I am "very dangerous", claimed Morgan McSweeney

I just got my Subject Access Request from Labour Together...

I am apparently “very dangerous”.

That, at least, is according to Morgan McSweeney - Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff and his former right-hand man.

I know this because I submitted a Subject Access Request to Labour Together, the organisation once run by McSweeney with the explicit aim of defeating Jeremy Corbyn and smashing the Labour left. In response, I was sent a 42-page dossier of emails, strategy documents, polling extracts and internal discussions in which my name repeatedly appears.

Some of it is absurd. Some of it is revealing - and some of it is frankly disturbing.

Before we get to the “very dangerous” part, though, it’s worth briefly explaining what Labour Together actually is.

Under McSweeney’s leadership, Labour Together sought to lay the groundwork to seize back the party. It received £730,000 in donations from millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen between 2017 and 2020, which it failed to properly declare. The Electoral Commission eventually fined the organisation and found it guilty of more than 20 breaches of electoral law.

The investigative journalist Paul Holden has done excellent work exposing Labour Together and its operations - particularly in his book The Fraud, which I strongly recommend reading. Labour Together responded by launching a smear campaign against Holden and two Sunday Times journalists, including attempting to link them to the Russian state.

That led to left-wing commentators and MPs submitting Subject Access Requests. You may well hear from others!

“I think this guy is very dangerous”

One of the emails in the dossier concerns a blog post about me from 2018 titled That Jones Isn’t Funny Anymore.

Now, what was this blog actually arguing?

It was about Labour’s so-called antisemitism saga. The author described me as occupying a kind of hybrid role - simultaneously journalist, activist, Labour insider and movement spokesperson. His argument was that because I didn’t deny antisemitism existed, but defended the Labour leadership against claims that it itself was antisemitic - while also arguing allegations against the leadership were being politically weaponised - that made me “worse than the deniers”, as he put it.

The blog said of me:

“His actions then and subsequently have been of a familiar type, enough outrage to keep his anti-racist credentials up but always with a view of protecting Corbyn and the project.”

The truth is I had a position at the time which I held - and still hold - in good faith.

I believed it was an outrageous and baseless claim that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leadership, and the overwhelming majority of Labour members were antisemitic. I consistently defended the leadership against those accusations. But I also believed there was an antisemitic fringe which had to be confronted, because antisemitism should always be dealt with where it actually exists.

The blogger portrays that as some cynical political manoeuvre. It wasn’t. It was - and remains - my genuine view.

And I’d note this too: at the time, I received criticism from parts of the left - and still do - from people who argue I was part of the problem during a smear campaign against the Labour leadership. This is normally based on distorting, misconstruing, erasing or inventing what I said or did.

But what McSweeney’s email shows is that the Labour right absolutely did not see my position that way. They regarded it as a “very dangerous” position.

I also think that because of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and because of the increasingly flagrant weaponisation of false accusations of antisemitism to smear opponents of that genocide, many more people are now alert to how these accusations can be abused politically.

But the Labour right certainly weaponised antisemitism in order to destroy the left. And it’s worth remembering that Martin Forde - the barrister commissioned by Keir Starmer after the leaked Labour report into antisemitism and factionalism - concluded there had indeed been weaponisation of antisemitism within Labour’s internal conflict.

What’s striking is that McSweeney simultaneously regarded me as “very dangerous” while also wanting access to my audience and the wider left-wing ecosystem around it.

Mapping the Labour membership

One of the documents is a 2018 Labour Together survey of Labour members, asking who they’d like to lead the Labour Party from a selection of figures who weren’t Labour MPs.

Caroline Lucas tops the poll on 25%. David Miliband and Sadiq Khan are both on 16%.

And then there’s Muggins here on 14%.

Below that: George Galloway on 3%, John Prescott on 3% - and Hillary Clinton on 2%

Which is obviously one of the strangest imaginary Labour leadership contests ever devised.

Flattered though I am at my leadership prospects eight years ago - leaving aside the fact I can barely tie my shoelaces - what was the point of this exercise?

I think the answer is fairly obvious. We were being used as political totems - a way of mapping ideological instincts and affiliations inside the Labour membership.

What McSweeney wanted to do through Labour Together was understand Labour members inside out: their reference points, who they looked up to, their emotional and political loyalties. Because if your goal is to wrest control of the party away from the left, you first need to understand how the left thinks.

And ultimately, that knowledge would be used to run a leadership campaign designed to deceive Labour members in order to steer the party sharply rightwards afterwards.

“Outriders” and the problem Labour has now

Another document contains these fascinating passages:

First of all: “young” is doing some heavy lifting there in my case. I’m a geriatric millennial!

But the passage is revealing.

Because they correctly identified something that was real: the Corbyn movement had a broader political-media ecosystem around it. Not centrally controlled, but broadly sympathetic. We were people who genuinely believed in the project and argued for it publicly.

Labour's problem now is that it cannot reproduce that organically.

Why? Because younger people today have suffered years of overlapping crises - from living standards to housing to debt. They are socially progressive. They are infuriated by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and despise Donald Trump.

They look at Starmer’s Labour and see a party with no serious answers to the crises defining their lives. They see social conservatism, deference to wealth and power, facilitation of Israel’s genocide, and sucking up to Trump.

So the pool of young people genuinely enthusiastic about defending this version of Labour is much, much smaller.

And many of the people drawn towards Starmer’s Labour are precisely the sort of hyper-careerist operators who are usually terrible communicators because nobody believes they stand for anything except self-advancement.

Anyone who has spent time around Labour factional politics knows the type immediately.

A failed podcast project

One of the most fascinating parts of the dossier concerns a podcast project called Changing Politics.

In 2018, McSweeney helped develop a podcast fronted by comedian Gráinne Maguire and journalist Marie Le Conte. The aim appears to have been to build an alternative-media platform capable of rivalling the pro-Corbyn online ecosystem while gently steering listeners toward Labour Right politics.

Here’s one such email:

One proposal suggested an opening episode with me, Ed Miliband and a “Corbyn social media person”. (This is all a bit Alan Partridge).

I was never invited - and the likely reason is pretty funny.

McSweeney sent an email:

A co-host replied replied:

“Owen Jones absolutely hates my guts so there is an exactly zero chance he will [go] on a podcast that I’m co-hosting.”

Well, this must be Marie Le Conte. I hope she doesn’t mind me saying - but “hates my guts” is much stronger than I’d put it. Certain misgivings, sure! (I once stole her hat at Labour conference for a picture and it went downhill from there).

But what matters is the broader strategy here.

They were trying to build a platform that could attract left-wing Labour members and audiences - and then seed support for Labour-right politics and personalities ahead of an eventual leadership contest.

And honestly, one element in particular made me feel sick.

One of the suggested episode themes was trans rights (which, I’d note, both co-hosts sincerely support).

Today, this Labour government has presided over an extraordinary collapse in trans rights in Britain. According to the latest Rainbow Map rankings, the UK is now near the bottom in Europe - barely above Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

But at the time they clearly recognised that younger Labour members cared deeply about trans rights and saw it as a way of generating enthusiasm and credibility with progressive audiences.

Nauseating cynicism.

The podcast itself was not a success - and the co-hosts had to chase McSweeney to get paid.

Radicalising people

There’s an interesting email to Morgan McSweeney and someone else, including a New York Times piece about online radicalisation through YouTube.

They wondered if the so-called “far left” benefit from this phenomenon in the UK, citing Novara and myself.

This is clearly “horseshoe” stuff - trying to equate the far right with the left.

But I would note that the video projects of both Novara and myself are much bigger than they were in 2018. So if they were worried about people being politicised to the left through video content, they are probably much more concerned now!

Understanding, mapping, exploiting

Elsewhere in the documents there’s a fragment discussing increasing reach among Labour supporters in Coventry, with the “key personality” listed as “Owen Jones”.

I genuinely have no idea why I’m linked to Coventry specifically. Perhaps they think I have a secret West Midlands political machine I’m unaware of.

But again, the broader pattern is obvious.

Labour Together was systematically trying to understand left-wing audiences, map political influence networks,, identify trusted communicators, and work out how to tap into those ecosystems.

And ultimately McSweeney used the infrastructure, political intelligence and strategic thinking developed at Labour Together to run Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign.

That campaign was used to dupe Labour members - whom McSweeney had obsessively studied.

We are now living through the consequences of that political project: an operation defined by factional conquest and hostility to the left, rather than by any coherent transformative vision of its own.

And it has now collapsed - as many of us warned it would.