Progress founder Liam Byrne has won selection as Labour’s candidate for the forthcoming West Midlands mayoral election, crossing the line on second-preference votes to beat rivals Salma Yaqoob and Pete Lowe.
The right-winger benefited last year from a bizarre endorsement by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell – although Momentum’s Jon Lansman angrily denied offering Byrne his or Momentum’s support. Byrne was also backed by former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson and right-leaning unions.
Byrne now faces Tory mayor Andy Street in the contest, although an election with two white men as the principal contenders in one of the UK’s most ethnically-diverse areas will raise eyebrows.
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This is the twozzer who gave a propaganda gift to the tories. Sadly, this says a lot about the membership who selected him. 🙁
He certainly did. John Ashworth did not seem to learn anything from it either.
” this says a lot about the membership who selected him.”
Just like those ‘Labour Heartland’ electors 🙂
Yet another Blairite Right Winger being lined up for a well-paid job (with no real function other than to con local people that central government-imposed austerity is under their local control ! ).
Of more significance for Labour is the fact that the now quite possible new leader of the Labour Party , ex DPP, Sir Kier Starmer , since 2018, is the ONLY member (by invitation only) in the entire House of Commons of the European section of that uber sinister globalist ‘thinktank’ neoliberal capitalist promoting body, the Trilateral Commission ! See the downloadable membership lists of the various regional parts at the bottom of the online page here http://trilateral.org/page/7/membership.
So Labour might well shift from being led briefly by a lifelong socialist to being led by a creature of the globalist capitalist oligarchy in only four short years ! Beyond tragic ! Do the Membership grasp what a sinister pro capitalist creature Starmer is ?
Lets hope for a loss then at the mayoral election
Whether you are George Galloway or Alistair Campbell, this is a public line that should never be crossed,
As in Campbellend , vote Libdem and Mandy , every day undermining Labour and Corbyn , yehh right !
Whats in the water in the Wmidlands,they have got to be on somthing to select a Muppet like Byrne
May as well vote toerag…Given the ‘quality’ of W.Mids so-called ‘labour politicians it’d make no odds anyway.
Better still, get shut of the useless mayoral positions overall. They’re all a pile o’shite.
I’ve asked this question “What do these Mayors actually do”? Never received a satisfactory reply.
Pick up big salary and send out press releases maybe?
I could give a f. if these posts of ‘Mayor’ were anything significant in terms of proper devolution rather than a Tory scam and part of an alternative gravy train alternative to the HoL.
“Out of a total of 6,948 valid votes, Liam Byrne received 3,105 first preference votes, Pete Lowe received 2,034 and Salma Yaqoob received 1,809. Five votes were recorded as invalid.
“After the redistribution of second preferences, Liam Byrne had received 425 additional votes and Pete Lowe had received 686 additional votes. A further 698 votes were non-transferrable.
“Therefore, after second preferences had been distributed, Liam Byrne received 56.5% of the vote and Pete Lowe received 43.5%.”
And so the Labour party returns to the New Labour party I walked away from ? Corbyns nicer gentler politics just got trashed
Who was really surprised reading that headline.
We will _not_ get another chance like we had with Corbyn.
I’d put some money on Starmer winning the leadership. May as well get something positive out of it…
Nvla, “We will _not_ get another chance like we had with Corbyn.”
I’d agree if I thought the UK would remain static – or even change slowly enough for the Tories to keep up – but I don’t.
The Tories’ whole strategy to date has been about hanging onto power, hiding the fact they haven’t a clue how to do brexit and hoping for the best – that doesn’t bode well for it being a brilliant success.
Just preventing the UK from grinding into gridlock is going to be like keeping 100 plates spinning on sticks with one hand while playing whack-a-mole with the other – and Tories are not exactly overburdened with talent, or very quick on their feet physically or intellectually.
Come the next election I think the landscape might be very different and I don’t think it’s wildly optimistic to hope the electorate will finally know what incompetent buffoons the Tories really are.
Wild, politically naïve, optimism on your part , David McNiven. In five years time the economic and political landscape will undoubtedly be ‘different’, and even more febrile than now. A new opportunity for Labour ? Nope. By the time of the next likely General Election Labour will have been under a thoroughly neoliberal warmed-up neo Blairite, ‘just tack slightly to the Left of the Tories’ – or sometimes even try to outflank them to the right on being ‘pro business’, and attacking the unemployed and poor (as Scottish Labour did for years) , probably Keir Starmer ‘leadership’, for five years or so. The Party’s current 500,000+ membership will be back down to its pre 2015 ‘Corbyn Surge’ numbers, ie, well below 200,000. And the small radical Left in the membership will have been comprehensively purged through trumped-up charges , or will have simply left through disillusion with Labour’s status-quo-maintaining policy offer, and constant trimming to fit with the line of the mass media. That is, the Party will be just as it was under, Kinnock, Blair, Brown, and Miliband, until Jeremy’s temporary leadership victory for a while changed the line of march – and temporarily avoided Labour following all of Europe’s traditional social democratic parties into electoral and membership numbers oblivion.
It is quite true that in five years the destruction of the entire public realm and civil society , including our NHS, and mass deprivation, will have advanced to dire levels, and masses of people will be searching for radical solutions. BUT tragically, from a Labour Party under the control of its triumphant centrist careerist PLP and leadership, the desperate working class mass electorate will find no answers or inspiration there.
And the next act of the tragedy that is UK politics to come ? Most likely a re-run of mainland European politics of the last ten years, with a massive rise in the opportunist, xenophobic, pseudo-radical Far Right populist parties to offer apparently ‘radical solutions’ to fill the political void that will be left vacant by a Labour Party returned decisively to its bad old middle class-oriented centrist pro-status quo maintaining politically bankrupt ways .
jpenney I’m as pessimistic about Labour’s short to mid term prospects as you – I quit the party as soon as its reversion to Blairism looked inevitable.
There are far too many variables to predict specifics for this parliament with any confidence – the economy may survive brexit relatively unscathed or it may not – but the predictors of boom times ahead have been very quiet for a very long time.
If the UK’s economic performance should lag substantially behind the EU’s I suspect there may be some minds changed.
The Tories’ reputation in the toilet is as far as my ‘optimism’ takes me.
Hardly naïveté to suggest that a public newly aware of the full extent of the UKIP/Tory con might demand change.
I disagree with your prediction that the far right will avoid blame and pick up more support when the brexit jobs bonus the people were promised BY THEM is seen to have been a lie – just a profits bonus for the disaster capitalists at the cost of even more job losses.