LABOUR TOGETHER is an anti-democratic law-breaking gang which should be driven from the Labour Party immediately.

The right-wing Labour campaign styles itself as a “think tank.” It is no such thing. It has no association at all with policy development or formulation.

Instead, over the last decade it has traded in fraud, deceit, illegality and now the smearing and intimidation of those legitimately looking into its shady doings.

It was founded more than 10 years ago and run from 2017 by Morgan McSweeney, then fresh from involvement in Blairite Liz Kendall’s disastrous bid for the Labour leadership, which garnered less than 5 per cent of the vote.

McSweeney deceitfully claimed that Labour Together was about uniting factions in the party. In reality, it ran a concealed campaign to undermine leader Jeremy Corbyn and force him out of office.

It operated on the understanding that the party membership would never willingly embrace a rightwinger as leader and that the restoration of Labour to what it regarded as its only fit and proper stewards would have to proceed through lies.

Keir Starmer was the instrument of this project, used by McSweeney to pose as a continuer of Corbyn’s policy agenda, but in reality someone prepared to discard all the policies on which he won the leadership and hand the management of the party over to the hardest right-wing faction.

In running this deceit, Labour Together under McSweeney “forgot” to declare nearly three-quarters of a million pounds in donations to the Electoral Commission. It was found guilty of 20 breaches of electoral law.

It was unwilling to submit its funding by multimillionaires to scrutiny while it was secretly backing Starmer’s leadership bid, all the time denying that it was doing so.

All this and much more was revealed in the book The Fraud, by investigative journalist Paul Holden. Labour Together was anxious to divert attention from its law-breaking, since that would undermine McSweeney, by then virtually running Starmer’s Labour.

When journalists began to report on Holden’s findings, Labour Together, by that stage under the leadership of Josh Simons, now a Labour MP and Cabinet Office minister, hired private investigators to smear and intimidate Holden, his associates, including Morning Star reporter Andrew Murray, and other journalists, it has now been revealed.

This was no aberration. Holden’s book exposes Housing Secretary Steve Reed, a Labour Together stalwart, as bullying an independent journalist exposing wrongdoing in his borough of Croydon.

Simons’s conduct has been referred to the independent adviser on ministerial standards. There should be no need for further adjudication — Simons is an enemy of democracy and independent journalism and should resign from government and Parliament forthwith.

But Labour MPs and others are right in demanding that the probe should go much deeper and further than simply Simons. Labour Together itself must be called to account.

“We need to get the full truth of what went on. At the moment, this does not pass the smell test, as far as I am concerned,” as John McDonnell put it in the Commons.

Downing Street Secretary Darren Jones dismissed such calls — unsurprisingly, since he has received donations in kind worth £60,000 from Labour Together.

Over 100 MPs are likewise recipients of shadowy funding from the group, and its alumni are still all over the government, despite McSweeney’s fall in the wake of his mentor Peter Mandelson’s disgrace.

But the labour movement must take up the call for a through investigation into Labour Together’s conduct from its foundation to its present exposure as an exercise in factional gangsterism. Only thus can the Labour Party remove the stench of right-wing criminality.