The SKWAWKBOX has broken a number of exclusives on the deeply problematic selection of candidates for May’s local elections in the London borough of Enfield, in which numerous applicants were approved onto the ‘panel’ of candidates without being asked a number of mandatory interview questions – and in some cases without being able to demonstrate basic literacy.
The successful candidates – by then councillors – promptly elected the person who had overseen their selection as the council’s new leader, ousting a long-serving council leader popular with all wings of the local Labour Party.
The issue has spun into calls by local CLPs (constituency Labour parties) – and then by around half the council’s Cabinet and others – for the national party to investigate what locals were calling an ‘ethnic coup’. Alleged abuse of Labour group employees by the new regime also drew outraged messages.
The ‘coalition of resistance’ to the ‘coup’ came from left, right and neither. The NEC’s decision to mount an investigation was a seismic shock to the Labour hard right, to which the new council leader and her allies are closely linked.
Now the mainstream media have begun to cover the issues – but (again) without crediting the SKWAWKBOX as the original source of the revelations.
An article in Sunday’s Sunday Times went into events in Enfield in considerable detail on the Enfield scandal – but the paper couldn’t quite bring itself to name this blog, instead referring to ‘a left-wing website’ and only then in relation to one aspect of the situation:
Don McGowan, an Enfield Labour councillor until this year, said all six black councillors seeking reselection in the borough, which is about 17% black, were deselected in favour of Turkish candidates, though two were reinstated and one was later selected for another ward. McGowan told a left-wing website he believed “it amounts to a coup by one ethnic group against another”.
The deselection of the councillors was a SKWAWKBOX exclusive, as were the issues with the selections, the letters sent to the Labour Party by local CLPs, by the council’s deputy leader and by an array of cabinet members and current and former councillors and officers – and the party’s confirmation of an investigation.
But the information is spreading and the right – in Enfield and elsewhere – is under increasing pressure as its behaviour at local and national level is coming under growing scrutiny, in large part because of information published exclusively by this blog and then often picked up by ‘mainstream’ media.
This pressure is enabling Labour more and more to become a party that represents both the movement and the government-in-waiting that this country desperately needs – and that matters more than anything else.
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Andrew Gilligan has ample form, as many will attest.
And now, looking at the ST article, don’t. Gillingan adds nothing new, but the main reason to avoid are the utter yahooish “readers comments” (some 30 of them)
Not giving credit is all part of Murdoch’s decades-long dumbing down of both his own servants AND “the great unwashed”. Let’s ensure we do NOT use our toilet paper to knowingly or unknowingly facilitate access to any source of knowledge and facts to the spoon-fed, blinded rump of the plebs.