Andy Collinson

Trying to make this world a better place little by little, opening minds to what is really happening out there...

[Andy Collinson @ACWobbles]

@medialens Are you aware of any specific studies on this aspect of human nature?

[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.

[Andy Collinson @ACWobbles]

@mancmark55 @BladeoftheS Says the guy literally doing the work for those plucky little oil and gas companies... Wakey wakey... There is a reason trump is binning satellite monitoring of CO2 and ocean temp buoys... All his buddies in big oil cos are celebrating and folks like you make it easier

[Andy Collinson @ACWobbles]

@medialens All the usual loons doing the work of the plucky little oil and gas industry. We are fucked it seems. They'll still be talking bollocks as 40 degrees becomes the norm, enjoying the new beach front property of inland Britain. Good luck!

[Andy Collinson @ACWobbles]

@zarahsultana How on earth has this descended to a public spat and division already? The perfect gift for the naysayers. We desperately need solidarity and some private discussions and agreements before this becomes a joke party prior to even fully launching.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Scrubbing the new Banksy mural from the Royal Courts of Justice is clearly insufficient.

Time to proscribe Banksy – and charge and jail anyone who retweets his mural under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

.@YvetteCooperMP Cooper’s two posts, one after the other, beautifully capture the hypocrisy at the heart of Western diplomacy, thanks to these two events occurring almost side by side.

Russia’s strikes = “egregious actions,” “recklessness,” solidarity pledged.

Israel’s strikes = “risk setting back negotiations,” “must be avoided.”

Two different languages, two different standards. The real world order for all to see.

[Andy Collinson @ACWobbles]

@yanisvaroufakis The article isn't there for me. All the others are.

[Mick Wallace @wallacemick]

It's a disgrace that Israel are still allowed to play International Football, Suleiman Al-Obeid is the 321st member of the Palestinian Football Association to be murdered by the Genocidal Israeli Regime. Shame on #UEFA ...

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

The Israeli Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, B'TSELEM, agonised long (too long in my view) and hard before coming up with this report and its crystal clear verdict: Israel is committing genocide. Nothing more needs to be said

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

I've written a deep dive into Labour's partnership with US Blackrock; corporate land grabbing, freeports, AI Growth Zones, and US Vassalism.
Please read, share, and, where possible, subscribe. I'm a volunteer uncovering the zonification of the UK.
https://t.co/scDKpeivFy

[Media Lens @medialens]

Please notice the difference: social media full of horrific footage of Palestinian children dead, decapitated, torn apart; scores of civilians killed by Israel every day. And the BBC... https://t.co/uwNMbHIrI5

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

This is what happened.

The AI thing was a psyop to make it appear that Hamas was, even loosely, the target.

Civilians have been the target from the beginning. It’s been genocide from the beginning.

[Howard Beckett @HowardRBeckett]

When Francesca Albanese tore into the members of the Security Council for turning up with the same script:

‘After 42,000 have been killed, have you no empathy for the Palestinian 🇵🇸 people’

A fearless advocate.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

The Guardian illustrate this typically braindead comment piece with a pic of Starmer at RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus, the international hub to support the Gaza genocide.

This is what "defence" budget is. It's a budget for imperial wars - and transfer of public funds to arms industry.

[Media Lens @medialens]

Hello again @JohnSimpsonNews,

We realise you're a busy man and may have missed this. 👇

Please tell us why you think @BBCNews has never reported on the #HannibalDirective, even after its use was confirmed by Yoav Gallant.

Here's our media alert:

https://t.co/Ucwv4QpH3g

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Hmm, maybe someone can help me.

How was Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine entirely 'unprovoked', when the British leader in charge at the time, Boris Johnson, now admits Nato viewed Ukraine as the battlefield for a 'proxy war' against Russia? 🤯

[Declassified UK @declassifiedUK]

🇷🇺 Kremlin-linked Russians will be barred from entering the UK, the government announces

🇮🇱 In other news - if a you're a senior Israeli military figure involved in war crimes in Palestine, you can enter Britain and be a given 'special immunity' to do so

https://t.co/v3NhQgISW5