Veteran Labour firebrand backs candidate: “he gives me hope – I urge CLPs and unions to vote for him”
Denis Skinner, one of Labour’s best-known and best-loved MPs – except by right-wingers on the receiving end of his equally well-known quips and tongue-lashings – has backed Richard Burgon in the race to become the Labour Party’s next deputy leader.
Skinner said of his decision:
I’m backing Richard to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Richard is a socialist who never gives in and never gives up. He gives me hope for the future of our Party. I urge CLPs & unions to nominate Richard and members to vote for him
The endorsement by such a giant of the movement is a huge boost for Burgon’s campaign, which is being chaired by Laura Pidcock, another hugely popular Labour star.
Having already won the support of the giant Unite union and the Bakers’ union, Burgon requires a nomination from one more union or any Labour-affiliated socialist society – in reality the Socialist Health Association or the Socialist Education Association, as many of the other socialist societies are essentially Blairite-run fronts – to make it into the full ballot of members.
Any leadership or deputy candidate who does not achieve the affiliate nomination threshold can qualify for the full vote if 33 CLPs (constituency Labour parties) nominate him or her. CLPs who have not already held nomination meetings will be doing so shortly, so check with your local secretary for the date and location.
The SKWAWKBOX asks all Labour members, supporters and affiliates to make sure that both Burgon and Dawn Butler are on the ballot paper – and to give first- and second- preference votes to them.
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Please come out of the trench and say you’re backing Burgon for deputy leader.
Byrgon and Butler second preference can’t be much clearer than that.
Bloody spellchecker again!…Burgon and Butler second preference
I will be voting for Richard. I listened to his speeches in support of Jeremy during the coup and was impressed He is a socialist a democrat and is a loyal and decent man whose support for his elected leader never faltered.
Off message but more importantly a mr Errol Graham starved to death after his social security?…was cancelled by our DWP…The poor victim was just four and a half stone when he was found in his flat.No electric or gas,not even the basics for survival in the middle of winter.RIP mr Graham and what sort of country allows legalised euthanasia as an official policy of a genocidal government against the most vulnerable people in society.Sick.sick society and the people who vote for the Scum Tory party.
Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey has described food banks as the “perfect way” to help the poor.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-dwp-chief-says-food-21379208
A society run by Right Wing Neo-Liberal Tory Barbarians who have just taken £300m from Northern Labour Councils and transferred it to Southern Tory Councils.
Research shows since Tories eliminated poverty from local Govt settlement rules and counted population size only they as Reverse Robin Hoods have robbed Northern Labour Councils of £6b and gifted Tory Southern Councils £3.5b so no change there then!
Back Becky, Back Burgon – the best and ONLY left wing democratic socialists candidates!
“Barbarians who have just taken £300m from Northern Labour Councils and transferred it to Southern Tory Councils.”
I think, post-election, this comes under the heading of ‘self-inflicted (or ‘endorsed’) wound’.
You can’t beat the Bolsover Beast.
Many have tried.
Is it acceptable to leave anyone with nothing, does the safety net exist,
It’s always the other, it’s acceptable to kill benefits claimants because they dont count,
It plays well with cheap and nasty Tory party base,
Now remind me, what do we call such people,
PMQ’s
Are you a fascist, then why are you murdering poor people
many more dreadful cases like that. a gentleman also collapsed and died in a queue at DWP JOB CENTRE innCardiff Nov or Dec last year. 2 weeks aft declared “fit for work”. Heart breaking… even to type this. Dreadful. While a foreign company is paid hundreds of millions to squeeze the most vulnerable. Where’s the sense, economy and humanity in that??? False economy. No sense and NO HUMANITY.
Here’s one reason UK propaganda media don’t give much air time or journalism to the revolution in France against Macron’s neoliberal re-aligning the economy so corporations and rich Rentier class can literally squeeze the life out of working people. Don’t want to give the Brits ideas and examples of solidarity.
Motivated workers can engage in real action that hurts Rentiers and enablers and helps the most vulnerable, even, most likely, saving lives.
https://www.leftvoice.org/the-robin-hoods-of-france-electrical-workers-cut-electricity-to-sell-out-union-reconnect-for-countrys-poor
Yes Maria. It is a DELIBERATE ploy to keep the NATIONWIDE French riots iff the MSM, in the UK, USA, Australia, the Caribbean and many places in Europe !!! A caller challenged Iain Dale on LBC on that. Even Iain, for whom i have some regard, replied with a nonsense that “the French riots were not new”, so “not news”. Funny that. Why then the none stop propaganda on the AS smears, EVERY TIME anyone raised an accusation without the slightest trace of evidence! The French riots over 68 weeks now, have been ongoing with many horrific injuries, including eyes knocked out. No other international riots are ignored like that. The MSM usuals would have been counting riots elsewhere in days, with hysterical descriptions of “the third day of riots”. Yet 69, 70 weeks of rioting, minutes away by plane, an hour and a bit by train, AND swimmable… NOTHING. “Not news”. People declared “Fit for work” by a renamed ATOS, a PRIVATELY OWNED company, those people die within weeks, and in the queue at the DWP Job Centres. No double hour segments on LBC or Talkradio. Doubt these national tragedies even get a mention on the BBC. Unforgivable, inhumane, WILFUL TORY CRUELTIES now. Not newsworthy for the the BBC, LBC or Talkradio.
Maybe they’ll make it up to those northern councils in other ways?
Doris might let them charge entrance fees for parks, libraries, council offices, jobcentres, shopping centres.
5G repeaters on lamp posts will soon let them charge drivers automatically for road use, parking, use of street lighting – and why should pedestrians get off scot free? Once facial recognition cameras on smart phones are up to snuff they just have to make us wear them on our chests all the time by law.
Anything can be charged for, MI5.2.0 can keep an eye on “terrorists” from an armchair and we’ll all simultaneously be the oppressors and the oppressed.
God’s chosen people will finally have evidence of all that antisemitism that’s been going unpunished since the evil goy Corbyn got elected.
Anyone else find it a bit offensive to be deemed UN-chosen?
This is in response to what Joseph O’Keefe said at the end of his 10.21pm post – ie ‘Sick.sick society and the people who vote for the Scum Tory party.’
The page I’ve linked to below has three article/pieces about the death of Errol Graham AND other people who have died in similar circumstances. And as far as I can ascertain Joseph, only the Mirror and the Guardian and the Daily Star covered the story (I looked through at least a hundred of the search results that came up, and it would appear that most of the MSM didn’t cover the story), the point being that the vast majority of people who voted Tory don’t get to hear about these tragic deaths, or they’ve been led to believe that such people were just scroungers anyway. Anyhow, the following is a clip from one of the articles:
Denise McKenna, co-founder of the Mental Health Resistance Network (MHRN), said the network was “absolutely devastated and saddened beyond words to hear of the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr Graham”.
She said: “We are enraged that the DWP continues to treat the lives of people who live with mental distress as disposable.
“This level of cruelty is outside of anything that would happen in a civilised society.
“The fact that Mr Graham had not responded to attempts to contact him following his failure to attend the work capability assessment (WCA) should have raised alarm bells over his safety, but instead the DWP took the opportunity to stop his social security entitlements.”
She said it was not surprising that Graham had stopped engaging with his GP, as specialist mental health services had been “decimated and most people with severe and enduring mental health problems have been left with virtually no support.
https://dpac.uk.net/2020/01/disability-news-service-news-23-january/
If we had state owned utilities we could legislate to stop electric gas and water from being cut off especially when the persons are vulnerable….and in the middle of winter its a death sentence for having no money.I would support the idea of a charge of manslaughter against the DWP and the utilities.Does no money mean that you die an awful death.and his this what its come to in 2020….No Money=death.?The United kingdom….?
Joseph
There are rules that stop people being cut off in winter, it cannot happen to vulnerable people,
Unfortunately vulnerable people by definition are not great at taking advantage of the protections,
Bottom line we need to change the language, no more playing the game, they only understand two emotions greed and fear,
Time to put some fear into them
On a point of history, as the french keep getting mentioned,
What do we think was the last thought that went through the heads of the aristocracy
Oh fuck
I thought we were in charge
Ungrateful bastards
Apparently our membership now stands at a record 580,000, The membership numbers have been significantly boosted by the 140,000 who have joined the Labour Party since the GE.
Anecdotal reports from CLPs suggest that a substantial proportion of these new members are intending to support Keir Starmer
I can believe that.
Starmer is very popular with LibDems, too; and they’re desperate for a human being they can rally round, having suffered a recent ‘not-on-this-planet’ experience. They also relate to his ‘pro-EU’ reputation.
That implies that the membership had fallen to 440,000 prior to the election, from a high of 560,000 if I remember correctly, and seems to suggest that many of them are now re-joining since the GE and Jeremy announcing that he’s standing down.
But I don’t recall the membership falling as low as 440.000 prior to the GE, and 480,000 was the lowest figure I ever came across.
There seems to be a lot of purely ‘anecodotal’ pseudo evidence being flung about by the press, from the ghastly Guardian to the, always hostile to any Leftism, Times, to the effect that hordes of ‘moderates’ have joined the Labour Party since December . And equally purely selective ‘anecdotal’ evidence also , based on a selective few Right wing CLP secretaries spouting to the press, that ‘most of them joined to vote for Starmer’.
Very hard to know how much of this is the usual Progress and Labour First propaganda fed to their usual compliant press pals. There appears to be no hard supporting data officially from the Party. Why didn’t these ‘moderate hordes’ pile in during the 2016 post Coup Leadership contest to support Owen Smith ?
It could be true though – in which case it would be very ironic for the Party to elect precisely the man, Starmer, who set out ever since the Referendum result to commit Labour to betray its promise to ‘respect the Referendum result’ , and hence had a key responsibility for losing us our 52 Leave-voting Labour heartlands seats in 2019. And Starmer is a man with all the charisma , and fresh post Blairite thinking, of a block of wood – so very quickly Labour’s policy offer under Starmer would revert to the Blair/Brown/Miliband days of always staying just a tad to the Left of the Tory policies – no matter how swiftly rightwards the Tories themselves are moving.
Labour with just that strategy lost our Scottish ex heartland worth around 50 seats forever to the Left-faking SNP (long before Jeremy was even Leader), and last year lost, probably forever again, our 52 oldest heartland English and Welsh seats by chasing the Lib Dems on Brexit . And of course local Labour Councils in these areas have steadily eroded support for Labour for a decade, and more, much more, with their craven administration of Tory austerity, and their endemic arrogant corruption, cronyism, and nepotism. Labour at local council level never adopted the post 2015 ‘New Corbynite Left anti austerity politics’ in any way . The next huge defeat for our Party will be at local council level – starting this May.
The endless corruption of the Labour Right, their ruthless sabotage throughout the four years of ‘Corbynism’, and the utter spinelessness of the Old Labour Left around Jeremy, Abbott, and McDonnell, and Lansman – made possible only by a compliant middle class membership imbued with totally non-socialist left Liberal politics, means that the ghastly neo-Blairite , Starmer might as well be the next Leader, because Labour has now had its ‘PASOK Moment’ of catastrophic electoral collapse, and regardless of the vain hopes of the few socialist on here, there is no way back for Labour as a mass membership-based Party rooted in the working class. Labour might as well amalgamate with the Lib Dems, to be a middle class ‘centre right’ party of the South and some of the big cities in England and Wales only – possibly even promoting a policy to their middle class voter base of ‘rejoining the EU at the first opportunity’ !” Labour will never again form a government in the UK on its own. It’s a dead parrot of a Party the Labour Right look quite likely to ‘win back from Corbynism’.
The sooner the small band of socialists still in the Party, and beavering away for Long-Bailey and Burgon, and hoping for a ‘recovery of the Left’ at some distant point, so wasting their time with this now lost to the Left Party, the better. But no doubt it will take socialists in the Party about five to ten years of future defeat by the Right for this to sink in. Meanwhile old PLP ‘Left-faking’ con men like John McDonnell , a key backstabber of Jeremy over the key Brexit policy issue, will keep on taking their huge MP salaries and posing as genuine socialists ! No-one will be more relieved that we lost the 2019 General Election than John McDonnell – the first ‘run on the pound’ after the election of a ‘Corbynite’ Labour government, and the reality that , beyond his empty blether, Shadow Chancellor McDonnell and his chums had NO strategy at all to face up to the destructive power of the global markets, would have been all too evident !
Allan – You may well be right, I mis-remembered the figure, it should have been 114,000 and not
140,000. It is still undeniably a substantial number of new members and their voting intentions will be bound to have an impact on the result.It is also worth noting that 14,700 have registered as supporters and will also have a vote. A total of c128,700.