The people demanding governments censor the internet to cleanse it of ‘fake news’ have been caught spreading disinformation of their own.

A new briefing by former investigative journalist David Rose for the Free Speech Union exposes a shadowy network of think tanks and campaign groups with close links to Sir Keir Starmer – and with Morgan McSweeney at its centre – that has spent years lobbying for online censorship while circulating defamatory smears against journalists and political opponents.

Josh Simons, an ex-Cabinet Office minister and former head of Labour Together, a think tank founded by McSweeney, commissioned a secret report from PR firm APCO Worldwide that falsely accused eight journalists who’d been critical of Starmer and his “extreme centrism” of being covert Russian “assets”. Simons passed the false claims to GCHQ. When Starmer’s “ethics adviser” was asked to investigate Simons, he exonerated him despite never reading key evidence submitted to him by one of Simons’s journalist victims. The adviser has since refused to reopen the inquiry in spite of calls to do so by Labour MPs.

McSweeney also founded The Center for Countering Digital Hate, which destroyed media outlets critical of Starmer by pressing advertisers to boycott them on the grounds they were “funding hate”. The CCDH enjoyed privileged access to the Biden White House and convinced US officials to “flag” inconvenient social media content as “misinformation” and press for its removal. CCDH’s head, Imran Ahmed, who once shared an office with McSweeney, currently faces deportation from the US for allegedly censoring American citizens and infringing the First Amendment.

Then there’s Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy behind the Trump Russiagate dossier, who has written smears about British public figures in return for cash. One such calumny, sent to Liam Byrne MP, was read out in the Commons under Parliamentary privilege, leading to an innocent man and business rival of one of Steele’s paying clients losing £8 million.

Morgan McSweeney. Josh Simons. Kate Forrester – who ran APCO’s London office. Imran Ahmed. Christopher Steele. Liam Byrne MP. Many of these people were behind the censorious Online Safety Act and are now lobbying Starmer to make it even more extreme.

Read David’s report, and you can hear him talking to former shadow Labour Chancellor John McDonnell about the sinister Labour hit squad behind Starmer’s rise to power in the latest FSU podcast.