"Unsettling and saddening": Jon Cruddas reviews 'The Fraud'
Harlow, November 2019: Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer | Image by: Associated Press / Alamy
4 min read
Paul Holden has assembled a methodical and damning account of the alleged machinations behind Keir Starmer’s rise to power
Excessive factionalism signposts illness within a political party, invariably bringing polarisation and dysfunctional conflict that culminates in electoral failure. It is a self-defeating process that truncates the purpose of a party by substituting political and intellectual renewal with questions of internal domination.
A staunch opponent of factionalism was the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who in his famous 1978 lecture “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” rejected polarising sectarianism in favour of a pluralist party: one agile and open, aligned to wider social movements – not cut-off, culturally closed, internally obsessed. A message tacitly acknowledged by subsequent leaders from Michael Foot to Ed Miliband – yet forgotten over the last decade.
Labour’s factional turn has been exposed in a spate of recent books on Keir Starmer’s party. Two texts bookend this literature.
The first, the case for the defence, on behalf of the lean, sharp-suited crew who post-election briefly bestrode Westminster, was Get In by Times insiders Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. The story – unprecedented in Labour history – of a leader sub-contracting political control to a single faction. Fascinating yet disturbing; page after page of stitch-ups and defenestration. The reader could clock why Labour was ill-prepared for government, lacking in narrative or policy. Such difficult work – the hard yards of opposition – distracted from more enjoyable slaughter and bloodletting.
We now have the companion piece, the case for the prosecution from the left, drafted by investigative reporter Paul Holden. Much is familiar, having already inspired numerous headlines – and resignations – as the author worked with assorted media outlets, including right-wing ones, to get damaging stories about Labour out pre-publication.
Factionalism can bend toward pathology
It is an unsettling work, stretching over 541 pages; systematic, often damning. It returns to Al Jazeera series The Labour Files, the Forde Report and a culture infused with alleged racism, defined by factionalism. It recalls numerous carve-ups over candidate selection and questionable expulsions. Holden assembles an impressive range of internal materials to build his central claim – that Jeremy Corbyn’s demise and Starmer’s ascent were linked to a conspiracy orchestrated by Morgan McSweeney and the think tank Labour Together, to the extent that it amounted to a corruption of British democracy.
Holden follows the money, linking undeclared donations to the funding of clandestine organisations in pursuit of factional advantage, even suggesting that a fake Jewish activist pursued antisemitic charges and the purging of left-wing members. He asserts that, while he did this work, Labour Together hired consultants to undermine him and his colleague Andrew Feinstein – Starmer’s local opponent in 2024 – by alleging links to Russian state actors.
Caption
You don’t have to agree with the central argument – personally, through early involvement with Labour Together, I don’t – to be saddened. The political ‘realists’ will of course respond, “So what?”
Well, in his recent Party Conference speech Starmer talked of reconciliation and nation building, healing, civic renewal, dignity and ethics. Yet such talk rests uneasily with a leadership disfigured by factionalism, and a party consumed by levels of polarisation that recent UCL research indicates exceeds that between Brexit leavers and remainers across the country at large. Can this government unify the country and forge the pluralist politics necessary to hold the nation together, given its narrow command-and-control, authoritarian character?
Factionalism can bend toward pathology and destroy once great political traditions. If that sounds melodramatic, let’s see how it plays out come May.
Jon Cruddas is former Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham
The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy
By: Paul Holden
Publisher: OR Books
