Tipsheet

Here's How U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer Worked to Silence American Conservatives

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  December 05, 2025 1:15 PM

We spent a lot of time hearing about "foreign election interference" after President Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. Democrats said Russian collusion and meddling won the election for Trump and posed a grave threat to our democracy. But as we're fond of saying, it's (D)ifferent when Democrats do it.

Last year, during the presidential election, members of the U.K. Labour Party came to the U.S. to campaign for Kamala Harris. Politico reported the Labour government was "scared" of the outcome of the election and feared Donald Trump would win a second term; when American voters objected to this interference, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it was perfectly normal for Brits to "volunteer" to work on American Democratic Party presidential campaigns.

But the rot goes so much deeper than that. Starmer and his government actively worked to silence American conservatives, including Breitbart News and other outlets, during the 2020 election.

Drop Site News reported on the story.

Here's more:

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 outlet The Canary, which is only now recovering. Breitbart News persists.

The project was run through an organization called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN was incubated and resourced by a think-tank called Labour Together under the guise of fighting misinformation and “fake news.” Between 2018 and 2020, the anodyne-seeming think-tank received £739,000 in donations that it failed to report to the UK Electoral Commission, in violation of electoral law. Labour Together was found guilty and fined in September 2021 for the offense.

Morgan McSweeney, now Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, was Labour Together’s company secretary during this period. He also listed himself on LinkedIn as Labour Together’s “Managing Director.” In October 2024, the prominent UK journalist Andrew Marr commented that McSweeney held a position “of unparalleled power in Labour Party history.”

Of course, Breitbart picked up on the story as well, as they were one of the outlets targeted by Starmer and his government.

Here's more:

The crackdown on freedom of expression and dissenting thought by the UK’s Labour government was hard-baked into its DNA long before it took power, with the “the most powerful unelected official in British politics” having run a shadowy astroturf organisation working to destroy unaligned news outlets including Breitbart, a report states.

A Labour Party thinktank cutout posing as a grassroots anti-“Fake News” group worked to kneecap left-wing outlets that were a threat to its globalist-left worldview, and right-wing outlets that positively covered U.S. President Donald Trump and ‘Mr Brexit’ Nigel Farage, it is claimed. The revelations come in an article published by Dropsite News by South African investigative journalist Paul Holden, citing “a trove of documents that expose the operation” and promoting his forthcoming book.

Breitbart became a target of the aforementioned SFFN in October 2019 when a now-deleted Twitter account by user Slaro Vekonai (@slarethestoic) sent a tweet to the U.K. Parliament's Twitter account. That tweet read, "You may not know it, but you advertise on Breitbart, a toxic and extremist American site. Can you please adjust your programmatic ad buy so your ads don't show up there due to retargeting? Thank you!" That tweet also tagged the @slpng_giants and @SFFNews accounts, with SFFN later amplifying the tweet and accusing Breitbart of being a "bigoted, conspiracist fake news site."

The Associated Press then contacted Parliament, which announced it was suspending the ads. Later in October 2019, SFFN confirmed that the U.K. Cabinet Office had created a "white list" of approved sites to advertise on, and several, including The Canary, Evolve, Rebel, and Breitbart, would no longer receive government advertising. But the attacks didn't stop there. The U.K. account for Ford was also tagged about ads appearing on Breitbart, and Ford responded that it was "investigating the ad placement" before confirming that Ford "does not share the views expressed on the website."

Two years later, SFFN was targeting Breitbart's YouTube account, too, complaining the website "consistently denied climate change, promoted sexism, [and] published racist conspiracy theories" on their monetized YouTube channel while encouraging companies to block ads on Breitbart's YouTube content.

It's no coincidence that Starmer's government recently passed the "Online Safety Act" that age-restricts websites and censors social media. The goal is not to protect children from harmful content, but to institute government control of the Internet.

This is important because, back in October, former President Barack Obama was making the rounds and pushing for sweeping, globalist censorship of the Internet. In June, he spoke of the need for "new forms of journalism" and said, "We don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government...regulatory constraints."

All of this is connected, of course. The global Left sees free speech — mainly American free speech — as a threat to its agenda, and clearly fears unregulated social media. And the U.K. government used its power to try and silence an American media outlet because it didn't like its reporting.

That cannot stand and we must fight back against it.