Millionaire who funded anti-Canary smear campaign advised Labour on arms sales to Israel

Declassified UK has revealed that “pro-Israel lobbyist” Trevor Chinn had a cosy meeting with Keir Starmer’s government a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This is the same millionaire that worked with think tank Labour Together to smear the Canary, and the left in general, during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as Labour leader. And it’s the same millionaire who has donated around £200,000 to Starmer and his cronies in recent years.

“An extreme form of corruption” from Trevor Chinn

Declassified and former Canary writer John McEvoy explained that Trevor Chinn’s discussion with Foreign Office political director Christian Turner and others in October 2024 “concentrated on Britain’s arms exports to Israel”. He added:

Chinn even offered “recommendations” on the issue, with Turner enquiring whether other British diplomats might also try “reaching out” to him and “hearing” his views.

And he said:

The department is refusing to release any more details about the meeting. It said to do so would prejudice “the effective conduct of our bilateral relationship with Israel”

Author and activist Andrew Feinstein, meanwhile, responded to the revelation by calling the meeting an example of:

State Capture, an extreme form of corruption where the highest offices of State are bought by private interests, & the policy agenda is determined by those private interests.

“Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us”

In 2024, journalist Anushka Asthana revealed that Starmer’s current chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, with the support of “Trevor Chinn and hedge fund owner Martin Taylor”, took over Labour Together in 2017 intending “to defeat Corbynism” by using “soft branding that made them seem warm and cuddly”. She added that:

One of McSweeney’s obsessions was the Canary

As she explained:

Corbyn supporters trusted the site equally to the Guardian… 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.

That’s why they organised a smear campaign to try and torpedo the finances of the Canary and other independent left-wing outlets. This effort didn’t ‘destroy’ us, but it did hit our advertising revenue hard and unfairly tarnish our reputation. If our mission to democratise the media with grassroots, campaigning journalism faced an uphill struggle already, this attack made it even tougher.

At the same time, the smear campaign against Corbyn’s leadership did just enough damage, along with the disastrous second-referendum policy, to derail his election chances in 2019 and subsequently weasel Keir Starmer into power (with the help of a secret £50,000 donation from Chinn).

Needless to say, the smears against the Canary were bullshit. An independent investigation by government-approved media regulator IMPRESS, for example, found that nothing the Canary published was antisemitic. But the financial and reputational damage of Labour Together’s malicious assault remained.

This is what we’re up against

Thugs like Trevor Chinn and McSweeney have power in Labour today. And that’s why the party is rotting into irrelevance.

These are men who are happy for the government to take billions of pounds from disabled people and give them to wealthy sadists profiting from death and destruction. They’ve helped turn Labour into “the party of the private healthcare sector” via “millions in donations from companies and individuals linked to the private interests carving up the NHS for profit”. And they’ve shrugged off ongoing British participation in genocide.

They and their allies continue to use underhand tactics to attack the left. And they won’t stop. But with unity, we can resist that and fight back. We can work in and with our communities to build people power from the bottom up, get active in the growing mass movement of the left and, yes, share and support the work of independent media. That’s how we can – and will – defeat the corrupt, ego-centric scoundrels currently ruining this country.

Featured image via the Canary