Canary takes legal advice over Labour Together and Morgan McSweeney’s antisemitism smears

The Canary is consulting libel lawyers over think tank Labour Together and its offshoot Stop Funding Fake News’s 2018-19 campaign against it. Specifically, we are looking into whether the groups’ actions constitute defamation. Moreover, the main protagonist in both those groups is Keir Starmer’s senior policy advisor in Downing Street – and we’ll be coming for him, too.

As the Canary previously reported, the Guardian/Observer recently revealed that Labour Party PM Keir Starmer’s top Downing Street aide Morgan McSweeney plotted to ‘destroy the Canary‘ – before ‘we destroyed the Labour right’.

It shows not only how him and his closest cronies tried to kill us – but also how they brought about Jeremy Corbyn’s downfall. The intention all along? To install Starmer as Labour leader, and eventually PM.

Morgan McSweeney: creating fake antisemitism crises

You can read the Observer piece here. It is extracts from Taken as Red: How Labour Won Big and the Tories Crashed the Party by Anushka Asthana. In it, she describes how McSweeney – he of Liz Kendall failed leadership bid campaign fame – rose up the ranks in Labour. He got to the point where, after 2017’s near-election victory for Corbyn, McSweeney was determined to finish Corbyn off. So, he began rallying his troops.

The group (now known as supposed think tank Labour Together) included Trevor Chinn (executive committee member of pro-Israel lobbying group the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) and hedge fund manager Martin Taylor. Labour Together was born – and MPs on its side included Jon Cruddas and Steve Reed.

As Asthana wrote:

One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary, an alt-left website that had seemed to appear from nowhere and grown to a peak of 8.5m hits a month. Moreover, Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian, their other favourite source of information.

And so McSweeney had an aim – to schmooze the Guardian and kill the Canary.

“Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us,” he told the Labour Together MPs.

So, the antisemitism ‘crisis’ was created – but how did this impact the Canary?

Stop funding the Canary

As Asthana wrote:

As part of a “Stop funding fake news” campaign, they took screenshots of articles they felt had either racist or fake content, then posted messages on Twitter aimed at brands that were advertising on the websites’ pages. Unquestionably, the readership of the Canary took a hit.

That part is incorrect. It wasn’t our readership that took a hit. That had already happened due to (oddly) Facebook changing its algorithms to de-prioritise news and groups on people’s feeds. A coincidence? Maybe.

What McSweeney did hit was the Canary’s advertising revenue. However, at the time support for us surged and we had more financial supporters than ever before. Yet it wasn’t enough to stop a round of redundancies and a reduction in workers’ hours at the Canary.

What McSweeney also achieved was to tarnish the Canary’s reputation. Of course, he also achieved his ultimate goal of destroying Corbyn’s leadership and getting Keir Starmer into power. Now, McSweeney sits at the top of 10 Downing Street as head of political strategy.

It goes without saying none of our content was racist or fake. An independent investigation by government-approved media regulator IMPRESS found nothing the Canary published was antisemitic.

But mud sticks – as did the financial consequences of McSweeney, Labour Together, and Stop Funding Fake News’s malicious smear campaign against us.

Taking legal action for everyone who was smeared

John Ranson was previously an editor at the Canary, until the previous owners made him redundant after the Stop Funding Fake News campaign. He said:

We were used to being attacked, and we’d already seen a big drop in readership due to social media algorithm changes. But the Stop Funding Fake News tirade was just bizarre.

By this time we were well aware that our editorial standards were among the most rigorous in UK journalism. We were under a proper regulator in IMPRESS. We weren’t ‘fake news’; we were just news that McSweeney etc either didn’t like or couldn’t understand.

So yes, it felt personal and any threat to our ability to carry on was a worry. But it was also pathetic, laughable and sad to see how afraid some people were of Corbyn’s brand of common sense decency.

So, the Canary is looking into whether or not we have a civil case for defamation. Obviously, there has been a passage of time relating to this. However, it was only after the Guardian article that the main instigator, McSweeney, was positively identified. Before this, the Canary only had a hunch.

We will not stand by while the people who nearly destroyed us don’t face justice.

Moreover, we will not stand by while the same people also defamed and smeared countless innocent socialists with false antisemitism claims. McSweeney and his cronies targeted members of the public with these smears – often putting people under huge amounts of stress and distress.

Starmer’s Labour – filled with toxic individuals and careerists – are already targeting some of the most vulnerable people in the UK, while being complicit in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and now Lebanon.

Now the Canary knows that senior individuals in that government have potentially committed defamation – we will not stand idly by and do nothing.

Featured image via the Canary