All 'The Fraud' proves is that part of the left has learned nothing
5 min read
Paul Holden’s The Fraud poses as fearless investigation. In truth, it is denial: distortion, omission and conspiracy-minded wish-thinking aimed at a left still unwilling to face the Corbyn years.
The thesis is simple: a “lawless” Labour faction conspired to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and install Keir Starmer. Pages of insinuation never rise above hearsay. One breathless section ends with the coy admission that the claims are merely “plausible”. Crucially, the core allegations were tested by independent authorities like the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and Electoral Commission before publication and failed. The book shows how easily narrative replaces fact when ideology demands it.
The only bodies with full access to the evidence, the EHRC and the lawyers who ran Labour’s internal cases, found that Labour under Corbyn broke the law by discriminating against Jewish members. That ruling, not gossip or leaks, is the definitive account of the crisis.
The Jewish Labour Movement’s dossier to the EHRC set out incidents that should shame any party. With sworn statements, JLM members described a membership secretary in Tottenham demanding home visits for 25 Orthodox Jews before allowing them to join. It recorded a whistleblower told to move antisemitism complaint files to the Leader’s Office on USB sticks so friends’ cases could be reviewed, with a personal email used to hide the trail. JLM has statements claiming senior figures waved away action against Ken Livingstone as a “Jewish conspiracy”. The dossier described a party culture “profoundly hostile to Jewish members”.
The EHRC later found Labour to have committed unlawful acts of harassment against its Jewish members. Rather than accepting the true significance of this finding, Holden engages in fantasies about our institutions, such as claiming “the Labour Together Project… helped the Jewish Labour Movement to ‘engineer’ the EHRC investigation into Corbyn’s Labour Party.”
His method is not investigation but collage: scraps of leaked emails, whispers and anonymous briefings glued into melodrama about “secret projects” and “purges”. Ordinary organisation becomes conspiracy; routine management becomes “factional warfare”.
I know this personally. Though I am mentioned, Holden, his publisher and their lawyers never contacted me for comment. The book contains no interviews with Jewish members, lawyers or investigators who actually dealt with antisemitism in Labour. The people who lived the abuse are silenced. The effect is to turn victims into villains and perpetrators into martyrs. The documented examples in the JLM dossier never appear; instead comes the comforting fiction that antisemitism was exaggerated by political enemies. That inversion of truth is denialism, and it defines the book.
I helped compile the JLM submission, so I know what Holden ignores. Our skeleton argument ran to 100 pages, backed by thousands more of documents and testimony. Over eighty current and former Labour staff gave sworn statements. Some came from Corbyn’s own office, corroborating interference, obstruction and hostility.
The EHRC’s findings could have been tested in court. They were not. For all the crowdfunders on the hard left, none was raised to judicially review the report. They knew they would lose. The evidence was overwhelming.
Holden portrays Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together as omnipotent puppet-masters. The simpler explanation — that members, appalled by antisemitism, defeat and chaos, chose competence — never occurs to him. He assumes ordinary members are puppets, not activists who rejected failure.
Equally revealing is what he leaves out. There is nothing on Chris Williamson, once a Corbynite MP and now a fixture on the Iranian state broadcaster’s Palestine Declassified, where he has described the massacre of hundreds of Israelis on October 7 as an “audacious military offensive by Palestinian freedom fighters”.
That trajectory says more about what went wrong on the left than any fantasy about “secret projects”. Where are the left protests at Williamson’s appearances? There are none. The silence is telling.
Perhaps persuasion is not the point. For me, The Fraud is about intimidation. Amid rising antisemitism, it appears to be a signal that the hard left will not let those who fight it know peace. Raise your head above the parapet for Britain’s Jews and you will be hounded. I felt its message was simple: don’t challenge us, or we will rewrite your motives and smear your name.
In the end, the book tells us little about Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney or Labour’s internal life. It exposes the psychology of denial: refusal to accept responsibility, the urge to recast defeat as betrayal, the longing to rewrite history until one’s side is blameless.
Five years after the EHRC report, this part of the left has learnt nothing. Unable to accept that it lost because it was wrong, it builds myths and conspiracies to explain away failure. Those myths still end in the same place: blaming the Jews, this time alongside an Irishman called McSweeney.
Adam Langleben is executive director of Progressive Britain
Correction (25/03/2026): This post has been edited to reflect the fact that Paul Holden’s book deals with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)’s 2020 ruling into the Labour Party in detail, including in a dedicated chapter and does not, as originally claimed, fail to acknowledge or omit discussion of it. A claim that Adam Langleben is accused of running a secret campaign against certain media outlets in the book has also been removed. Although the review was published in good faith, we regret these errors.
