The Putin accusation will no longer work on Farage
J’accuse blogs
The ‘mainstream media’ has finally decided that Labour Together’s crude tactics against journalists and scrutiny is deserving of its full attention. Labour Together, the organisation created by Morgan McSweeney to take control of the Labour party using Keir Starmer as a figurehead, paid a public affairs firm to investigate journalists who were themselves investigating Labour Together’s financial impropriety. Part of this scheme involved accusing these journalists of using files which had been acquired through Russian hacking. Weaponising the bogeyman of Russia in order to silence dissent and criticism.
The dodginess of Labour Together has been known about for years, it is galling that this is only receiving wider coverage now that Morgan McSweeney has ceased being useful to journalists, and that evidence has emerged that Gabriel Pogrund - a Sunday Times journalist - was targeted.
The Novara Media journalist Paul Holden released a book last year about the McSweeney project and even explained inside it that he had been targeted by a public relations firm, but this was mostly written off as crank nonsense at the time or simply ignored. There are also several other left-wing journalists including Kit Klarenberg and Matt Taibbi, but the BBC’s coverage this morning speaks only about Pogrund for the first two thirds of the article.
The Corbynite Left has been screaming into the void about this for years. Very few ‘mainstream’ journalists care about McSweeney destroying the Canary through targeted advertising boycotts in order to weaken Corbyn. It is also well known, and widely accepted, that the Labour Together offices were used to set up the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which lobbied for (amongst other things) the Online Safety Act, which is also a targeted attack on non-mainstream media (which impacts this very Substack).
None of this is to attack Pogrund, who of course was doing his job properly by investigating Labour Together - it is a criticism broadly of those who refused to scrutinise Starmer’s Labour party when it was in opposition and did assiduous PR work for McSweeney, swallowing the nonsense about Dagenham bins and refusing to pay any heed to the Corbynista loonies who were pointing out how morally corrupt these people really are. It is yet more credit to the ‘online world’, and an argument in favour of digital liberty that you would know much more about McSweeney if you followed EyUp Lovely on X instead of reading the Guardian and the Times cover-to-cover every day.
The salient point here, however, is that Farage has been gifted a tool for beating back all and any allegations that the government makes regarding ‘Putin’. He can say, simply, that this government used dodgy PR agencies to fabricate claims of Russia ties against journalists, so why listen to his allegations now? Getting rid of McSweeney or even Keir Starmer will do nothing to address this weakness. Labour Together and its various hydra heads brush up against every part of the Labour party. tens of thousands of pounds to Shabana Mahmood’s office (see the register here) in the run up to the last election and in the time since. Streeting is an old friend of McSweeney. Even the left winger Angela Rayner has received donations from Labour Together.
It cannot be emphasised enough how much the government is relying on Russia allegations to beat Reform at the next election. Polling shows that Farage is weakest with the public on…defence…and it is hoped that Farage’s appearances on Russia Today and his statements in support of Russia in Syria as an MEP (along with some other yet to emerge revelations) can be used to cripple him in the months leading up the election. Starmer has already said unequivocally that he believes Reform is a pro-Putin party. Farage has been ‘cucking’ on Defence in an attempt to dampen down this attack line. But now:
Every time that somebody tries to accuse Farage or any other Reform figure of an improper relationship with Russia, you can now point to how Labour figures fabricated Russian hacking allegations in self-defence.
This is an amazing gift to be given when you are already ten percentage points ahead in the polls. It is this sort of overreach – the Russiagate hoax - which meant the Democrats were no longer being taken seriously by the American public when it came to the 2024 US Presidential election. Reform must make a big stink about this. Labour have cheapened the sacrifice of Ukranian soldiers by throwing this accusations at a free press vexatiously. It is vile, it is unacceptable. And when you see Starmer or one of his many spook-turned-MPs try and play this card, make sure you remind them.
A short little postscript as well. Thanks to another catastrophic Labour right screw-up, we no longer need to make an intellectual defence of ‘Online Safety Act’. The next time some blithering retard tries to say that the Online Safety Act is needed to protect children, you can remind them that one of the witnesses at committee stage, one Liron Velleman, has just pleaded guilty to child sex offences. Velleman sent messages to (who he believed to be) a thirteen year old girl asking to see her in her school uniform, then in her underwear and sent also sent ‘her’ a video of his penis. God bless the Labour right and their uncanny ability to wreck every cause they touch.