Imy

Cyber Journalist - Kashmir # Likes & Retweets are not endorcements #

[Imy @AikMirpuri]

Indian forces occupying Kashmiri towns & cities and not allowing anyone go out even for food. People are getting injured and many dying right now. Kashmiri people facing grave injustice since 1947 when they were promissed sovereignty but not been given sovereignty #Kashmir

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

Nick Robinson needs to deal with these powerful and well made points from Paul Holden

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

This a deeply disappointing, borderline irresponsible interview of Morgan McSweeney from @bbcnickrobinson. It looks like impunity in action. Has the media not learnt any lessons from Mandelson and of the need to properly scrutinise political actors?

It is the BBC's job to hold political actors to account, to pose them real questions, and to get them to put a proper version of events on the record.

That is all the more important for a figure like McSweeney, who has wielded extraordinary power and has led or participated in attacks on legitimate, factual journalism, but who has never spoken about his role in these scandals on the record.

The interview doesn't touch, once, on the rock-solid evidence of McSweeney's serious unlawful misconduct or the Labour Together/APCO scandal. This stuff is widely available and easy to verify.

Here is a reminder of what we know about McSweeney, about which he wasn't asked a single thing:

1. McSweeney was Company Secretary of Labour Together from July 2017 to April 2020. During this period he failed to report over £700,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission. This was plainly unlawful. LT was found guilty and fined for this offence, but said in public it was an 'administrative oversight.'

2. McSweeney failed to report donations after he had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Electoral Commission he didn't need to report them in late 2017.

3. McSweeney failed to report donations after the Electoral Commission told him, explicitly, that Labour Together had a legal duty to report donations.

4. McSweeney engaged in a two-month correspondence with the Electoral Commission in early 2018, in which it was clear he knew he had to report donations. Yet he failed to do so for over two years thereafter.

5. McSweeney failed to report donations even though he was telling MPs he was reporting donations, and even though Labour Together's website also stated that it was declaring donations to the Electoral Commission.

6. McSweeney failed to report donations even after Shabana Mahmood, on Labour Together's behalf, wrote an article for LabourList in February 2020 stating that Labour Together was reporting its donations. At the very time Mahmood wrote the donations, LT was taking in donations it was failing to declare.

7. McSweeney used this undeclared money, to fight an undeclared, covert war on the Labour Party leadership between 2017 and 2020. He also used it to pay for polling which was then fed into Starmer's leadership bid. Materials produced by McSweeney during his time at LT was fed, word-for-word, into Starmer's campaigning material. According to Rachel Wearmouth, McSweeney spent 'every spare moment' during the last six weeks of 2019 to prepare Starmer's leadership bid, during which time McSweeney was drawing a salary from LT.

8. When Labour Together was put under investigation by the Electoral Commission for McSweeney's failure to report donations, McSweeney was consulted by LT's lawyer Gerald Shamash. The email recording this consultation and its contents were published by the Tory Chairman Kevin Hollinrake and have been available in public for a year. The email raises serious questions about whether LT was candid in its responses to the Electoral Commission and, in particular, McSweeney's correspondence with the Commission in 2017/2018 that shows he was aware of the need to report donations. Early correspondence between LT and the Electoral Commission shows that, despite being asked to provide all information of relevance to the Commission's inquiries, LT failed to even mention McSweeney's name, let alone the phone call.

9. In early 2019 McSweeney launched an astroturf campaign called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) , with his friend and factional ally Imran Ahmed. It was supported by @SteveReedMP and operated out of the same office as Labour Together. SFFN purposefully set out to 'eviscerate' the economic viability of @TheCanaryUK and to destroy the livelihoods of its journalists, many of whom were long-time members of the National Union of Journalists.

At no stage in its first year operation did SFFN declare its controlling minds. Instead it presented itself as a 'grassroots' campaign of well-meaning activists.

McSweeney and Ahmed tried to take out proper journalism because they saw it as a threat to their political objectives. "Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us," is what McSweeney told Labour Together insiders according to Anushka Asthana.

SFFN made promiscuous allegations of antisemitism against The Canary - the antisemitism that McSweeney claims is what drove his factional war on the left - which were found to have no substance when reviewed by a panel of media lawyers and practitioners at media regulator Impress. SFFN repeatedly inferred that The Canary was antisemitic because it run articles quoting left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews disturbed by aspects of the "antisemitism crisis."

10. SFFN also targeted well-known US media sites, which led to McSweeney being directly called out by the US State Department. His colleague, Imran Ahmed, is now sanctioned by the US because the US accuses the company he and McSweeney set up, CCDH, of being part of a global censorship complex.

11. When I started reporting on McSweeney's undeclared money and his secret campaigns, including by taking damning primary documents to the Sunday Times, Labour Together appointed APCO Worldwide to produce a 'package' that would 'proactively undermine' my factually accurate, public interest reporting.

To be clear: APCO were hired to 'proactively undermine' my reporting on McSweeney and his role in Starmer's rise. The intention, as shown in internal docs, was to protect both Starmer and McSweeney's reputations ahead of an imminent general election, while I was trying to warn people about the true nature of this project and it's unlawful origins.

12. APCO produced an insane, ludicrous, highly defamatory report that accused me, my family and my colleagues of being part of a pro-Kremlin network of journalists and speculating that I received hacked documents from Russia. APCO also investigated @Gabriel_Pogrund, with whom I'd collaborated with on the Sunday Times story, making a series of offensive comments about him and his ethnicity. APCO identified a range of other journalists in the UK and US as "persons of interest" to be investigated.

This highly invasive, despicable investigation targeted my work colleagues and my family, including by finding my home address and mapping my personal relationships. Labour Together and its Managing Director, Josh Simons, reported me to the National Cyber Security Centre on the basis of this mad, insane report.

13. Less than a month ago, it was revealed that McSweeney and his buddy Paul Ovenden (later Chief of Strategy at Number 10, who would resign following revelations from my book) were copied into emails about the investigation. McSweeney plainly knew about APCO's investigation. Simons, in one mail, wrote to set up a meeting with McSweeney, Ovenden and APCO's Tom Harper in 'HQ' to discuss the 'Paul Holden report.'

Three days after this meeting I was reported to the NCSC, along with my colleagues and family members. Emails show Simons was coached in how to make a 'crime report' about me to the NCSC.

14. The APCO/Labour Together scandal was so ugly and so damning that Labour Together has been forced to change its name. It also led to the resignation of Josh Simons as a Junior Minister. The Speaker of the House has supported calls for a Parliamentary inquiry into Labour Together.

15. Josh Simons thereafter stepped aside as the MP for Makerfield in order to make way for Andy Burnham, the incoming PM who has displaced McSweeney's man, Starmer. There is a straight and clear line between attempts to protect McSweeney from scrutiny in 2024 and Starmer's resignation in 2026.

So, to make this clear: there was a massive scandal because plans were put in motion to stop questions being asked about McSweeney's unlawful failure to declare money... and now the public broadcaster is failing to ask McSweeney questions about the money. Has the media learnt nothing from the Mandelson scandal about what happens when you don't properly scrutinise political actors?

And here's some things McSweeney and Robinson did talk about, but which doesn't bear scrutiny:

1. Starmer didn't just take some suits and glasses as 'freebies' during the election campaign. He took over £100k in freebies between 2021 and 2024, more than every Labour leader since Tony Blair combined. In addition to free clothes, Starmer took football tickets, tickets to watch the horse racing, and free holiday accommodation for his family from a billionaire. One of his football freebies was donated by a company that had only just been forced to pay a £11m settlement because the installed faulty and potentially flammable cladding on tower blocks in Gosport. Taking these donations means that Starmer had conflicted himself on key areas of policy even before he was elected.

2. Both McSweeney and Robinson quickly collude in claiming that Sir Keir Starmer didn't say that Israel 'has that right' to shut off water, fuel, food and electricity to Gaza. But we've all seen the video, where what Starmer has said is utterly plain. Multiple Ministers went on air to defend the statement thereafter. Does the BBC really think that huge numbers of Muslim councillors immediately left the Party by mistake, because they can't understand plain English?

3. McSweeney has said that Labour Together was 'neutral' during the 2020 leadership election. But Labour Together, and its key associates, have said repeatedly since 2022/2023 that LT backed Starmer's leadership bid. You can find these comments on the Wayback Machine in about two minutes.

4. McSweeney says he never intended to rid the Party of Corbynism. There are now multiple accounts, including from the country's leading political editors and journalists, about how McSweeney crafted and distributed strategy documents, including a plan called 'Operation Red Shield' and a 2017 SWOT analysis, that set out plans to undermine Corbyn's leadership and install a new leader who would 'renew' the Party.

5. This is not the first time that McSweeney has spoken to the media. Instead, it is the first time he has let his comments be attributed to him in public. Multiple journalists have spoken about how he was the source of stories damaging to his opponents. While he was Chief of Staff at Number 10, he was meeting with the editors of the major UK newspapers more regularly than Number 10's own head of comms. We know this because transparency regulations means that these meetings are recorded and can easily found on the gov website. This man has shaped our media discourse, and our political epistemology, in profound and disturbing ways. It is utterly disingenuous to claim that this is the first time he's spoken to the media.

[Sky News @SkyNews]

Mr Farage was returning from Independence Day celebrations when Sky News asked him about claims relating to financial support received from a convicted criminal.

Farage accused Sky News of 'harassing' his family; Sky News has not contacted anyone from his family about the story.

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Israeli troops have just shot and killed a Palestinian child in Qalandiya refugee camp, near J’lem: more medieval cruelty from the killing regime

[Bob Vylan @BobbyVylan]

We are suing The BBC for defamation.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Today fossil fuel billionaires celebrate because it's the 1st July and once again - the energy price cap is going up.

It doesn't have to be this way. Join the movement to end Rip Off Britain.

https://t.co/0qbagSvIYp

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

This is the sound of an 18-month-old toddler crying because the Israeli army shot him.

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

In a series of attacks that are beginning to feel coordinated the BBC's Jeremy Bowen has been accused of prejudice against Israel. In this article for British Journalism Review Irfan Chowdhury and I investigate whether these accusations make sense:

https://t.co/25WGJdc6J9

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Keir Starmer lied through his teeth to become Labour leader.

He justified Israeli war crimes, arrested opponents of genocide, attacked pensioners, disabled people and migrants, pocketed freebies, crushed dissent and threw others under the bus to save himself.

History damns him

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

The most emotion Keir Starmer has shown is over losing his job, not enabling the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Good riddance.

His next stop should be The Hague.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Keir Starmer could have ended child poverty, homelessness and the grotesque levels of inequality in this country.

Instead, he abandoned those in need, destroyed our civil liberties and facilitated genocide in Gaza.

That is how this Prime Minister will be remembered - and that is the legacy of moral and political bankruptcy he leaves behind.

The crises in our society are not going away. Neither are we - and we will keep fighting for a more equal, peaceful and dignified society for all.

[liam cunningham @liamcunningham1]

Andy Burnham joined Labour friends of Israel in 2015.
Same shit, different day.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

We are being asked to accept that Keir Starmer was a principled politician who rescued Labour from oblivion before being destroyed by the media. Wrong. To understand why he fell Starmer only needs to look at the mirror. My column for Middle East Eye:

https://t.co/bVmvORJ0ia

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Like many Palestinian children in Gaza, Wateen has lost her hearing due to the blast impact of israeli explosions — there are 1000s more like her https://t.co/NA0Qd9xN6P

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

It's illegal to say

I support Palestine Action

and

I support Palestine Action with all my heart

with a jail sentence of up to 14 years, as I informed viewers

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Israel is disappearing Palestinians.

They are kidnapped by the Israeli army - and that's the last we know about them.

[The National @ScotNational]

Question Time has been called out for a 'dangerous' lack of balance on its panel – with Zack Polanski suggesting the BBC had allowed a billionaire to buy 'an entire episode' https://t.co/mNc7S4lBy4

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

So, I have a friend who works at the BBC.

Yesterday, they told me the Tony Blair Institute basically selected the entire panel for @bbcquestiontime — hence why there was no balance and it was essentially dangerous big tech propaganda. Loads of staff pissed off, but silenced.

[Rana Ayyub @RanaAyyub]

This is what an Emmy awards acceptance speech looks like. Kudos

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

1) No I'm not actually right wing

2) Bonnie Blue is a Reform supporter

3) No I don't think being left wing is depraved

4) I'm sorry for taking the piss on this app. I should have realised that's a fatal error and I will endeavour not to repeat to repeat this sin in future