Former President Donald Trump’s election campaign team has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the US election watchdog, accusing the UK Labour Party of “blatant election interference”.
“In recent weeks, [Labour] have recruited and sent party members to campaign for Kamala in critical battleground states, attempting to influence our election,” the Trump campaign alleged in a press release titled ‘The British Are Coming!’.
In its complaint, the Trump campaign point to the fact that Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, his director of communications, Matthew Doyle, and a host of Labour MPs, aides and strategists attended the Democratic National Convention in August to meet with Ms Harris’s presidential campaign team, apparently to help them understand how Labour secured one of the biggest landslides in British electoral history.
Also cited is the fact that Starmer’s director of strategy, Deborah Mattinson, went to Washington in September to brief the Vice-President and her running mate, Tim Walz, on election strategy.
What the Trump campaign’s complaint doesn’t mention is that it isn’t just a shared interest in ‘election strategy’ bringing the two parties closer together.
Leaked internal documents seen by The DisInformation Chronicle show that a lobby group linked to McSweeney has been engaging with the Biden/Harris administration, as well as prominent Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, to censor what it describes as “harmful content”.
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which campaigns for more online censorship, was founded by McSweeney – who was appointed as a director at think tank ‘Labour Together’ following the 2017 general election campaign – and is now run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle. CCDH’s Head of Research Callum Hood previously worked for Labour Party MP Ian Austin, now Lord Austin of Dudley.
According to The DisInformation Chronicle, “it is crucial to understand that CCDH, Labour Together and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party exist as a single package, with McSweeney at the helm”.
An insight into the type of organisation it is can be gleaned from the fact that “Kill Musk’s Twitter” is the first item in the template of its monthly agenda dating back to earlier this year.
This isn’t an empty threat, either.
The group perfected its technique of ‘financial strangulation’ back in 2019 when it silenced Sir Keir’s Corbynite critics by urging companies to stop advertising on news sites like the left-leaning Canary on the grounds that their pro-Palestinian takes were anti-Semitic.
“Destroy the Canary, or the Canary destroys us,” McSweeney told Labour Together MPs at the time.
Needless to say, a subsequent investigation by the media regulator Impress found nothing the Canary published was antisemitic.
Ahmed opened a CCDH office in Washington in 2021, and in addition to working with American journalists to suppress dissent and enforce narratives friendly to Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration, its staff are now working up plans for ‘Canary 2.0’ – i.e., “killing” the online presence of Democratic rivals like Musk by attacking X’s advertising revenue.
That the group has connections to the current US administration is clear from the leaked documents.
“60 meetings on the Hill,” reads one CCDH task assignment from early 2024.
“Meeting with 16 congressional offices over the next two weeks to give updates on the Elon lawsuit,” reads another, referring to Musk’s since-dismissed lawsuit against CCDH accusing it of manipulating data to make the argument that ‘hate speech’ had surged on X since Musk acquired the social media platform.
Elsewhere, the CCDH’s documentation records: “US policy engagement: set up meetings with Klobuchar’s team to seek a quote/press release endorsement. Our meeting with their team is on Tuesday.”
CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators to promote an initiative it calls the “STAR framework” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content”.
STAR’s core concepts are similar to the UK’s Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of regulating social media via the threat of swingeing fines.
Although not quite similar enough. According to CCDH, the Online Safety Act doesn’t grant the regulator enough power to censor online content that it regards as “disinformation”.
In August, the group held an “emergency” meeting to discuss the role of social media in fuelling the civil unrest that followed the murder of three girls in Southport.
The meeting was attended by officials in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the Home Office, Ofcom and the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, as well as representatives of the Community Security Trust, Tell Mama, the Incorporated Society of British Advertising and current and former MPs.
Cosily enough, this little get together was held under the Chatham House rule, meaning that when CCDH published the policy recommendations that emerged from the meeting it wasn’t required to attribute views to individual participants.
The most eye-catching of these is that the Online Safety Act should be amended to grant Ofcom – one of the bodies represented at CCDH’s conflab – additional “emergency response” powers to fight “misinformation” that poses a “threat” to “national security” and “the health or safety of the public”.
Unfortunately, the stipulation that these new powers would only be used in an “emergency” or a “crisis” isn’t particularly reassuring, politically or epistemologically: ‘politically’, in that such terms have a remarkable tendency to expand to suit the agenda of our would-be censors; ‘epistemologically’, in that the difference between ‘misinformation’ and ‘plausible hypothesis’ – the lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins, for instance – is often little more than the passage of time.
CCDH’s proposal would involve amending the section 175 ‘special circumstances’ directive created by the Online Safety Act to enable Peter Kyle MP, the Secretary of State for DSIT (also represented at CCDH’s chinwag, of course), to issue a “directive” to Ofcom to ramp up its censorship powers if the Government feels there is a threat to national security or to the health and safety of the public.
Not only that, but the “objective” he would be “directing” Ofcom to prioritise, e.g. what online content to remove, would be defined by him.
Kyle, who was recently accused of breaking the ministerial code over his hiring of former Labour Together policy fellow Emily Middleton, is a close confidant of Sir Keir Starmer’s.
Judging from interviews he’s given about the shortcomings of the Online Safety Act, it’s a safe bet he’d be in favour of amending it to grant himself the power to order Ofcom to remove content that, in his view, poses a threat to public safety.
Ofcom is of course free to meet under the Chatham House rule with as many think tanks as it likes – but under the proposals put forward by a group founded by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, the regulator would become a weapon of censorship wielded by the Government.
