Tricks and Treats

As comments on yesterday's post correctly put it:

Labour Together went after made men at the Sunday Times and Guardian. That was their only mistake. If they had kept it to independent journalists, the whole episode would have been disappeared. The police raid on Asa Winstanley in October 2024 has still never been mentioned by any UK paper.

And:

If only the media has listened to the thousands of Labour members who were smeared and harassed by Labour right wingers. If only they had read the Forde report. If only they had watched The Labour Files.

Gabriel Pogrund, in particular, had been an enthusiastic participant in the anti-Semitism scam against Jeremy Corbyn, and he and Patrick Maguire had gushed over Morgan McSweeney in Get In, important and enjoyable though it was. But this hit was revenge for the revelation that Labour Together had failed to declare more than £730,000 in donations between 2017 and 2020, leading the Electoral Commission to find it guilty of 20 breaches of electoral law.

In similar vein, see the ongoing investigation into the Labour Party for having treated more than 600 people at Gorton and Denton, mirroring that into Reform UK for having put out an electoral communication that not only bore no imprint, but purported to have come from a person who did not exist. If either Angeliki Stogia or Matt Goodwin won, then that result would be contested in court.

And speaking of electoral dodgy dealings, the CEO of Labour Together is Alison Phillips, who is also a director of Hope Not Hate, registered charity number 1013880, at least two of the trustees of which were Labour parliamentary candidates, one of them a member of the party's National Executive Committee, when it put out a libellous leaflet against George Galloway at Rochdale during the 2024 General Election campaign. That leaflet looked like an old-fashioned Labour one.

Hope Not Hate objects equally to all of criticism of anything that Israel might ever do, criticism of the war in Ukraine, support for Brexit, opposition to gender self-identification, opposition to unrestricted immigration, reservations about the cashless society, resistance to mass surveillance and to the criminalisation of protest, criticism of the official approach to climate change, and criticism of the official approach to Covid-19. That list is not exhaustive, and it would not be difficult to predict the additions to it. That is the package, to be taken as a whole or not at all, and prepare for the consequences if you chose not to take it. What role has been played by APCO, or by any other such operation, in the delivery of those consequences?