BOOK REVIEW
David Jackson
“The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy” (Paul Holden)
Part 3
This is a lengthy, significant and substantial book of almost 550 pages. It is supported by nearly 800 footnotes, which the author decided to place online. I believe that to do it proper justice required more than one review. The initial review considered the early years of Labour Together and the rise of Morgan McSweeney, who was Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff for almost 6 years. The second review centred on what “The Fraud” had to say about the funding of Labour Together and its lack of transparency. In this review I cover other aspects of the book which I think are particularly noteworthy.
The first area is the anti-semitism controversy which took off from early 2018 and ultimately became the pretext for the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn after the publication of the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) report in October 2020.
In relation to anti-semitism, Holden covers various aspects of this controversy in some detail. He also writes about it with some passion and returns to the issue on repeated occasions in the first half of the book. The reason for the degree of anger with which he writes about the issue only became clear at the end of the book, where he mentions in the acknowledgements that he talked to victims of the Starmer project. Many of those victims were Jewish for whom being accused or suspected of anti-semitism was a particularly difficult experience.
In the introduction to the book, Holden suggests that Labour Together’s most consequential intervention was to insert itself into the anti-semitism controversy. You get a very clear sense that his feelings on the issue are stronger than the demonstrable facts allow – he states that there is now little doubt that Labour Together’s role was profound, wide-ranging and at times despicable, whilst also arguing that further investigation is needed to establish the full extent of Labour Together’s involvement in “what became a protracted national controversy”. A further investigation of this nature is unlikely to be ever undertaken.
In subsequent chapters, Holden fleshes out why he thinks Labour Together’s role is significant. Whilst acknowledging the role of groups that operated openly such as Labour Against Anti Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement, he argues that Labour Together was different because it operated in the utmost secrecy. In the process, McSweeney worked with Steve Reed and Imran Ahmed to create an organisation called the Center for Countering Digital Hate and a related campaign called Stop Funding Fake News which would prove to be useful in attacking and undermining Corbyn’s support. Imran Ahmed had been a spin doctor for various Labour MPs such as Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle with a track record of hostility to Corbyn and his supporters. A track record which made him an ideal kindred spirit.
An example of an early intervention by McSweeney and Ahmed crystalised on 1 April 2018 in the front page of the Sunday Times with the headline ‘Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory’. This was accompanied by a further article on the inside pages ‘Vitriol and Threats of Violence: The Ugly Face of Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabal’.
The genesis for this sensational story was when McSweeney and Ahmed joined a raft of Corbyn supporting Facebook groups in either January or February 2018. They 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 antisemitism. McSweeney ensured that the most disturbing examples found their way to the Sunday Times. The subsequent article was based on 2,000 incidents of ‘hate’ which had been found by combing through twenty Corbyn supporting Facebook groups with a combined membership of 400,000. Many of these groups were open which meant that anyone in the world could post to them.
Four days later, Wendy Patterson the administrator of a Corbyn supporting Facebook group rebutted the tone and content of the Sunday Times article in a rebuttal published by openDemocracy. As part of the rebuttal, she estimated that there were approximately 4 million posts across the Facebook groups investigated. Whilst the ‘hate’ posts were to be regretted, they were miniscule as a proportion of the groups’ overall activity.
From my perspective, as a proportion of 4 million, 2,000 incidents is just 0.05 per cent of total activity. Any factory (hate or otherwise) with a failure rate of 99.95 per cent on its production line would soon go out of business.
Holden laments the fact that Patterson’s rebuttal was universally ignored in the mainstream press. In so doing, he doesn’t pose the question of why no supporters of Corbyn or indeed any other fair-minded people within the Labour Movement did not take up Patterson’s rebuttal. In April 2018 the anti-Semitism controversy was still in its early phase when there was still a chance to control and shape the narrative. In that context it was not surprising that a Survation opinion poll in 2019 found that the public believed that 34 per cent of Labour Party members were under investigation for anti Semitism.
What I find particularly disturbing about the activities of McSweeney and his associates prior to 2020 is that as well as doing this fishing expedition on Facebook they also commissioned polling of Labour Party members. One of Starmer’s other biographers commented that the results of this polling found that the average Labour Party member was more inspired by John Lennon than Vladimir Lenin. Whilst they are perfectly within their rights to amplify the spectre of anti-Semitism for political ends, the evidence they gathered themselves clearly demonstrated that contrary to what they were promoting to their media contacts, the Labour Party was not in any danger of being overrun by anti-Semites.
The second aspect that caught my attention is the book’s coverage of Starmer and his campaign for the leadership in 2020. While it is unlikely that the ultimate result would have been different, the Labour Left/soft Left could and should have mounted a more robust challenge. His campaign relied heavily on donning the mantle of Corbyn and in that context he could and should have been more forcibly challenged as to why he resigned from the Opposition frontbench during the Chicken Coup of 2016 in contrast to Rebecca Long Bailey, his main contender for the Leadership, who instead of running away from the Shadow Cabinet stepped in and stepped up. When the policy platforms of the two main contenders in a leadership contest are almost indistinguishable, then it is perfectly reasonable to raise the issue of character.
Another aspect of Starmer’s leadership campaign that received a very light challenge was in relation to who funded his campaign. Under the rules of the leadership contest, all contenders had to periodically report their donations to Parliament on set reporting dates – February 10, March 2, March 16 and April 14.
His main rivals, Rebecca Long Bailey and Lisa Nandy declared their funding and donations contemporaneously. Starmer refused to follow suit. He took some £708,000 in donations but only disclosed £223,000 before the close of voting on 2 April 2020. Starmer did not make a full disclosure of his donations until 14 April 2020, 10 days after he was declared the winner of the contest. Almost half of the late declarations came from 3 donors – Baron Waheed Ali (£100,000), Martin Taylor (£95,000), Trevor Chinn (£50,000) – who vehemently opposed Corbyn and the politics he represented.
All three donations from Messrs Ali, Taylor and Chinn were made in February 2020 but only ‘accepted’ by Starmer’s campaign in March. The donations from Ali & Chinn were accepted after 16 March. The donation from Taylor was accepted on 9 March but not registered with Parliament until 31 March. There was limited criticism of Starmer’s failure to publish donations contemporaneously (from Jon Trickett of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs) and uncomfortable questions on the matter by the broadcaster Andrew Neil. But once again there was no sustained scrutiny from the supporters of Long Bailey & Nandy when it would have been reasonable to do so.
Holden also alludes to Starmer’s time as Director of Public Prosecutions (2008 to 2013) focusing on three issues that would have cast him in a bad light with Labour’s left-leaning membership – the establishment of ‘night courts’ after the London riots of 2011; the Gary McKinnon extradition case[1]; and his approach to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks[2]. He notes that these matters were extensively reported by the Guardian when Starmer was DPP but were ignored in 2020 when Starmer was running for Leader. Given that these matters were already in the public domain, it is reasonable to ask why there was no meaningful Left-wing challenge to Starmer and his own projection of himself as a Human Rights lawyer/champion.
The final set of thoughts are linked to the decline in Party membership. Holden details the downward trend in Labour membership during the 2019-2024 Parliamentary term. During that period Party membership declined by almost a third:
- December 2019: 532,000
- December 2020: 523,000
- December 2021: 432,000
- May 2023: 396,000
- March 2024: 367,000
This pattern of declining membership has persisted to the point that membership in 2025 was reportedly around 250,000 less than half of the membership in 2020.
Holden correctly identifies that over half of the 165,000 decline in membership occurred in the 12 months after December 2020, when Corbyn’s ‘de facto’ suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party was upheld. He quite rightly points out that had all the departing members formed their own party, they would have challenged the Conservatives for the title of Britain’s second largest party.
This is a point that is not further developed or discussed as it is beyond the remit of the book. But I believe there were 2 different options for the Labour Left that were missed – Strategic Pre-Emption or Strategic Patience. Neither of them would have been straightforward or easy, but they are preferable to the current situation of British Politics.
Strategic Pre-Emption would have been the earlier creation of Your Party or something analogous to it. They would probably have encountered the same issues that Your Party experienced during its establishment, but they would have had a longer period to stabilise and be better placed to challenge the Greens as the voice of progressive Liberalism.
Strategic Patience would have involved remaining in the Labour Party. A difficult decision given the degree of control McSweeney and Labour Together exercised from 2021 onwards and difficult given Starmer’s response on Palestine after 7 October. On the other hand consider the more recent U-turns that have been forced on the Starmer Government with a relatively weakened and smaller Left compared to 2020. A party with more than 100,000 additional left-wing members would result in more leverage for the Left.
I don’t have a settled view on which option is preferable, but in line with Joe Hill’s farewell advice, it is better to organise than to mourn.
David Jackson
[1] Gary McKinnon was an autistic IT expert who hacked into US military databases looking for information about UFOs. The US Government sought his extradition with the possibility of a 70- year sentence in a high security prison. Starmer facilitated the extradition process which was only halted when Theresa May used her authority as Conservative Home Secretary to block the extradition (much to Starmer’s reported chagrin).
[2] This centred around a conflict between the Swedish authorities and the Starmer’s CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) over how to question Assange over sexual assault allegations against him. Assange wished to be interviewed by the Swedish authorities in London to which the Swedish authorities were agreeable, but the CPS and Starmer blocked any such interview in London and then lobbied the Swedes not to drop the case against Assange.
Labour Affairs 