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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.