Another Attack on Labour Democracy as Starmer Bans Anti-Monarchist Group from Affiliating to Constituency Labour Parties

The Guardian posted a piece yesterday reporting that our shambolic, authoritarian leader in the Labour party has purged yet another group. Starmer seems to be trying to steal some of the Tories’ clothes as the leader of a patriotic party. Under Maggie Thatcher, the Tories draped themselves in all the imagery of traditional British patriotism – Union flags, references to Maggie’s hero, Winston Churchill and the Second World War. The 1987 Conservative general election film featured black and white footage of Spitfires zooming around while an excited voice declared ‘It’s great, to be great again’. Except she didn’t make us great. She nearly wrecked the country economically and institutionally while declaring she was. Starmer’s clearly seen how that worked, and wants to do it for the Labour party. Hence photos of him stood with a Union flag parked in a corner somewhere.

Now he’s passed another internal regulation preventing constituency Labour parties from affiliating to the anti-monarchist group, Republic. He justified this by stating that he was a patriot, and that was why he believed in a series of left-wing policies. Well, for now, at least, until he’s told otherwise by Murdoch or his donors. But the same could be said of Republic. Patriotism could be construed as wanting the very best for one’s country. If you adopt that point of view, then Republic are patriots in that they believe the country can be improved by ditching the monarchy.

But who are Republic anyway?

I admit, I’m a royalist, and so I don’t know anything about republican and anti-monarchist movements. The last such organisation I heard about was MAM – the Movement Against the Monarchy, who came and protested the Maundy Thursday service in which the Queen dispensed Maundy money several years ago at Bristol cathedral. I hadn’t even heard of Republic until Starmer acted and the Groan reported the issue. My guess Starmer is afraid that Labour would get embroiled in any controversy that flares up about the planned anti-monarchist demonstrations at the coronation tomorrow if it’s found that these organisations are connected to the Labour party in some way. But it’s still an attack on Labour grassroots democracy.

I realise many people, especially the older generation, strongly object to anti-monarchist demonstrations. This was especially true of the older generation who fought and served in the Second World War. Several of Mum’s older friends had done so, and had the privilege of receiving the Maundy money from Her Maj several decades ago. They were bitterly disgusted by the demonstration by MAM. But democracy says you tolerate opposing viewpoints. You might find Republic deeply offensive, but that shouldn’t deny individual parties the right to affiliate them. That’s their business, not Starmer’s. Although he did justify it by saying it was just putting into action regulations passed two years ago preventing local Labour parties from affiliating to organisations proscribed by the NEC. And boy, is there a list! It includes Jewish Voice for Labour, Sikhs for Labour, pro-Palestinian groups and so on. Any group that gives David Evans a fit of the vapours and causes Thatcherite apparatchiks to clutch their pearls.

There have always been anti-monarchists in the Labour party. When Clement Attlee and the great Labour government of 1948 came to power, the saw themselves in the tradition of a long series of working class radicals like Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense, which argued against the monarchy and aristocracy and supported the American Revolution. Back in the 1980s there was Willie Hamilton, who hated the monarchy as well as much of the British establishment. I remember all the jokes about him. On one of the Saturday morning radio panel shows, the contestants were asked to guess what was happening from a sound clue. You heard a swishing sound, then a scream. The panel’s fun answer was ‘the Queen knighting Willie Hamilton’. I haven’t heard of Republic, I haven’t heard of anyone affiliating to Republic, and I haven’t heard of anyone being put off voting Labour by Republic. I guess some of the radical London councils may have, but they’ve hardly caused a national panic.

This is Starmer trying to turn the Labour party into the Tories Mark 2. It’s more proof that he’s an authoritarian who’s totally unfit to rule. If does this in Labour, what will he do in government?

Sent Off the Suggested Motions from the Labour Left to My Local Labour Party

Okay, folks, I’ve sent off the model motions that the Arise Festival of Left Labour Ideas suggested to their followers and supporters that they should propose them to their local Labour parties ready for the upcoming Labour conference to my local party in south Bristol. I put up a piece yesterday showing what they were: renationalising the public utilities, including education and the NHS; ending the deportations to Rwanda; raising the minimum wage to £15; and stopping the further Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. All excellent policies. I don’t know if they’ll be proposed at the meeting, as the email I got from them about the meeting said they had six already. But you have to try.

As for whether or not they’ll be accepted and passed by conference even if they are passed by the local party, well, unfortunately the ‘100 per cent Zionist’ Starmer is in charge, a true-Blue Labour Tory infiltrator. And there’s Jess Philips, who said that Labour would be even harder on the unemployed than the Tories. Neither of them would welcome these policies, and neither would the rest of the Blairites now packed in the parliamentary Labour party. But there’s always hope.

Update

After sending them off I got a kind reply from the local party secretary stating that they’re only accepting one proposed motion per person. So which one would like I like to choose? It’s a hard one, as they’re all good and necessary. However, I chose the £15 minimum pay rise because people are starving and they need the money now. I really hope it goes through.

Other motions being proposed for the local meeting this Thursday include:

Green New Deal – Proportional Representation – Support for Striking Workers

Reproductive Rights – International Development – Industrial Strategy (End UK Childcare Crisis).

Reproductive rights obviously refers to abortion, which people are afraid is threatened after the repeal of Roe vs Wade in America.

Anti-Semitism Smears: My Email to Local Labour MP, Karin Smyth

As part of my campaign to clear my name of the vile accusations of anti-Semitism that have been anonymously made against me, I have contacted my local MP for Bristol South, Karin Smyth. My email runs

“Dear Karin,

Thank you for all the hard work you have put in for your constituents, your regular briefing to Bristol South Constituency Labour Party and particularly your determination to defend the greatest of British institutions, the NHS. I great appreciate your efforts on this behalf, especially in these arduous times.

I regret that I am contacting you over a personal dispute between me and the NEC, which I find particularly distressing. I have been accused of anti-Semitism, a form of racism of which I have a particular and deep abhorrence. Yesterday I was informed by the Complaints Team at the Labour Party about the matter and instructed to formulate a reply and a defence, if I had one, within seven days. I intend to fight this all the way, as I have always made my opposition to racism, including anti-Semitism, and its related political expressions, Fascism and Nazism, abundantly clear.

I am particularly vexed by the fact that my accusers are anonymous. This is contrary to natural justice and the principles of English law, which says that the accused has the right to face his accuser and question them. I am not convinced by the argument that it is to protect the accuser from anti-Semitic intimidation, as Nazis and anti-Semites are rightly hated by the vast majority of Brits and those who stand up to them correctly viewed as heroes. It is far more like the use of anonymous informants by totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet bloc.

I am going to fight these lies and smears, though I regret that knowledge of previous cases has given me little hope that I will win my case. I have no confidence in the NEC and Labour party justice, which I believe to be nothing short of Kafkaesque show trials and kangaroo courts.

I would be very grateful indeed if you could look into this matter and suggest ways in which I may carry my defence further.

Yours faithfully,

David Sivier”

I am also contacting a number of other organisations and individuals about this in order to publicise this grotesque travesty of justice. I will let you know how this goes, and whether I receive replies.

Haredi Jews Send Letter of Support to Diane Abbott

This is another fascinating piece refuting the allegations that the Labour party is institutionally anti-Semitic. On the 29th March 2019 Skwawkbox posted an article reporting that the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations – UOHC – wrote a letter supporting Diane Abbott.

The letter was written as a riposte to attacks on Abbott for not intervening when her local party passed a motion denying that Labour is institutionally anti-Semitic. Supposedly some Jewish members left in tears. The Skwawkbox notes that most of the media accounts did not mention that the motion was brought and supported by Jewish party members. As for Abbott herself, Labour party rules specifically prohibit MPs from interfering in motions by the constituency parties.

The UOHC is the umbrella organisation for Haredi – ultra-Orthodox – Jews, who are not represented by the Board of Deputies, along with secular members of the Jewish community. The good rabbis write

We are aware that you often spend much time and trouble to assist constituents and others with their personal and other problems, and that the ethnicity and religion etc., of those that you assist makes not an iota of difference to the assistance that you generously provide.  We hope and trust that you will continue your battle against racism, and your other endeavours for the general population of this country for many years.

Shraga Stern, an activist in Hackney’s Haredi community, welcomed the letter and mentioned that when Jeremy Corbyn signed an early day motion in 2010 calling for the relocation of Yemeni Jews to Britain, Diane Abbott had been the second to sign it and had done so without a moment’s hesitation. Stern also said

While it is sad that the UOHC letter had to be written at all, I am delighted at this instance of public Jewish support for Ms Abbott, whom I regard as a true friend of the Jewish people.

Orthodox Jewish union issues letter of strong support for Diane Abbott

Abbott is the most vilified female MP in parliament, a fact the media neglected to mention when they were falling over themselves to cover the misogynistic and anti-Semitic abuse directed at Blairite female MPs like Luciana Berger. Berger has suffered real, horrific abuse, but this has been covered by the press and media simply to discredit Corbyn, despite the fact that it has no connection to him at all. And the biased media have absolutely no interest in upsetting this story by giving the same amount of coverage to left-wing Labour MPs, who suffer the same abuse.

Stern was also one of the members of the Jewish community, who attended Finsbury Park mosque when Jeremy Corbyn visited it. I think he may also have suffered attacks from the Jewish Chronicle, which is absolutely outraged that any Jew should support Corbyn, and which has been trying to discredit those who do. One of their latest victims is a Holocaust survivor, who also signed a letter by twelve other members of the Haredi community supporting Corbyn. They have tried to suggest that this person couldn’t really be a survivor of the Shoah, as they left in 1939, before the Final Solution got underway in 1942. However, the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Israel defines a Holocaust survivor as any Jew, who lived through the Nazi era. The Nazis got into power in 1933, and the concentration camps were opened that same year. And from the start the regime was persecuting the Jews horrifically before the official deportations started. So the JC’s allegations simply won’t wash. They prove instead what a vile, mendacious rag the Chronicle is.

As for Abbott’s unswerving support of the Jewish community in her constituency and elsewhere, I can believe that very easily. She has always been a dedicated campaigner against racism and discrimination, most obviously for the Black community but also for other ethnic groups. It’s her utter opposition to racism that has led to her demonisation by the right-wing media, and the vile hate messages she has to endure.

Corbyn and Abbott have never been anti-Semites and, like the very many others falsely smeared, have enjoyed the confidence and support of large sections of Britain’s diverse Jewish community for the care and work they have done on their behalf, and that of all the ethnic groups in Britain. 

New Labour Sets Up Delegate-Only Meetings to Exclude Corbyn Supporters from Nominations

Mike today has posted up another piece about the anti-democratic dirty tricks pursued by the Blairites to stop Labour party members voting for Jeremy Corbyn, according to an article in the Evening Standard. Mike reported yesterday how Conor McGinn, the Labour MP for St. Helen’s North, had misdirected Corbyn supporters to Century House for a meeting over a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. McGinn and at least six of his cronies held the real meeting behind closed doors over in the Town Hall. When a group of women, who had come to support Corbyn and been misled, tackled him about it, McGinn reported them to the police and then wrote a completely misleading account of the incident for Politics Home, claiming to have been threatened and intimidated by them.

This process has been repeated in Blaenau Gwent, where Labour party members were prevented from attending a meeting to nominate, who they wanted as leader of the Labour party. The CLP instead chose Smiffy. It is not remotely coincidental that the local Labour MP is a director of Progress, the Blairite faction in the Labour party.

Now it also appears to have been done in Chuka Umunna’s local party in Streatham. The party’s grassroots members were locked out of the meeting, and the nomination was made by the party’s general committee, which chose Smudger. A party spokesman told the Standard that they had to do it like that, as the party’s membership was too large for everyone to be notified at such a short notice.

Mike points out that this is rubbish. They could have used email. If the problem was that the membership was too large to fit in the usual premises, then they could have done what Jeremy Corbyn does, and booked larger premises. Mike speculates that the people, who’ve arranged such anti-democratic tricks, don’t realise the amount of ill-will they’re creating for themselves, ill-will that will be expressed later on. Or they simply don’t care, as they’re trying to create a literal party within a party with Labour.

Mike concludes his article with the following recommendation

In the meantime, anyone who feels mistreated by this attempt to sidestep democracy is entitled to express their displeasure to the NEC – perhaps in the form of a multiple-signature letter or petition; perhaps with a motion of no confidence in the nomination decision and the process by which it was made.

See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/07/30/anti-corbyn-stitch-up-in-labour-leader-nomination-process-is-another-attack-on-democracy/

I’m not surprised that Chuka Umunna’s CLP in Streatham have tried this trick. Umunna is a Blairite through and through. A little while ago, when it seemed the party was going a little too far to the left for his liking, he warned that if it continued to do so, he and other ‘aspiring’ Blacks and Asians would leave the Labour party. This was part of a general warning by Blairites that a leftward turn by the Labour party would lose them the votes of all the aspirant, upwardly mobile ‘swing voters’ Blair, Broon and Mandelson had cultivated as part of their electoral strategy.

In Umunna’s case, there’s a nasty undercurrent of racial entitlement in this. The Labour party was founded to protect the interests of the working class and poor. At the heart of Socialism is a profound belief in equality, a belief that also motivates Socialists to support the independence movements that arose in the British colonies abroad, and support Blacks and Asians in their campaigns for racial equality at home. But Umunna’s statement suggests he believes that the majority of British people, regardless of colour, should continue to suffer if they are poor or working class, in order to reward Black and Asian swing voters, who are, like their White part counterparts, likely to come from the more affluent sectors of the population. It’s a nasty, racist attitude, though I doubt Umunna sees it as such. He probably sees it as supporting the rights of Blacks and Asians to join the affluent White groups, a demand for equality, even if it means the further impoverishment of everyone poorer than them.

It’s also particularly toxic politically in the present climate post-Brexit. Brexit has led to a massive increase in racism and racist incidents across Britain. Many racists believe that the vote to leave the EU has given them tacit permission to express publicly their private racial hatred. Dissatisfaction and frustration by the White working class was one of the fundamental causes of the Brexit vote. By pursuing the votes of affluent ‘swing voters’, Blair, Brown and Mandelson left very many members of the working class feeling left behind, as conditions for the working class generally worsened. Tory papers, such as the Scum and the Heil have consistently attacked affirmative action campaigns to improve opportunities for Blacks and Asians, and immigration, as discrimination against the White British. Umunna’s comment could easily be seen by disaffected Whites as confirming their belief that New Labour has no interested in helping the poor or working class, unless they are Black or Asian.

Owen Jones, in his book, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, makes the point that despite the abandonment of the working class by New Labour, the working class as a whole isn’t racist, although the Tory press has done its level best to claim that it is. He describes a strike at a large industrial plant against the use of cheap immigrant labour. Yet while the Tory press claimed that this was purely a racist attack on the employment of migrant workers, the trade union that called the strike did so partly because it was concerned about the exploitation of the migrant labourers, who did not share the same working conditions as the British fellows, and were forbidden to join a union.

The demands by Umunna and his White counterparts that the Labour party should continue to focus on getting the votes of the middle class, and promoting the ambitions of the aspirant few against the impoverished many, should be strongly rejected. Mike himself has quoted surveys from Labour supporters that show that social aspiration rarely, if at all, figures as one of their concerns. Furthermore, the neoliberal policies Umunna and the rest of the Blairites have embraced, have actually destroyed social mobility.

If Umunna and the rest of them are serious about restoring social mobility, and enabling Blacks and Asians, as well as Whites, to rise higher, then they need to go back to the old Social Democratic consensus. The architect of this strand of Labour ideology, Tony Crosland, argued that it was in the interests of business to support the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state, as this allowed the workers to buy more of their products, and so stimulated both production and profitability. And he also argued that there was no need for more radical forms of industrial democracy, such as works councils and worker directors, if trade unions had an active role in negotiating with management, and workers had good chances of promotion.

If New Labour returns to this policy, then it will both bring prosperity back to working people, regardless of their colour, and get more Blacks and Asians into the middle classes. It isn’t social democrats like Corbyn blocking the social advancement of Blacks and Asians – or anyone else, for that matter. It’s neoliberals concerned to hold on to the status and privileges of the rich at the expense of the poor, no matter what colour they are.