

Fake Jewish-sounding personas to make antisemitism allegations

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

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

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

Miriam Margolyes calls it what it is

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

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

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

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

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

Mocking anti-Zionist Jews

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

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

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

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

An illustrative example tells the reader that:

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

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

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

LAAS’s links to the far-right

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

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

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

Attacking pro-Palestine meetings

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

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

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

LAAS advised by director of UK Lawyers for Israel

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

we could not have functioned without him.

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

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

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

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

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

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

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

The ‘antisemitism crisis’

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

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

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

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

Targeting Corbyn’s associates

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

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

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

Labour Together confecting the ‘crisis’

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

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

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

Anonymously feeding stories to the media

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

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

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

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

The thought crime of antisemitic denialism

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

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

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

Manufacturing a moral panic

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

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

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

Double standards and inaccurate reporting

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

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

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

Accusations… over a pun

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

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

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

Outrageous allegations against professor Jonathan Rosenhead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

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

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

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

Potentially serious legal consequences of McSweeney correspondence

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

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

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

Electoral Commission has questions to answer too

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

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

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

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

McSweeney lies to Labour MPs’ faces

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

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

Misinforming the public

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

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

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

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

Shabana Mahmood laying cover in LabourList

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

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

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

A propensity to misdirect, obscure, and plot in secret

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

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

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

Substantive new evidence – enough for another probe

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

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

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

Starmer’s leadership bid

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

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

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

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

McSweeney running Starmer’s campaign while breaking the law

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

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

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

What a mess.

Original sin

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

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

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unreported money that made it possible

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

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

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

Cash pours in for Labour Together at a telling time

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

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

At a telling time: McSweeney behind the scenes

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

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

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

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

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

An ‘administrative oversight’?

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

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

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

It further explained that:

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

Most importantly, correspondence reiterated that:

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

McSweeney’s donation cock-ups: intentional?

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

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

Call logs to the Electoral Commission: the receipts

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

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

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

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

The unidentified Commission advisor told McSweeney:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labour Together extolling the virtues of the Labour Party

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

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

Political podcast scripted by none other than… McSweeney

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

The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy is available to purchase directly from www.orbooks.com from Monday 13 October. E-books will be instantly available to buy. Hard-copies bought via OR Books will be delivered directly from its warehouses and arrive shortly.

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.

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

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

McSweeney tightens his grip on Labour Together

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

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

John Cruddas: now critical of Starmer’s authoritarian leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real McSweeney

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

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

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

‘Progress type’ in sheep’s clothing

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

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

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

McSweeney: Mandelson’s golden boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McSweeney gets his first bitter taste of defeat in Streatham

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

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

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

‘Blue murder’: McSweeney’s mask slips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

This post was originally published on Canary.