Who rigged Labour’s parliament? Investigators want to know

Shadow World Investigations and Paul Holden, author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, have announced a new investigative project about the transformation of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) under the Labour Together faction. This long-germinating project is soliciting evidence about how Labour Party processes were used (and abused) to manipulate the selection of Labour MP candidates who now make up the majority of the PLP.

“Sir Keir Starmer was the frontman for a rotten political project that spent the best part of a decade remaking the Labour Party along rigidly factional and exclusionary lines and the most consequential transformation was of the Parliamentary Labour Party,” says Paul Holden.

“Two thirds of the Labour MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons were selected through a process tightly controlled by Morgan McSweeney, reportedly with direct (albeit informal) input from Peter Mandelson,” Holden continues. “Labour Together and its key donors then spent over £2m on getting this intake of MPs elected. The selection process that McSweeney oversaw was beset by allegations of misconduct and irregularities so widespread that veteran journalist Michael Crick described it as “corruption”. One MP selection resulted in criminal charges being filed against Labour officials, with close connections to key Labour Together figures,” Holden says.

As these are the MPs that not just determine the future of the country but will play a key role in either making or breaking the political fortunes of whoever next succeeds Starmer, Holden believes the time is right to launch a probe into how they came to get where they are. “In a follow up to The Fraud, my colleague Jessica Murray and I, will be embarking upon ‘The Labour Together Parliament’ project to examine the legitimacy of the process that resulted in the current Parliament, upon which any Labour government will rest,” he said.

Call for evidence of wrongdoing or stitch-ups

“What we need as a first step is information. We would like evidence of any wrongdoing or stitch-ups during the selection process. We would like to build a collection of evidence about the ways in which bureaucrats forced through or manipulated the selection process, including in the finalisation of longlists and shortlists, and, where it happened, the decision being removed from local democratic decision making altogether,” said Holden.

The investigation is especially interested in the vote tallies from every Labour candidate selection between 2022 and 2024, which have not been routinely published. “We are particularly interested in tallies that distinguish between postal, online and in-person votes. These different vote tallies would have been provided to losing candidates. Sometimes they were only read out in selection meetings. We are not looking only for results that seem ‘dodgy’ – but all vote tallies, including those that are not in the least suspicious. This will allow us to build a holistic database and rigorously test different hypotheses,” he said.

“We would also like tallies from candidate selections in seats that weren’t Labour targets and didn’t result in any MP. Ideally, it would be great if we could be provided with contemporaneous evidence of these vote tallies – such as a screenshot of a message or email relaying the result. We would also be interested in narrowing down which CLPs used Anonyvoter for MP selection, even if the vote tallies are not available.”

Holden and his team have set up an email account at [email protected]  for any information to be submitted to. This is an important project which will peel back another layer of the nefarious practices that have bedevilled Labour’s MP selection process over recent years and Holden’s call for evidence deserves to be shared widely.

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