| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden 15:52 - Mar 2 with 459 views | ZedRodgers |
The Fraud is the political equivalent of finally being shown the CCTV of your house being robbed after the police told you that you’d imagined most of it. Except in this version, the burglars are now living in your bedroom, insisting they broke in to renovate it for you - and yet you’re still being forced to sleep in the garden 6 years down the line.
At times I genuinely wondered whether I’d drifted into some kind of echo-chamber fantasy. A soothing voice narrating the vindication of every political frustration I’ve had over the past decade. But once you step back and see it all in the context of what it actually is, it’s all still just a horrible nightmare - An extremely bleak account of the crushing of hope and the tactical subversion of democracy.
Paul Holden strikes me as a tenacious investigative journalist, and is seemingly unphased by any of despicable attempts to gather intel on him and his family as a result of the work in this book. His case against Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, and the way they deceived their way to power, is completely grounded in documentary evidence and testimony, and I'd argue that the specific issue of Labour Together donations being obfuscated is probably due some kind of legal challenge.
Holden’s most significant achievement here is not to caricature them as Bond villains twirling procedural moustaches. He demonstrates how easily the language of tackling racism and restoring trust can be weaponised - turned into managerial tools that hollow out the very democratic culture they claim to protect. Antisemitism became a factional weapon, and this book puts any debate on that to rest.
Since the book was published, Labour’s “grown-ups” rebirth has been remarkably efficient at exposing itself for what it really is - The lingering smell (and now apparent undoing) of Peter Mandelson being Exhibit A. The disasterclass that was the selection process and campaign in the Gorton & Denton by-election probably sits close behind. I'm sure another case study in how the New New Labour model was always destined drown itself in factional muck will present itself in the next few days. Which leaves the obvious question - what exactly was the party cleansed of?
For those who spent a lot of time talking about antisemitism between 2017 and 2019, the excerpt below shines a light on some of the more spurious claims. I can recall at least one poster on here citing the likes of LAAS and Euan Philipps as sources of truth in the past.
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"…Documents leaked from the Labour Party showed that Labour Against Antisemitism's (LAAS) spokesperson and one of its most well-known activists, Euan Philipps, had created a fake persona called 'David Gordstein', which many readers would take to be a Jewish name. Philipps is not Jewish. Philipps admitted to Al Jazeera that he was David Gordstein, but insisted that 'he never claimed to be Jewish when doing so'. David Gordstein would play a material role in the success of the astroturf campaign that was incubated by the Labour Together project. Philipps remained a prominent member and spokesperson of LAAS even after his Gordstein persona was exposed.
Previously unseen documents from the Labour Party show that the Gordstein persona was used to make hundreds of complaints of antisemitism to the Labour Party between 2017 and 2021. The reports are detailed, but perhaps the most important feature was the number of times the persona was used to accuse left-wing Jews of antisemitism. The outrageous story of Goldstein's complaint about the elderly Jewish party member Riva Joffe, which led to the party investigating her on her death bed is dealt with in Part Three.
One of the more absurd Gordstein complaints was directed against Miriam Margoyles, the idiosyncratic national treasure and garlanded Jewish actress who played Professor Pomona Sprout in the film adaptations of Harry Potter. One of Margoyles' allegedly antisemitic acts, according to 'Goldstein', was to use her Facebook profile to share an article written in 2019 by the highly regarded Jewish social anthropologist and LSE Professor David Graeber. Graeber challenged aspects of the mainstream narrative alleging a 'crisis' of antisemitism in the Labour Party. He argued that the way the Labour Party 'antisemitism crisis' has been covered was itself antisemitic, because it generated unjustified 'rancour, panic and resentment' that 'creates terror in the Jewish community'. Ironically, Graeber had written in despair about how many of the 'protagonists' of the antisemitism crisis 'were not Jewish'.
So, to recap: an invented Jewish-sounding persona (Gordstein), created by a non-Jew, charged a Jewish actress with antisemitism, because she had shared an article by a left-wing Jewish academic, which argued that non-Jews telling scare stories about antisemitism was itself a form of antisemitism. This same non-Jewish activist would play a key role in amplifying the astroturf Stop Funding Fake News campaign, also led by non-Jews, that would implicitly accuse media outlets of being antisemitic for interviewing and recording the views or Jewish people who questioned aspects of the 'antisemitism crisis'. That astroturf campaign was run by an organisation established by Labour Together." |  |
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| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden on 16:13 - Mar 2 with 391 views | BlueBadger |
So, this isn't a book about Paul Lambert's time at ITFC? |  |
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| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden on 16:21 - Mar 2 with 359 views | Zx1988 |
With the benefit of hindsight, I find Andrew Marr's cheerleading for Starmer in the first half of 2024 to be very interesting - a lot of talk from him about how Starmer was going to be 'radical' and a modern-day Clement Attlee.
Were Starmer and McSweeney pulling the strings of a suitably-reliably mouthpiece, or was an experienced political commentator such as Marr so naive as to buy into the hype? |  |
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| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden on 16:39 - Mar 2 with 316 views | jasondozzell |
| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden on 16:21 - Mar 2 by Zx1988 |
With the benefit of hindsight, I find Andrew Marr's cheerleading for Starmer in the first half of 2024 to be very interesting - a lot of talk from him about how Starmer was going to be 'radical' and a modern-day Clement Attlee.
Were Starmer and McSweeney pulling the strings of a suitably-reliably mouthpiece, or was an experienced political commentator such as Marr so naive as to buy into the hype? |
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| Book review: The Fraud by Paul Holden on 17:12 - Mar 2 with 268 views | DJR |
Unsurprisingly, the book got no reviews in the media but is a good, and eye-opening, read.
Research for his book was the source for the Times articles detailing £730,000 of undeclared donations by Labour Together. Revelations in his book led to the resignation of Paul Ovenden, Head of Political Strategy at No.10. And the first report last October about snooping on journalists by Labour Together involved him.
As an aside, I knew Euan Philipps, who was a member of our local party and who resigned from the local party in a blaze of publicity and in a very underhand way.
By a strange coincidence, I also knew Jenny Manson, a co-founder of Jewish Voice For Labour and someone who was actually Jewish. [Post edited 2 Mar 17:34]
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