Steve Reed Leads Labour’s Attack on Zack Polanski and the Green Party

The Green Party under Zack Polanski has lit a fuse under British politics. Surging in the polls their membership has rocketed and now pose a real threat to the Labour Party the government of Sir Keir Starmer and the wider political establishment. The response has been predictable. Smears, innuendo and bad faith attacks.

Julia Hartley Brewer (Far-Right Broadcaster): Are we going to be put in internment camps? Are we going to be killed?

Sir Keir Starmer (Prime Minister): That’s the Green Party now; high on drugs, soft on Putin.

Zia Yousuf (Reform UK Spokesperson for Home Affairs): A poisonous vessel for extremism and antisemitism.

Jake Wallis Simmons (Daily Telegraph columnist): Zack Polanski, shamefully, has turned himself into, probably, British politics foremost mouthpiece for antisemitism.

The same playbook that was once used to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has been dusted off once more. This time it is the Greens and its Jewish leader Zack Polanski who are presented as a safe haven for antisemites. After the horrifying attack on Jews in Golders Green, the Labour Party attacks have taken an ugly but familiar turn, inflaming community fears and ethnic tensions to score political points. Back then, the campaign against the Labour left succeeded because we had no idea who was masterminding it. This time we’ve got receipts. Leading those attacks for the Labour Party is Steve Reed MP the Cabinet Minister for Housing, Local Government and Communities:

“People will remember when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – a lot of racists and antisemites joined the party – we had a real problem with it until Keir Starmer became leader and he kicked them out. Well, a lot of those people didn’t leave politics they walked through the open door of the Green Party straight into the waiting arms of their new leader Zack Polanski.”

I have been investigating Reed for close to five years now. He is a central character in my book, the Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy. He’s one of the most concerning characters I encountered in my investigations. Reed’s position of influence in the government of Sir Keir Starmer stems from his long association with Morgan McSweeney. McSweeney was, until recently, the Chief of Staff to Sir Keir Starmer. He is also a longtime associate, confidante, a protege of Peter Mandelson. McSweeney and Reed were united in their hatred of the anti-war pro-Palestine and socialist politics that for a brief time took root in the Labour Party. Together they set out to destroy the possibility that this sort of progressive politics could succeed.

The vehicle through which this project was carried out was an anodyne seeming think tank called Labour Together. In July 2017, Morgan McSweeney was appointed the managing director and company secretary of Labour Together. Reed was also a company director. In secret McSweeney and Read hatched a two-phase plan which they would execute through Labour Together. First, Labour Together would undermine the democratically elected leadership of Jeremy Corbyn even if it meant that the Labour Party would lose the next general election. One of the ways they did this was to inflame the antisemitism crisis that was undermining Corbyn’s reputation starting at least in 2018. McSweeney and other Labour Together associates worked to place because we need another labour together associates workplace alarmist stories in the media. At no stage, no stage, was their role disclosed. Second with Corbyn defeated, they would handpick a pliant successor who would erase all remnants of the left from the Labour Party. The man they eventually chose was Sir Keir Starmer.

Starmer’s fraudulent, mendacious campaign to become labour leader was very much a Labour Together project. Something they denied at the time, but they couldn’t help bragging about thereafter. But this sort of skullduggery was expensive. Between 2017 and 2020 Labour Together took in over £800,000 in donations. The money mainly came from two sources. The first was Martin Taylor, a millionaire hedge fund owner with interests in private healthcare. The second was Sir Trevor Chinn, a wealthy businessman and pro-Israel advocate. By law Labour Together was required to report these donations to the Electoral Commission. But between February 2018 and 2020, Labour Together failed to report £730,000 in donations received. I think there’s good reason to question whether this failure to report donations was intentional.

But let’s make this very clear, Steve Reed was a director of Labour Together for years. He was a director of Labour Together while it was failing to report donations, while it was breaking the law. And not just any law. This is the law that governs the health and well-being of our democracy which is designed to guarantee transparency and accountability. The law that is supposed to enable us as ordinary citizens to see who’s funding who, and why. Because labour together broke the law, nobody knew they were lavishly funded by a hedge fund owner and a pro-Israel lobbyist. And all the while, Reed and McSweeny’s Labour Together project was secretly inserting itself into the Labour Party antisemitism crisis. The effect of their work was to wreck the credibility of their opponents they could not defeat through open, legitimate, democratic contestation.

Steve Reed is also a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel. In fact, in 2013, Reed travelled to Israel on a fact-finding mission. That trip was paid for by Labour Friends of Israel. In early 2026, as the Government Secretary for Local Government and Communities, he wrote to local governments and warned them that if any of them adopted boycott campaigns against Israel they could face a legal challenge.

Of course, it is up to you to judge the Greens and Zack Polanski on these matters, but I can say this for sure the one person who cannot be trusted on these issues is Steve Reed. Because on nearly every issue that matters, good governance, respect for the law and the vitally important issue of anti-Semitism, and community cohesion, Reed’s record is deplorable. Sadly, this is not the only red flag when it comes to Reed and issues of good governance. Reed’s local political base is the London borough of Croydon. He is currently the MP for Streatham and Croydon North. Party files that I reviewed show that he was a close political ally of the labour figures, the councillors, and the mayor’s that ran Croydon Council into the ground between 2014 and 2022. In November 2020 the Labour run Croydon Council declared effective bankruptcy amidst concerns of serious financial mismanagement. For years one dogged investigative journalist, Steven Downes, the editor and founder of inside Croydon, had tried to blow the whistle on the factionalism and incompetence of Reed’s crew. In response Reed repeatedly tried to get Downes kicked out of the Labour Party. Because of his accurate public interest journalism Reid and his allies described Downes revelatory reporting as a form of hateful abuse.

But things would turn sinister, genuinely sinister in 2021, when Inside Croydon’s e-mail and Twitter were hacked by unknown actors. Within days of the hack Inside Croydon’s stolen emails were sent into the Labour Party bureaucracy. E-mails show that Steve Reed was copied into the messages sharing the stolen emails at his personal and parliamentary address. Amazingly, the party did not report the situation to the police. Instead, the Party used the emails to identify Inside Croydon’s confidential sources. Four of the confidential sources were labour councillors who were blowing the whistle on a collapsing council. All four of them were subjected to disciplinary proceedings based on the hacked emails. These labour councillors were not able to stand. But who has been allowed to stand for the Labour Party, a woman by the name of Ruth Bannister who had also handled the stolen emails. Oh, and Sir Keir Starmer’s niece who was selected into the second safest ward in Croydon after two senior sitting black councillors were blocked by Labour Party bureaucrats. Now Reed has claimed he did not see the messages showing the hacked emails. But in at least one message a Labour Party official said that Steve Reed had asked that a complaint attaching the hacked emails be sent to the party’s general secretary David Evans. So, let’s make this clear. In response to credible fact-based journalism blowing the whistle on a council careening towards bankruptcy, Reed and his allies did not reflect, they did not act to right the ship, no, Reid and his allies attacked the journalists, whistleblowers, trying to stop the rot.

Sadly, this is not the only time people associated with the Labour Together project have gone after journalists. As I’ve previously revealed on Double Down news, I was one of several journalists, targeted by Labour Together. I was even reported to the UK security services. My crime? Writing factually accurate stories exposing the sordid political project.

Then there’s the vexed issue of antisemitism. And let’s be clear here. Antisemitism is a real and serious issue. It must be fought wherever it emerges. It must be handled with sobriety and with the full respect for the enormity of the crimes caused by antisemitic beliefs. We must condemn the horrors of the recent Golders Green attacks just as we must condemn the far-right protesters throwing Nazi salutes at a Green Party rally addressed by Zack Polanski himself. But on this, Read has failed on nearly every account. Indeed, Labour Party files show that Reed has a deplorable habit of making promiscuous and reckless allegations of antisemitism, including against left-wing Jews.

As I revealed in my book, in May 2020, Reed wrote to the Labour Party’s disciplinary team. Reed submitted dossiers of evidence against ten individuals. Reed said the dossiers, which he had not written, were profoundly worrying and appear highly credible. He urged the party to immediately suspend those individuals and investigate them for antisemitism. It was a genuinely extraordinary list. Of the 10 individuals, Reed accused of antisemitism, four were Jewish. For the record, Reed is not Jewish himself. Labour’s disciplinary team were put under immense pressure to find any evidence they could use to suspend the people on Reed’s list. The party could turn up nothing on three of the individuals Reed complained about, but one individual was not so lucky: Jonathan Rosenhead an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics. The Party dug up a complaint about how Professor Rosenhead had once recounted the ludicrous story of how a Jewish labour councillor, Jo Bird, had been suspended for making a pun on the phrase due process, [Jew process] a pun that portrayed Jewishness in a positive light. Rosenhead was forced to answer the charge that he was an antisemite, on this flimsy accusation. He wrote a devastating response to the Party. He explained how many of his family members had been killed in the Holocaust and how outrageous, genuinely outrageous, it was to be accused of a crime, so immense and heinous, as antisemitism. Rosenhead resigned in disgust, effectively harried out of the party at the behest of Steve Reed.

But this was just the tip of the iceberg. Party files showed that Reed repeatedly made contentious allegations of antisemitism, often against his local political opponents. In one case he complained about a young black woman. She had argued that antisemitism, while a deplorable form of discrimination, expressed itself differently to anti-black racism. She was immediately suspended and like Rosenhead, resigned in disgust.

Sadly, Reed has continued in this vein in government. Late last year [2025], Reid addressed the annual conference of the Jewish Labour Movement. Reed claimed that a Jewish Labour MP, Damien Egan, had been banned from visiting a school in Bristol. because it inflamed teachers upset by Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza. Egan, in addition to being Jewish, was the vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. The story of how Egan was banned from the school was denounced in the international media. The Times reported that a Jewish family in Bristol was so upset by the story that they decided to move out of the city. Starmer addressed it in the House of Commons:

All members of parliament should be able to visit anywhere in their constituency, schools or other places, without any fear of antisemitism. We do take this as seriously. We are providing more funding for security and support we’re putting in across the country, and we will be holding those to account who prevented this visit to this school.

But it was nonsense. In response to the allegation the school was inspected by Ofsted the school’s regulator. Unlike Read’s comments, Ofsted’s sober, factual report was barely mentioned in the media. But it showed that Egan was not banned. Instead, the school had found out that some parents had intended to protest his appearance, upset by Egan’s support for Israel. But the Egan’s visit was set to coincide with the school pickup, and the school feared it would become chaotic. They suggested that Egan’s visit be scheduled for another time. Indeed, by the time Reed told the story to the world, the school had already started arranging for Egan to visit at a more convenient time. He would eventually visit the following month.

Remarkably, the Ofsted report noted that the federation that ran the school, the Cabot Learning Federation, had already hosted Egan on four different occasions at different schools in the area. The Ofsted report found the school, Bristol Academy, was a diverse and inclusive community school. It found that teachers had expressed deep hurt and how their school was being portrayed. The teachers explained to Ofsted, that they were proud of the inclusive nature of the school, and it seems with good reason. Then the school was cleared in yet another detailed report, a report actually concerned with the facts. They found that the decision to ask Egan to visit on another day was based entirely and solely on safeguarding concerns; nothing to do with antisemitism. But Reed had dropped a bomb on the tolerant, inclusive, successful school. he [defamed] by telling a scare story about antisemitism that bore little resemblance to reality. Reed’s reckless intervention created massive local turmoil, threw the school into crisis, and even prompted a Jewish family to leave Bristol in fear. Is this the sort of behaviour of a man who takes antisemitism seriously? Is this the sort of person who has a care about local government, local communities and local schools? Is this the sort of man that should be listened to at all, not just about antisemitism, but about good governance, respect for the law, and community cohesion? Is this a man who should even be in government, let alone wheeled out as the attack dog of Starmer’s failing, unpopular, scandal-prone government? For me, the answer is clear.