British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has ordered an investigation into an anti-Breitbart censorship campaign group over accusations that it sought to smear journalists with false ties to Russia.
The Cabinet Office has been tasked with investigating Labour Together, a think tank founded by former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, which was central to Prime Minister Starmer’s rise to power through its creation of censorship cut-out groups that targeted supporters of former far-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as well as conservative American media, including Breitbart News.
Amid scrutiny over McSweeney’s involvement in the appointment of Jeffrey Epstein-linked Lord Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, further accusations against Labour Together emerged, including that it reportedly hired American PR firm APCO Worldwide for at least £30,000 to investigate critical journalists at the Sunday Times and Guardian newspapers.
This followed a Times report that McSweeney had failed to declare £730,000 in donations to Labour Together. According to the independent outlet Democracy for Sale, APCO falsely accused the reporters of obtaining their information from Russian or Chinese sources that supposedly hacked Britain’s Electoral Commission. The firm is further said to have investigated the “backgrounds and motivations” of the journalists.
On Monday, Prime Minister Starmer said that he “didn’t know anything” about the APCO Worldwide operation, saying per the BBC: “It absolutely needs to be looked into.”
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told Times Radio on Monday that an investigation into Labour Together will include the role of its former director, Josh Simons, who was in charge of the think tank when APCO was commissioned and has since joined Starmer’s government as the digital minister.
“The Cabinet Office will be investigating the facts of what has happened. There’s already an investigation going on by the regulatory body that covers public affairs agencies, and that is absolutely right, too,” she said.
Simons has claimed that APCO Worldwide went beyond its brief and said that he was “shocked” that its report included “unnecessary information” on Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund, which he said he asked to be removed before passing the report to the intelligence services.
Nevertheless, Conservative Party Chairman Kevin Hollinrake said that the behaviour of Labour Together demonstrated a ” worrying contempt for the free press”.
“With its close and widely known links to the heart of government, serious questions must be answered about who was aware of these actions, including whether senior figures around the prime minister knew.”
Labour Together came under increased scrutiny late last year after it was claimed by South African investigative journalist Paul Holden that the McSweeney-founded group had created multiple leftist cutout groups, including Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), to wage censorship campaigns against the far-left in Britain and conservatives in the United States, including Breitbart News.
For example, in 2020, the CCDH had reportedly lobbied Google to ban conservative sites, including Breitbart, from its advertising programme. The NGO had also previously defined its core mission as “Kill Musk’s Twitter”.
In December, Centre for Countering Digital Hate director Imran Ahmed was sanctioned by the Trump administration for his role in the “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”
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