In the ninth installment of the Canary’s exclusive serialisation of Paul Holden’s book The Fraud, Morgan McSweeney colludes with Gabriel Pogrund at the Times – and it starts a chain of events that will lead to Corbyn’s downfall. This is the second part of Chapter Three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reed targets local independent media holding the Labour right to account

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

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

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

Lawbreakers and factional spin-doctors spearheading the charge against misinformation

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

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

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

CCDH’s conflicting origin stories

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

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

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

CCDH targeting Elon Musk’s Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who funds CCDH?

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

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

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

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

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

The astroturf campaign

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

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

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

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

Featured image via the Canary

By Paul Holden

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