So did McSweeney learn hiding pro-Israel donors from Starmer, or Starmer from McSweeney?

Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – a chief architect of the antisemitism scam against Jeremy Corbyn and attempts to destroy the Canary – is under pressure today after the Tories received a leaked email showing legal advice from McSweeney’s lawyer that shows Labour Together lied in its excuse for not declaring more than £700,000 in donations received when he was running it.

Labour Together: excuses, excuses

Labour Together claimed the non-declaration had been an administrative error, an excuse the Electoral Commission (EC) swallowed – and then imposed a minimal fine – but in reality, the excuse was a fiction, a ‘strategy’ for getting off the hook as far as possible:

This was done in order to ‘protect’ pro-Israel donor Trevor Chinn and keep the source of Labour Together’s funding hidden from then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Alongside the emails exposing the deception, a Freedom of Information request shows the EC making absolutely clear to McSweeney that all donations must be declared – and that a criminal offence has probably been committed, not just a rules breach:

But such sharp practices are not exclusive to Morgan McSweeney and LT. When running for the Labour leadership in late 2019 and early 2020, McSweeney’s boss Keir Starmer also hid several of his biggest donors – including the fiercely pro-Israel Chinn – no doubt because Labour members would not have been fooled for a second into believing Starmer’s thoroughly dishonest election pitch that he wanted to bring unity and build on Corbyn’s policies.

Starmer: squirming

An obviously evasive Starmer infamously squirmed when put under pressure by then-BBC interviewer Andrew Neil about his refusal to declare his donors in the same way that his leadership rivals had done:

Eventually – long after the result was in and it was too late for Labour members to change their votes – after his campaign of promising to promote party unity and maintain Jeremy Corbyn’s policies – Starmer was revealed to have accepted £455,000, the bulk of his spending, from anti-Corbyn and mostly pro-Israel donors.

Despite, or because of, Labour Together’s dishonesty it was appointed by Starmer’s Labour in 2021 to try to fight the success of independent candidates.

Not declaring donations from Chinn promptly appears to be habit-forming on the Labour right. In 2022 Rachel Reeves, now Chancellor, suffered her own ‘admin error’ in failing to declare a Chinn donation. Such connections – part of the huge funding given by the Israel lobby to the Labour right now in office – clearly seem connected, whether as cause or as effect, to the ongoing collaboration in Israel’s genocide of approaching 800,000 civilians in Gaza.

McSweeney: corrupt to the core

Given the timelines and the length of time Starmer and McSweeney have been intertwined, it’s not clear who is the apple and who is the tree – but one clearly didn’t fall very far from the other. Tragically their exposure has come too late to save the country from the ‘Austerity MKII’ of the red Tory team, but in an ethical Parliament both would be long gone and in a sane world neither would ever get within a hundred miles of power again.

Featured image via the Canary