Rayner Threatens Purges as Labour Members Revolt against Leadership’s Treatment of Corbyn

Mike also reported yesterday that Angela Rayner made a speech to the faux Jewish group, the Jewish Labour Movement, that she would suspend ‘thousands and thousands’ to get rid of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. This looks like a threat to purge all the awkward Labour party members, who insisted on discussing and passing motions against the suspension and denial of the party whip to Jeremy Corbyn. A string of local Labour parties and affiliated organisations and trade unions have passed motions of solidarity with the former Labour leader and condemning the leadership’s attempts to prevent discussion of this issue, and their other attacks on party democracy. These local parties include Pudsey, Harrow East, the Westminster branch of Momentum, New Cross, Dulwich and West Norwood, Milton Keynes North, Milton Keynes South, Hall Green Birmingham, Bristol East, Bristol South and Leeds North East. Momentum held an online rally in support of Corbyn on Saturday, and Hackney South and Sheffield Hallam have passed motions of ‘no confidence’ in David Evans. Hackney South have also passed a similar motion on Keir Starmer. As the peeps on Twitter have observed, this is a revolt of the Labour rank and file against the leadership.

Labour leader Starmer thought party rules are his toys for coercing the membership; he is badly wrong | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

Hence Rayner’s threat to purge the party. This comes after she declared a little while ago that she wouldn’t be in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet if she believed he was an anti-Semite. She has also written an article stating that the EHRC’s findings on anti-Semitism in the Labour party are not up for discussion and that the Labour party was going to implement them. As Mike points out, this is precisely what Starmer and Ange aren’t doing. The EHRC report condemns the political interference in the conduct of cases. But this is what Ange and Starmer are doing. The gruesome twosome are also very conveniently neglecting to mention that in 60 per cent of cases, the EHRC found that the conduct of cases was biased against the accused. Mike’s trial following smears in the press of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial was a kangaroo court, and so have been the cases of very, very many others. Marc Wadsworth’s was notoriously biased. He’s Black, and a long-standing campaigner against real racism and Fascism, including genuine anti-Semitic attacks. But he too was accused on anti-Semitism with a squad of White Blairite women MPs demanding his expulsion. Some commenters compared it to a Klan lynching. They have a point.

And so Rayner has been threatening a mass purge of all those awkward people, who dare to defy the leadership’s lies and its rightward movement back to Blairism.

Rayner defies EHRC by threatening to suspend ‘thousands’ of Labour members | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

And it’s significant that she made this threat at a meeting with the Jewish Labour Movement. I’ve called it a faux Jewish group, and it is. It’s the old Zionist Labour party organisation, Paole Zion, rebranded. This was moribund, effectively dead, until a few years ago when it was revived, given a change of monicker and had masses of money pumped into it from someone, somewhere. It claims to represent the party’s Jews, but in fact you don’t have to be Jewish or even a member of the Labour party to be a member. It was also until Corbyn’s ouster numerically small. It had just over a hundred members, and its active core was probably much, much less. The pro-Corbyn Jewish organisation, Jewish Voice for Labour, was much larger and much more Jewish. Only Jews could be full members, though gentiles could become associate members. But they were sidelined and ignored by the establishment and the media because they’re left-wing Jews, who opposed the Israeli state’s abuse of the Palestinians. The Jewish Labour Movement is much smaller and far less representative, but as they are a right-wing, fanatically Zionist organisation, they are presented as the true representatives of Labour’s Jewish members.

Starmer and Rayner thought there would be little opposition to their expulsion of Corbyn and his supporters and their attempts to reassert Blairite dominance. And now that the party has shown that it will defy them on this, they’re reduced to making threats of purges on a truly Stalinist level.

Which shows their factionalism, authoritarianism and contempt for Labour democracy and the party’s ordinary members.

Vox Political on the Suspension of Wallasey Constituency Labour Party

Mike over at Vox Political also put up a piece today about the suspensions of Wallasey constituency Labour party by the Labour Party’s general secretary, Ian McNicol. Apparently, there had been complaints about bullying and intimidation, though the real reason may have been that the party had voted to deselect Angela Eagle, and was planning another meeting at which the deselection would be approved. It was also planning to pass other decisions, which would be sent to the national party.

Mike wonders whether it Mr McNicol has bothered to investigate the complaint, or whether it is a case, where the authorities have used unsupported excuse of there having been a complaint to stop an event they didn’t like. In Mike’s case, this was where the local council would ban any event they didn’t want using that excuse. The accuracy of the complaint was never investigated, so there was never any proof.

He also makes the point that it does not seem that Mr McNicol issued the party with a written warning before he suspended it, as he is required to do under Chapter 6 of the party’s rule book.

If there is no proof that there was bullying and intimidation in the party, and if no written warning was issued, then Mr McNicol is liable to be investigated and suspended for his infraction of the rules.

See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/20/angela-eagles-local-labour-party-suspended-but-the-decision-may-be-against-the-rules/

This seems to show just how desperate the parliamentary Labour party is to cull Corbyn supporters from the membership, and the complete contempt the Blairites have for the grassroots. They’ve already suspended Brighton, the biggest constituency Labour party. There were allegations of intimidation of anti-Corbynistas in the local Labour party for Bristol East, though Mike has reported that despite the local Labour MP Thangam Debonnaire giving her support to the supposed victims, other people at the meeting claimed it was no rowdier or threatening than usual.

Of course, Blair had similar intolerant attitudes to possible sources of dissent in the Labour party. He had the public schoolboy’s hatred of the trade unions, and one of the first things he did when he took over the Labour party was threaten to cut the party’s ties with them. As the Labour party was partly founded by the unions to represent working people in parliament, this was an attack on a core, founding element of the party.

This also reminds me very strongly of the actions of the Parliamentarians during the Civil War. This was ‘Pride’s Purge’, when Colonel Pride entered parliament on 6th December 1648 to arrest 45 MPs and prevent 78 more from taking their seats. Twenty more MPs refused to take their seats. As a result, the ‘Rump’ parliament was the acquiescent tool of the army. It’s presumably this piece of history which has inspired the name of Tom Pride’s blog, ‘Pride’s Purge’. The rump parliament differs from the current Labour administration in that it was actually very radical. It abolished the House of Lords, the monarchy and declared Britain a commonwealth. Blair reformed, but did not abolish the House of Lords, packing it with more of his supporters. And economically, his followers were very determined to maintain and expand the status quo in the form of capitalism and the power of private industry.

There is one other similarity between the Cromwellian interregnum and Tony Blair, however. Both began terrible invasions of other countries, which has resulted in massive bloodshed and a legacy of terrible national and social division. Cromwell invaded Ireland, an event which is notorious in Irish and British history for the terrible atrocities inflicted on the Roman Catholic population. And Blair joined Bush in the illegal invasion of Iraq, which has also destroyed the country and resulted in massive bloodshed and atrocities.