Story by Paul Holden After Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur were banned from entering the UK earlier this week, reportedly because of their criticism of Israel, Piker commented that he “would never have imagined that a [Labour] government would ban me from entering the UK.” Indeed, millions of UK voters would likely agree. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is not really a Labour government; it came to power on the back of a secret project to wrest control of the Labour Party back from an ascendant left wing. This secret project was resourced by illegally undeclared money from wealthy donors, funneled through a seemingly anodyne think tank called Labour Together. It involved covertly seeding promiscuous claims of antisemitism against political opponents, attempting to silence independent media that threatened to expose its project, and—ultimately—developing the dishonest leadership pitch that allowed Keir Starmer to trick a left-wing membership to elect him leader. Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary responsible for the ban on Piker and Uygur, was one of a ‘brave band’ of eight MPs that guided the Labour Together project during the leadership of Starmer’s left-wing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The MP who has most loudly demanded Piker and Uygur’s banning is David Taylor. Elected in 2024 as part of the Labour’s landslide, Taylor was closely vetted and approved by a Labour Party bureaucracy reporting directly to Labour Together’s long-time former managing director. And the single largest donor to Taylor’s election campaign was Labour Together. Piker and Uygur were not banned by the Labour Party—they were banned by the Labour Together party. The primary architect of the Labour Together project is Morgan McSweeney, who was, until recently, Starmer’s chief of staff and widely understood as the real force running the government. McSweeney resigned in February after it was revealed he had pushed Peter Mandelsohn as the UK’s ambassador to the U.S., despite knowing of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. I know McSweeney’s capacity for destroying free speech—and especially criticism of Israel—first-hand. I have been investigating the Labour Together Project since 2021, setting out my findings in my book, “The Fraud.” As a result, I was one of multiple journalists targeted by Labour Together. I was reported by Labour Together to the UK’s cybersecurity agency, in an apparent attempt to catalyze criminal investigations into me and my colleagues. I was forced to fend off repeated allegations, briefed to the media by Labour Together, that I was under investigation by the UK’s security services on the basis of ludicrous suggestions that my colleagues and I at the small anti-corruption non-profit Shadow World Investigations were patsies of Russia. The allegations are totally false, and obviously so, not least because we have faced legal and extra-legal threats for reporting on the corruption of Russian oligarchs. In 2026, the Guardian confirmed that, despite Labour Together’s best efforts, the UK’s security services declined to open an investigation into me based on tawdry and fabricated conspiracy theories. I am still trying to find out exactly how far these damaging smears travelled. According to a senior investigative reporter at The Times, copies of a highly defamatory and genuinely insane report about me, my family, and colleagues was “disseminated widely in Westminster and Fleet Street.” Did this stop or chill mainstream reporting of my book? I’m still trying to find out.. But in a media environment already hostile to left-wing journalists, I doubt it helped. When we launched Drop Site, we made a promise: expose the crimes of the powerful and hold them accountable, no matter the consequences. We knew we’d be targeted for it. We also knew reader support would be the only thing keeping us alive. While legacy outlets stay silent or run interference, we keep publishing the facts they don’t want told and amplifying the voices they want silenced. And we’re paying the price. Israeli officials attack us by name. Governments ban our work. The most fanatical loyalists are now calling for Drop Site’s prosecution simply because we report the facts. This is what it looks like when powerful interests try to erode free speech and due process. Corporate-backed outlets get showered with cash. An independent American news organization exposing genocide, abuse of power, and corruption gets systematically targeted for destruction. As the attacks intensify, your support is what makes us impossible to silence. Can you make a tax-deductible donation today to show them we’re not backing down? Labour Together’s War on British Democracy and Free SpeechLabour Together was founded in September 2015 in response to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s most left-wing leader in decades. Corbyn was embedded within the anti-war and anti-imperialist movements that had emerged in response to the invasion of Iraq, and had a long history of vocal support for the Palestinian cause. At first, Labour Together’s motivations were non-conspiratorial. Its founders, most prominently a well-respected MP named Jon Cruddas, believed that Labour Together could find a way to stop the party’s right-wing defecting in protest at Corbyn’s election. But Labour Together was fundamentally transformed in July 2017. The previous month, Corbyn had led the Party to win over 40% of the popular vote in a general election. Although it was not enough for him to form a government, it secured his position as leader for the foreseeable future. It was at that point its board of directors tapped Morgan McSweeney as managing director and company secretary at Labour Together. McSweeney, a product of the Labour Party’s most reactionary right-wing, was implacably opposed to the progressive anti-imperialist politics of Corbynism, which he “despised” and believed to be “evil.” McSweeney soon distributed an internal strategy document in which he set out a two-phased plan. First, Labour Together would work to undermine Corbyn’s leadership. Second, Labour Together would choose and groom a successor who would cleanse the party of the “hard left” Corbynites. McSweeney and his allies would eventually alight on Sir Keir Starmer to perform this role. The Labour Together Project, of course, would fail if their true motives were uncovered. To prevent discovery, Labour Together would adopt a public façade of inter-party unity, promising a kumbaya project of dialogue and understanding that was a world away from its true, hyper-factional intentions. McSweeney called this defensive maneuver Operation Red Shield. The money came easily. McSweeney’s appointment heralded an influx of donations totaling over £800,000 between 2017 and 2020. Most of the money came from two sources. The first was Martin Taylor, a wealthy hedge-fund manager with investments in U.S. private healthcare and longtime donor to the right-wing and centrist wings of the Labour Party. The second was Sir Trevor Chinn, who also served as a board member for Labour Together. Chinn is a long-time Israel lobbyist: “I spent my entire life working for Israel,” Chinn told a gathering in 2013. He is a prominent member of Labour Friends of Israel, a group pressuring Labour MPs to defend Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and criticized moves towards recognizing Palestinian statehood. In 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor by Isaac Herzog for services to Israel. Chinn would remain on the Board of Labour Together until late 2024, including during the period in which the organization was funding the election campaigns of over a hundred hand-picked Labour MPs. Between August 2017 and June 2024, Chinn donated £406,500 to Labour Together, in addition to donating over £622,000 to various Labour MPs between 2010 and 2026. This included a donation of £50,000 to Starmer in 2020 to support his bid to become party leader. The scale of donations received by Labour Together between 2017 and 2020 would normally have attracted scrutiny. But between early February 2018 and April 2020, McSweeney failed to report over £600,000 to the Electoral Commission, as required by law. Consequently, no one knew that Labour Together—then a low-key think tank—was being funded with huge sums from right-wing and pro-Israel donors. Labour Together was found guilty of the offense, which it called an “administrative oversight,” by the Electoral Commission in 2021 and was made to pay a minimal £14,250 fine. In 2021, I was leaked a substantial cache of documents by Labour Party whistleblowers concerned about widespread misconduct in the Party. Buried in this huge tranche of materials were a handful of damning documents about Labour Together, its secret projects, and its failure to report donations. I supplemented these documents with Freedom of Information requests and source work. By 2023, I was convinced that the “administrative oversight” story did not add up, and took the story to the Sunday Times. The documents I gathered clearly undermined the narrative that it was all an administrative mix-up. For example, they show, beyond doubt, that McSweeney was repeatedly instructed by the Electoral Commission to report donations in late 2017 and early 2018, after he had attempted to argue that the organization was exempt. The leaked documents also raise questions about whether Labour Together was candid with the Electoral Commission when they were investigated. The Slush Fund and the War on Free SpeechWith his undeclared “slush fund”, McSweeney set about waging war on free speech. In this endeavour, he had a notable ally. Imran Ahmed, a one-time Labour Party spin doctor who disdained the Corbynite left, worked with McSweeney in a covert war on the left, culminating in the creation of an organisation called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and its precursor campaign, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Ahmed and McSweeney helped to inflame Labour’s “antisemitism crisis,” working with mainstream outlets hostile to Corbynism to create the impression that Corbyn’s Labour Party was riddled with antisemitism and that this flowed inexorably from a left-wing, anti-imperialist, and pro-Palestinian politics. At no stage were Ahmed and McSweeney’s role declared, only coming to light many years later. In a highly effective pincer movement, SFFN and CCDH were then used to silence independent and left-leaning outlets who were fact-checking and debunking the stories Ahmed and McSweeney were placing in the media, rewriting justified skepticism as antisemitic “denialism.” In April 2018, for example, the Sunday Times published a lurid front-page story on “Corbyn’s hate factory,” supported with multiple inside pages of alarmist filler. Corbyn’s so-called hate factory was revealed to be twenty popular pro-Corbyn Facebook groups. The Sunday Times claimed it had been given a dossier of over two thousand incidents of “hate” that had been found in the groups, including bullying, misogyny, homophobia and antisemitic comments. The dossier was provided by two unnamed whistleblowers—revealed to be Ahmed and McSweeney only in 2025. But the article’s key claims didn’t withstand much scrutiny. The groups in question were mostly open to the public and hosted hundreds of thousands of members. One moderator of multiple Corbyn-supporting groups calculated that at least four million posts had been made across the twenty or so groups targeted by the Sunday Times during the period of investigation. The two thousand posts that had been religiously scoured were a minute drop in the ocean and did not reflect the overall tone or content of the groups, she argued. The second vector of attack, closely related to the first, was to launch a vicious campaign against left-wing and independent media outlets. These outlets, which supported Corbyn, were seen by McSweeney as vital to Corbynism’s popularity with the Labour membership. The particular focus of McSweeney’s attention was an independent left-wing outlet called The Canary, which had exploded in readership and popularity after Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party. As I have reported previously, McSweeney and Ahmed set about destroying The Canary via a campaign called Stop Funding Fake News. SFFN, launched in March 2019, was an archetypal astroturf campaign and presented itself as a group of concerned grassroots activists working on a shoe-string budget who couldn’t be identified for fear of reprisals. Truthfully, SFFNwas launched by Ahmed with McSweeney, who later described it as a “precursor” to CCDH. Leaked documents strongly suggest that it was also created with the support of Labour Together, which provided resources to help incubate the project. The SFFN campaign was brutally successful. With the backing and support of the UK celebrity Rachel Riley and amplified by a network of pre-existing Twitter campaigners called Labour Against Antisemitism, SFFN pressured advertisers to withdraw ads from The Canary on the basis that it was antisemitic. This allegation would later be comprehensively debunked by Impress, the independent media regulator with whom The Canary was registered. Nevertheless, SFFN’s campaign slashed The Canary’s revenue and, perhaps most importantly, toxified its brand. Soon, left-wing Labour MPs were pressed by mainstream media outlets if they uttered any word of defense of The Canary, shared its content or agreed to be interviewed. The Canary’s questions about the campaign to label Corbyn as antisemitic were successfully neutralized. Read more: Keir Starmer Machine Ran a Secret Campaign to Demonetize Breitbart News and Other Opposition Outlets Some of the same groups that were involved in The Canary’s takedown also advocated for the entry ban for Piker and Uygur. One of the documents I was leaked was a briefing written by the aide of a prominent Labour Together MP who now serves in Starmer’s cabinet. The note claimed that Labour Together had sought input from pro-Israel Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and the Community Security Trust (the UK’s version of the Anti-Defamation League) in setting up the SFFN campaign and CCDH. Neither organization replied to my request for comment at the time. Both the JLC and CST were quoted two weeks ago pushing for the UK to ban Hasan Piker from entering the UK. “Hasan Piker should not be allowed to enter the UK to spread his 7 October denialism and apparent support for terrorist organizations to a British audience,” the JLC told the Jewish News. “This is not conducive to the public good and the government should ban him.” The current and historical links between these groups and Labour Together are extensive. Trevor Chinn, the longtime Labour Together board member and funder, has served as vice president of the JLC since 2016. Another vice president of the JLC is Lord Jonathan Kestenbaum, who served on the board of Labour Together between May 2023 and May 2026. Kestenbaum’s stint as an IDF soldier in the late 1980s was only recently excavated by the journalist Jody McIntyre. Dave Rich, a director of policy at CST and a fierce critic of Corbyn, has served on the board of CCDH since 2022. The success of the SFFN campaign against The Canary encouraged Ahmed to expand its scope. Soon, it was also targeting U.S. outlets, including Breitbart and Zero Hedge. The latter was subjected to a SFFN campaign to pressure Google to remove it from Google’s ad-delivery platform on the basis that it was spreading Covid-19 conspiracy theories, supported by a number of Labour MPs. Zero Hedge’s offense was to run an article questioning whether Covid-19 emerged from a lab-leak in Wuhan. In April 2020, Keir Starmer was elected Labour leader, making McSweeney his chief of staff. McSweeney stood down as director of CCDH, and Ahmed relocated to the U.S. In the U.S., CCDH became closely allied with the Biden administration. Its report on Covid and the anti-vax movement, the ‘Disinformation Dozen’, was given prominent airtime in the U.S. media and cited by the Biden White House. It also partnered with the Anti-Defamation League in the US in 2023. In the wake of October 7, Ahmed frequently appeared as an expert on misinformation in the U.S. media, warning people to get their news about Israel’s assault on Gaza from mainstream news outlets and not the social media platforms that were showing unfiltered evidence of Israeli atrocities. “Social media should not be trusted for information—full stop,” Ahmed told The New York Times, which made the warning its “quote of the day” on October 15, 2023. Two years later, The Grayzone reported on emails leaked by a CCDH insider, showing that “top officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. helped introduce Ahmed to potential funders, and were even invited to review a CCDH report before publication.” The report, published in mid-2024, urged Meta to remove several pro-Palestine groups on the basis that they were host to antisemitism. The Labour Party Is Dead, Long-Live the Labour Together PartyThe resounding defeat of the Labour Party in the 2019 general election set the stage for the next phase of the Labour Together project: installing a candidate as Corbyn’s successor. The Labour Together project immediately swung in behind Starmer as their choice for future leadership contender, with McSweeney joining Starmer’s informal leadership working group in July 2019. McSweeney used extensive and expensive polling of the Labour membership, paid for with his slush fund, to minutely plan Starmer’s campaign messaging and policy platform. McSweeney served as Starmer’s campaign chief between January and April 2020, during which time he still served as a director of CCDH and Labour Together. The former was busily attacking The Canary via its still-unmasked SFFN campaign, which warned Labour members not to vote for Stamer; the latter was still taking in large donations that McSweeney was unlawfully failing to declare. For the life of the campaign, Starmer also declined to identify who was funding him. It was only after he was elected that Starmer disclosed that he had received combined donations of over £100,000 from Labour Together’s key donors, Chinn and Taylor. Though McSweeney remained company secretary during the campaign, Labour Together claimed that it was not backing Starmer, or any other candidate. Indeed, Shabana Mahmood—now the Home Secretary responsible for blocking Piker and Uygur—penned a letter to the Labour membership promising this was the case. Only later did Labour Together brag about its role in making Starmer leader, seemingly oblivious to the idea that people would find it offensive to be misled so thoroughly. “We backed @Keir_Starmer & helped him win the leadership. Now we’re the think tank that helps Labour win,” Labour Together confirmed in a self-congratulatory thread on X in 2023. Starmer’s campaign, written and choreographed by McSweeney, presented him as a radical eco-socialist and inheritor of the Corbynite tradition. Starmer promised an ethical foreign policy, to nationalise key industries, increase taxes on the rich, prioritize climate change and seek to unite the Party’s warring factions. Every aspect of this pitch was unceremoniously dumped upon his election. The left-wing commentator and journalist Owen Jones has called it the “‘biggest political con in recent British political history.” Unsurprisingly given Labour Together’s past, antisemitism became a dominant theme in the Labour Party’s remaking under McSweeney’s watch. Despite rhetorical flourishes claiming that the Party tolerated criticism of Israel, large numbers of Labour Party members were disciplined for criticising Israel in terms unacceptable to the leadership, like calling Israel an apartheid state or promoting BDS. Any dissent over the nature of the “antisemitism crisis” became sufficient for a member to be purged. Jeremy Corbyn was kicked out of the Party, his slow-motion defenestration catalyzed when he publicly commented that the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party had sometimes been exaggerated by political actors: an undeniable truth, in light of what we now know about the Labour Together Project. McSweeney’s allies, placed throughout the Labour Party, then systematically blocked or purged left-wing members from being selected as candidates for local government or as MPs.
The Re-Emergence of Labour Together and the Second Offensive Against JournalismLabour Together went into semi-dormancy after McSweeney left the organisation to run Starmer’s Labour Party in April 2020. In April 2023, with the Labour Party ascendant again, Labour Together relaunched as the “provisional wing of Starmerism” and a de facto policymaker of the incoming government. It was also used as a vehicle through which funds from millionaire donors would be directed into supporting the incoming Labour administration, paying for staff in the offices of multiple shadow Cabinet Ministers and directly funding the election campaigns of over a hundred incoming Labour MPs. Overseeing this operation was Josh Simons, then aged just 29. Simons had a brief and undistinguished career under Corbyn. He resigned from the Labour Party in 2016 after less than a year, publicly insinuating that he was convinced that “the way Corbyn and those around him think about Jewish people is shaped by a frenetic anti-imperialism, focused on Israel and America.” It was in the context of Labour’s imminent victory and Labour Together’s renewed ascendancy that I approached the UK’s Sunday Times with documents relating to Morgan McSweeney’s failure to report donations. This formed the basis of a front-page story, published in November 2023. The article concluded with a brief paragraph noting that I planned to publish a book about Starmer, McSweeney, and Labour Together. A few days later, I published an article with Matt Taibbi, pitched as the first of a multi-part series about the role of Labour Together and McSweeney in creating SFFN and CCDH. Within days of the Sunday Times story, Labour Together appointed the reputation management firm APCO Worldwide to get on top of what threatened to break as a scandal. Dogged investigative reporting by the journalists Peter Geoghehan and Khadija Shariffe, who recently won the coveted Paul Foot award, alongside more recent disclosures made to me by Labour Together, have revealed exactly what that meant. According to a November 2023 contract signed by APCO and Labour Together, APCO was tasked with investigating “the sourcing, funding and origins of a Sunday Times article about Labour Together, as well as upcoming works by authors Paul Holden and Matt Taibbi—to establish who and what are behind the coordinated attacks on Labour Together.” APCO’s investigation would produce “a body of evidence that could be packaged up for use in the media in order to create narratives that would proactively undermine any future attacks on Labour Together.”
APCO promised to use a range of highly invasive investigative techniques in pursuing this investigation, including “human intelligence investigations,” “financial investigations,” and “stakeholder outreach.” APCO would be paid £30,000 by Labour Together for the work. The investigation would be led by a former Sunday Times journalist named Tom Harper (who, somewhat awkwardly, was the husband of the Sunday Times’s erstwhile political editor, Caroline Wheeler). Internal APCO documents show that its investigation soon broadened to include anyone who had written about Labour Together or CCDH. In an internal document, given the codename Grimsby Town, an appendix listed several “persons of interest” to their investigation, including the U.S. journalist Paul Thacker (who would subsequently publish a series of stories about CCDH with Taibbi) and UK journalists now working at the Sunday Times and Guardian. The result of APCO’s investigation was a report given the codename Project Cannon. I have only recently seen a full and unredacted copy of this report, which is astonishing and upsetting in equal measure. The report alleged—entirely falsely—that I was part of a pro-Kremlin network of journalists and speculated that I had received documents hacked from the Electoral Commission by Russia. This was entirely untrue. My investigations were based on legal leaks by Labour Party whistleblowers, Freedom of Information requests, and open-source digging. The report shows that APCO “traced” my home address and identified that I lived with my partner Jessica, the daughter of Andrew Murray, a lobby journalist and a one-time advisor to Corbyn. Jessica, a fiercely private person, was my de facto investigative partner on “The Fraud,” discovering and tracing key leads. She ultimately decided not to put her name to the work for fear of reprisals after we became dimly aware that Labour Together had been fishing around our family. APCO’s investigation also targeted the small non-profit, Shadow World Investigations, that I launched with colleague Andrew Feinstein in 2018. Taibbi and the Sunday Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund, who had published the 2023 story about McSweeney’s undeclared donations, were also given the Russia-gate treatment. In late January 2024, armed with this report, Labour Together and Josh Simons reported me and my colleagues to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the UK’s version of the National Security Agency. Labour Together and Simons urged the NCSC to open an investigation into us alleging that we might have received documents hacked by Russia. Documents show that Harper and APCO helped coach Labour Together on how to lay what he called a “crime complaint” to the NCSC. The emails, never before published and reproduced here for the first time, were sent with the subject line “Criminal complaint.”
When the APCO and Labour Together scandal finally broke into the mainstream media in February 2026, prompted by new leaks about the scale of APCO’s investigation, it was spun as the rogue project of Josh Simons. But only two weeks ago, Labour Together’s new leadership, who have renamed the think-tank as ThinkLabour and criticized the APCO investigation as “indefensible,” released new documents to me that I was entitled to under the UK’s data protection laws. The new documents show that the highest levels of the Labour Party were aware of APCO’s investigation into me. “Tom Harper (on copy) will be delivering his report on Paul Holden on Monday,” Simons wrote to McSweeney and the Labour Party’s senior communications officer, Paul Ovenden, in 2024. “Could we find a time for Tom, Morgan, Paul and me to Zoom or meet in HQ sometime next week?” It is still hard for me to process that some of the most powerful people in British politics were discussing reports sharing my home address. In a remarkable twist of fate, eighteen months later, Ovenden would resign as the Chief of Strategy for Starmer (and McSweeney’s de facto number two) in September 2025—after my book revealed historic Labour Party internal messages showing Ovenden sharing offensive jokes about Diane Abbott, the country’s first black female MP. The newly disclosed documents—reproduced here for the first time—show that Simons and Labour Together met with the NCSC in a video call to make their case that I and my colleagues deserved to be investigated by the UK’s security forces. Minutes of the meeting taken by Labour Together show that Simons told the NCSC that I and my colleague Andrew Feinstein “have tried to manufacture that antisemitism was manufactured in Labour.”
In other words, in a meeting where Simons was trying to convince UK security service officials that I should be investigated, my skeptical view of the “antisemitism crisis” that had been secretly inflamed by Labour Together itself was specifically cited as the grounds for suspicion. Simons, was forced to resign after the APCO scandal broke into the open. In an ugly resignation letter sent to Starmer and published on the government’s official portal, Simons explained that he believed his decision to employ APCO was justified because he feared my investigation would “push” narratives that “downplay[ed]” the issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party. “I was particularly concerned about the upcoming publication of a book by Paul Holden, who had obtained this confidential material,” Simons wrote to the prime minister in a letter that soon landed on the desk of every newspaper in the country. “I believe those concerns were justified. The book diminishes the antisemitism that infected Labour under its previous leadership.” Simons also criticized my colleague Andrew Feinstein for speaking at an event called “How Jeremy Corbyn was destroyed by a smear campaign led by Israel.” Simons piously explained to Starmer that “the Labour Party must always be vigilant against denialism and as a Jewish Labour MP, I make no apologies for that vigilance.” The implication that Andrew engaged in antisemitic denialism is absurd. In addition to running against Sir Keir Starmer in the 2024 General Election to protest the Labour Party’s stance on Gaza, Andrew is the son of a Holocaust survivor, has lectured at Auschwitz on genocide prevention, and was the first person to move a motion in South Africa’s Parliament noting the horrors of the Holocaust. Andrew, like many left-wing Jews, was placed under investigation by the Labour Party for alleged antisemitism in 2021. Andrew threatened to bring legal action against the Party, and the case was finally dismissed years later. The Labour Together GovernmentIn July 2024, Starmer’s Labour government swept to power with a massive majority, securing the election of 409 MPs (in a parliament of 650). Starmer’s cabinet was dominated by Labour Together alumni, and McSweeney was swiftly appointed his chief of staff. Seven years after McSweeney had hatched his secret plot to destroy Corbyn and recapture the Labour Party, Labour Together had taken over the British state. To the great surprise of much of the voting public, the Labour Party’s vaunted offer to change the status quo turned out to be little more than a chimera. Starmer’s government soon announced significant welfare cuts, including plans to gut state support for the disabled, while commitments on the environment were quietly watered down. But it was on civil liberties, and Israel, that Starmer’s Labour Together government has proved to be the most disturbing. Despite an early announcement that the UK would block certain arms exports to Israel, the UK remained deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as comprehensively detailed by the journalist Peter Oborne. At the same time, Starmer’s government introduced increasingly draconian measures to quell protest against Israel’s assaults on Gaza. In July 2025, the government proscribed the direct action group, Palestine Action, as a terrorist organization. Palestine Action has, for a number of years, regularly broken into UK production facilities run by Elbit, the Israeli arms company. The designation made it a terrorist offense for anyone to support Palestine Action. As of 2026, the police have arrested over 2,000 activists, including large numbers Jewish and elderly protestors, for holding up signs reading “I support Palestine Action.” In February 2026, in an embarrassing blow to the government, the High Court ruled that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful. Undeterred, Shabana Mahmood, responsible for banning Piker and Uygur, announced that as Home Secretary she would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. New legislation passed into law in April 2026, widely panned by civil liberties campaigners, now gives the police the right to ban or limit protest marches if they take place too frequently. The police can now claim that repeated marches—against Israel, in effect—cause “cumulative disruption.” The restriction on protest rights has repeatedly been justified on the basis that frequent pro-Palestinian marches in London have made London’s Jewish community feel unsafe, despite the marches featuring prominent blocs of Jewish protestors. In perhaps the most astonishing move, Starmer’s government has introduced plans to scrap jury trials for all but the most serious criminal offenses. If passed, the plans would overturn a nearly thousand-year convention that anyone charged with a criminal offense be judged by a jury of their peers. The plans have been introduced to widespread consternation in the legal community; many have noted that juries have, rather inconveniently for the government, repeatedly refused to convict environmental and pro-Palestinian direct action campaigners charged with criminal damage. Unsurprisingly, Starmer and his government are widely despised. Starmer is famously the least popular prime minister since the introduction of modern polling. Vast numbers of former Labour members and voters have abandoned the Party in disgust. In local elections held last month, the Labour Party lost nearly 1,500 local council seats. A “projected national share” analysis performed by the BBC showed that if voting patterns in the local elections were repeated in a General Election, Labour would receive just 17% of the country’s vote, almost exactly half what they received in the 2024 general election, 1% less than the Green Party, and 9% less than the far-right Reform Party. The Green Party, led by the eco-populist, Jewish leader Zack Polanski, has witnessed an influx of over a hundred thousand paying members. Polanski has been steadfast in calling out Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Green Party and achieved a series of remarkable victories in the local elections, effectively displacing the Labour Party in left-leaning urban constituencies that used to be a bedrock of Labour support. The Greens would likely have performed even better if had not been subject to a coordinated smear campaign ahead of the local elections that claimed that the Greens were—you guessed it—riddled with antisemitism. That campaign was largely pushed by Steve Reed, McSweeney’s longtime ally and Labour Together alum. In the days ahead of the election, the Labour Party published a vicious ‘dossier’ about Green Party candidates that was given credulous and alarmist coverage by the mainstream press. In lurid front-page stories, Green candidates were dubbed extremists—for, among other things, sharing an interview with Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein or welcoming the High Court’s decision to rule that the proscription of Palestine Action was unlawful. In this context, the ban on Piker and Uygur is not just unsurprising, it was practically inevitable. Indeed, the bans flow inexorably from the two persistent themes of the Labour Together story and Starmer’s rise to power: a punitive intolerance for robust speech on Israel, and outrageous attacks on independent, non-conformist journalists speaking truth to power. Piker and Uygur now join a long list of journalists and commentators, who have had their lives turned upside down by a political project careening into the dustbin of history. Become a Drop Site News Paid SubscriberA paid subscription gets you:✔️ 15% off Drop Site store ✔️ Access to our Discord, subscriber-only AMAs, chats, and invites to events, both virtual and IRL ✔️ Post comments and join the community ✔️ The knowledge you are supporting independent media making the lives of the powerful miserable You can also now find us on podcast platforms and on Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Telegram, and YouTube.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.