From our vantage point looking across the pond at the United Kingdom, it truly does seem like the country decided to put an end to itself rather than allow public anger to be channeled by the one-time Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. With hindsight, and thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden, author of today’s article below, we can now see clearly that the destruction of the Labour Party at the hands of a corporate, pro-Israel faction within the party was quite calculated and deliberate.

One piece of that strategy involved destroying the journalistic outlets that had organized themselves around the Corbynist energy, and to do so, the faction created astroturf organizations that claimed to be objectively rooting out “fake news.”

That faction eventually succeeded in electing Sir Keir Starmer prime minister, but doing so required political deception on a historic scale, resulting inevitably in his historic unpopularity. The right-wing takeover is not a matter of if, but when, and Starmer may wind up being the last Labour prime minister ever.

Along the way, Starmer’s faction also waged a secret war on conservative news outlets, as well. The censorship campaign targeting political opponents has morphed into an alarming attack on speech rights in the UK, focused on critics of Israel but broadly encompassing a wide range of expression.

Holden lays out just how it happened in his piece below, which is adapted from his book—get a copy here—and expanded with additional reporting.

—Ryan Grim

Keir Starmer Machine Ran a Secret Campaign to Demonetize Breitbart News and Other Opposition Outlets

Story by Paul Holden

As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart. The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation. Many of the documents were revealed for the first time in my recent book – called “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy” – and are expanded on significantly there.

The campaign succeeded in effectively destroying the left-wing British