Political activist and author Lindsey German endorsed Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.
In 2019, she wrote that there was little evidence for an epidemic of antisemitism within the Labour Party, with a “very small number of cases proved, and a small number of accusations made”. Such allegations were “political attacks – against Corbyn and his left wing politics, and against all those who criticised the state of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.
“The Fraud”, written by respected investigative reporter, Paul Holden, lifted the lid on the deceitful, secret campaign inside Labour to destroy Corbyn and install Starmer as it’s right-wing Labour leader.
Lindsey German’s review
It could hardly be a better week to review a book whose subtitle is Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy. I was reading the last chapter when the news broke that Downing Street advisers were briefing against Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who was allegedly planning to challenge Starmer for leader. The furore that followed demonstrated that the dysfunctionality of Starmer’s administration was on a par with the sheer chaos that has engulfed recent Tory governments.
Paul Holden’s detailed and extensive book is a very important primer for all of us who want to understand what is going on. His case is clear that there ‘is compelling evidence that the political project which propelled Keir Starmer to first party and then national leadership was authoritarian, deceptive, and open to corporate capture, and that it lacked a principled approach to the struggle against racism. As this book shows, the Starmer project has also repeatedly skirted the edges of the law. “This is the machine that now runs the UK”.
Holden identifies the two overlapping projects – what he calls the Labour Together Project and the Starmer Project – that were key to Starmer succeeding to the leadership and then to government. He also identifies the person at the centre of them, his adviser Morgan McSweeney, who is now under fire over the latest briefings. He and the people around him set up Labour Together, aimed at destroying Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the Labour left which had grown during those years. It was set up in autumn 2015 but was not effective until after the 2017 election.
McSweeney has gained the aura of a spectacular evil genius, but it’s much more likely that he will end up like other such characters in Downing Street (Dominic Cummings, anyone?) who thrive on political manoeuvring, swim comfortably in the pool of Westminster gossip and briefing, but who lack a political understanding of what is actually happening beyond their rarified world.
At root in understanding McSweeney’s motivation, we have to place his hatred of the left. Corbyn’s leadership win in 2015 (McSweeney’s political judgement can be demonstrated by the fact that he managed the campaign of Liz Kendall, who came last with 4.5% of the vote) struck terror into the hearts of Labour’s right. It tried everything to damage the highly popular leader, including the ‘chicken coup’ of summer 2016, when shadow cabinet ministers resigned sequentially, trying to force Corbyn out. There was the pathetic leadership challenge from Owen Smith. There was the constant gossip, innuendo and attack from the bulk of the mainstream media.
Corbyn’s success accelerated plotting.
None of this worked however. When Theresa May called the election in April 2017, no one predicted that it would end in a hung parliament, a Tory government only held together by a sordid deal with the Ulster Unionists and with Corbyn already in receipt of the biggest Labour vote in a general election for a long time.
As Paul Holden demonstrates, McSweeney had already been involved in ensuring that party money and resources were channelled to right-wing candidates and denied to constituencies where such resources might have turned narrow defeats into wins
Now, however, the forces of the right, even more terrified by Corbyn’s relative success in the election, turned towards strategically destroying his leadership. McSweeney took up employment with Labour Together the day after the election result. ‘It was then that McSweeney came on board and started working to undermine the Labour left’.
Money poured into the organisation, an estimated £849,429 between June 2017 and March 2020, especially from two sources, hedge-fund manager Martin Taylor and businessman Sir Trevor Chinn. This covered exactly the period from Corbyn’s near win to the culmination of Starmer’s campaign to be leader. The aim was to defeat Corbyn and to ensure that the left lost convincingly.
There were two main lines of attack against the left, both evident before 2017 but exacerbated in order to ensure the right would triumph. One was the clamour for a second referendum on Brexit, which helped Labour lose a swathe of ‘Red Wall’ seats in 2019.
The other was the campaign on antisemitism, which was weaponised against Corbyn.
Paul Holden examines this important topic thoroughly, demonstrating the role of Labour Together, its determination to use accusations of antisemitism to destroy the left, its close alignment with Zionist organisations and its targeting of the left, including those many Jewish people in Labour who identified with Corbyn. It transpired that many such activists were themselves accused of antisemitism because of their anti-Zionist views and the growing criticisms of Israel from the left. This led to the suspension and expulsion of Jewish activists (some in Jewish Voice for Labour) for alleged antisemitism, and of the black activist Marx Wadsworth on charges which were politically motivated on the part of their opponents.
The mud stuck and the accusations of antisemitism were used to deny Corbyn the parliamentary whip and eventually force him out of the party.
But that was after the 2019 defeat and Starmer’s successful campaign, orchestrated by guess who: McSweeney. As was clear to many of us at the time and as Holden documents very well, this was fraudulent. Starmer would never have won the leadership if he had even whispered the kinds of policies he stood on during the 2024 election.
In the aftermath of Corbyn’s defeat, there was still huge affection for him and, more importantly, respect for his policies. Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ were a recognition of that. His 2020 campaign video included ‘shots of Stop the War’s march against the 2003 Iraq war; grainy footage of historical trade union confrontations with the police; and, most notably, shots of Starmer standing with Diane Abbott or being embraced by Corbyn’.
None of this lasted past his election. Once anointed, he moved steadily and quite rapidly to the right, ditching his pledges, shadowing Tory policies and continuing his war against the left.
Corbyn’s defenestration in the wake of his perfectly reasonable and honest response to the EHRC report on antisemitism in Labour was one of the most shocking and dishonourable acts by Starmer. It demonstrated how far the Starmer Project and its architects were determined to go to eradicate the left.
Lurching to the right.
Research from Labour Together in 2023 highlighted how far the party was prepared to move right. In Red Shift, it discounted those it claimed would always vote Labour and argued it had to appeal to the ‘Patriotic Left’ and ‘Disillusioned Suburbans’. This meant adopting Faragist policies on issues such as crime and immigration.
As Holden remarks: ‘Having crushed the left and disempowered the membership, the Labour Together and Starmer projects were then free to lurch to the right on policy’.
Accompanying this is the scandalous treatment of a number of individuals: respected MPs like Beth Winter deselected from safe Labour seats, likely successful candidates such as Faiza Shaheen, bumped by a Zoom call because she was too left-wing. At the same time, a series of Labour Together figures and other allies of McSweeney were parachuted into seats without so much as a word to local party members. The worst example has to be that of Diane Abbott, who resisted being forced out of her Hackney seat but who has been treated really shabbily by the party leadership.
Holden tells us of the ‘Leaked Report’ and its allegations of racism and misogyny on the part of various staffers at Labour Party headquarters. Some of the worst examples were those aimed at Abbott. Yet when one of the examples of this from The Fraud was leaked to the press, and it led to the departure of Paul Ovenden, by now a Downing Street adviser, there was barely concealed sympathy for him from the media and anonymous colleagues.
This is a sorry tale of opportunism, deceit, dishonesty and at the very least political fraud. It reflects very badly on Starmer and McSweeney but not just on them. Many of the present cabinet members played a key role in Labour Together, including Wes Streeting, Steve Reid and Lisa Nandy. They have all presided over a brutal attack on the left, a sharply rightward-moving politics and a cosying up to big business and employers, which prevents any challenge to their power and influence.
Starmer, of course, won a big majority, but he is spectacularly unpopular and his policies disastrous. His course on Gaza led to some prominent Labour figures, including the unlamented Jonathan Ashworth, losing their seats to independents, and others seeing their huge majorities slashed (this is the case with Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, both tipped as future leaders but who may lose their seats at the next election).
So too may Starmer, if he gets that far. Left independent Andrew Feinstein took nearly 20% of the vote in 2024 while Starmer’s fell dramatically. Despite the triangulation of the right, Labour is losing votes to both left and right, with Reform in a strong position and the Greens and the nascent Your Party on the left.
Now this venal and incompetent government is heading for another fall, this time over the tax-raising budget they promised never to introduce. That’s because, despite the supposed genius of McSweeney and his mates in Downing Street, they have failed to see what nearly everyone in the country can see; that attacking pensioners, or the disabled, or children on benefits, is not popular. Nor is sucking up to billionaires and hedge-fund managers. Nor is supporting Israel’s genocide. Nor is alienating ethnic-minority voters, who don’t like being scapegoated.
Time for a change from the left. That will be a struggle and, in the process, will mean a fight against Starmer and all he stands for. Paul Holden’s book is well worth reading and covers a huge amount, impossible to deal with in one review. It gives us plenty of ammunition about why and how things have gone so badly wrong.
Building an alternative means breaking not just from this party and these individuals, but from the whole idea of Labourism, which delivers less and less under neoliberalism, and which scapegoats and marginalises those it is supposed to represent.
caltonjock 