IN The Fraud, journalist Paul Holden exposes the systematic takeover of the Labour Party by a ruthless, well-funded right-wing faction. This project, focused on capturing state power, has not only shattered the party’s integrity but may ultimately threaten its very existence as a vehicle of change.

For Holden, the promise of the 2017 Labour Party manifesto was a beacon of hope. It contained a commitment he believed could be “genuinely revolutionary” — transparent offshore tax haven registers, many of which are in the purview of the British state.

“If you actually let people look at tax haven registers, they’ll find out who the corrupt politicians in the world are,” Holden explains. “You’d actually start revolutions. It would have fundamentally transformed the world.”

That hope curdled into “frustration and anger” as he watched the party implode, captured from within, with its left wing expelled or cowed. His new book, born from a leak of internal Labour documents, details what he describes as a “preconceived plan of mass deception, dishonesty, and disinformation” designed to make the possibility of any change towards the left impossible.

Holden is no stranger to investigating corruption. His previous work with Andrew Feinstein, Shadow World, delved into a massive, corrupt South African arms deal involving European arms companies selling weapons the country did not need and would not use. He saw how imperial powers corrupted the young South African democracy, a process he soon realised was “typical, not unique.”

“I never really distinguished between South African corruption and global corruption,” he says, noting Britain’s central role as a financial hub that enables such practices. The 2017 Labour manifesto offered a chance to disrupt this system, making the subsequent internal coup all the more devastating.

The leak of Labour documents revealed the mechanics of this takeover. Holden describes a “very deep and profound… preconceived plan” by a “very small, regressive, effectively idealist faction” whose sole aim was seizing state power.

“This is a programme that captured the Labour Party to capture state power,” Holden states. “None of that process is about making the world a better place… At this point, it’s basically power for themselves.”

Central to this project is Morgan McSweeney, the elusive strategist behind Labour Together. Holden describes a man who “almost never speaks in public” and for whom “systematic dishonesty… is his primary and sole political tool.”

“It’s very difficult when you have a character who is repeatedly creating these quite elaborate public performances that are designed to deceive everyone,” Holden says. He characterises McSweeney as a “zealot” with an “extreme animus” towards the left, reportedly believing groups like the Stop the War Coalition are “evil,” a belief that is almost unhinged.

One significant weapon in achieving this aim was found in the anti-semitism crisis, which was centred in the book. “It would be easy to leave that out and just tell a straight story about dirty money, corruption, lying, dishonesty… but I didn’t feel like that reflected the reality,” he explains. “The anti-semitism issue was absolutely central to all of that process and has had serious material long-term impacts,” notably in constraining and influencing the party’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

The financial scale of this capture, Holden notes, is surprisingly small. The undisclosed sums from prominent businessmen mobilised by Labour Together were “tiny in the global scheme of things.” Yet, in British politics, where spending is tightly regulated, this represented “fantastic value for money.”

He compares it to the South African scandal, where a £25,000 bribe ended up in machinations which almost “destroyed the capacity of the state to prosecute any economic crime” to avoid jail. “It’s a tiny amount of money… incredibly good value.”

This initial investment, however, unlocks a much “more lucrative ecosystem” of lobbying and PR firms that only exists if parties are “open to the process of being lobbied and captured.” The Starmer project, Holden argues, threw the door open to this “institutionally corrupting” ecosystem, reversing the trend under Corbyn where lobbyists found no purchase. Lobbying firms had given up trying to influence Corbyn’s Labour, but were virtually ubiquitous at the 2025 Labour conference.

“There is a pathway through our politics from being a local councillor in Redbridge, say, to eventually sitting in the same room as Peter Mandelson on Global Counsel,” Holden says. “That… underlines a lot of the furious struggle over the soul of the party.”

The future, however, holds significant struggle. He believes this project “threatens the long-term viability of the Labour Party as a political project.” Their electoral strategy was to “erase any substantive difference between themselves and the Tories,” making them the “inheritors and defenders of the current political-economic status quo.”

This, he argues, is “incredibly stupid” in a moment of “mass revulsion at the status quo,” evidenced by the Tory Party’s historic collapse. “The Labour Party is going to be punished for exactly the same thing… If you make people’s lives worse while you’re in power, they will punish you.”

Compounding this is a “suicidal” political methodology of “relentlessly targeting marginal voters” while ritually humiliating the left. “There’s only so long that you can put people’s heads in the toilet and flush it before they’re like, ‘I don’t want to do this any more’.”

He warns that the party could alienate so much of its historic coalition that it “could really struggle to retain more than 100 seats” in the next election, entering a “death spiral.”

This failure, however, creates a “vast political space” to the left of the Labour Party. The key question is whether a new formation can mobilise the millions who are “extremely angry, extremely distrustful of politics” and “desperate for an alternative.”

Holden sounds a cautious note. This political engagement is “brittle.” Many new activists, radicalised by issues like Gaza, are inexperienced. “If in that moment you lose people’s trust… those people will leave very quickly. Trust is like a really key part of our politics… It’s very hard once you’ve lost it to regain it.”

Suppose, for a moment, that there is a victory: the next election is won by a coalition of Your Party and the Greens. The prospects are sobering: the ruling class will “fight back tooth and nail,” starting in the media, with astroturf groups abounding, and escalating to an “investment strike” and punishment by the bond markets.

“One of the key tasks… is going to have to be to very explicitly explain to voters… that changing the world and changing economic reality is ugly,” he states. “It’s going to be a fight, a tooth and nail fight, to even extract the most minor concessions out of capital… People have to have the fortitude and the grit to stick with the fight.” In short, as many on the left have often pointed out, elections alone will not suffice.

For Holden, the capture of the Labour Party was not just an internal squabble; it was a fundamental betrayal that has left the British people without a genuine vehicle for progressive change, just when they need it most.

Paul Holden’s book The Fraud is out now, published by OR Books (www.orbooks.com).