Analysis Breaking Exclusive

Video exclusive: “It’s not called the struggle for nothing” – Lavery responds to day’s events, tells members I understand your frustrations but stay in and fight

Leading left-wing Labour MP Ian Lavery has issued an urgent video calling for members of the party who want to see a genuine alternative to respond to today’s events by staying in and fighting for Labour’s future.

Lavery tells members he fully understands their frustrations at the actions of party leader Keir Starmer, but that this only makes it all the more essential that they respond by renewing their determination to organise and win, for the sake of the millions of desperate people who need radical Labour policies enacted:

Lavery is right. There have been many saying today – including many sockpuppet accounts no doubt hoping to spread the idea – that they will leave the party, but that will play exactly into the hands of those trying to sicken and drive away the left so the doors can be walled up after them.

And his call is all the more urgent, given the resolve to organise for a leadership challenge that has been galvanised among Labour’s left MPs by today’s woeful responses by Keir Starmer.

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30 comments

  1. He should’ve stood for leader rather than Becky. We need Ian Lavery more than ever. I’m struggling to stay in the party at the moment but will wait and see how the NEC elections go. But, it doesn’t look good at the moment perhaps we should stop calling him Starmer but call him Storma because he’s full of %@&!

    1. Have just rejoined. It`s not right to treat Rebecca Long Baily as she has been by Starmer. You need to be in to have a say.

  2. That leadership challenge needs to happen NOW not next year, by when, with plenty of warning, Starmer will have purged enough left wingers that whoever wants to challenge won’t be able to get nominations.

  3. If there’s going to be a leadership challenge, it needs to happen tomorrow. I’m in my 60s and I was contacted a half hour ago by my stepmother to say she is handing in her party card. A more mild mannered, gentle woman you could never hope to meet. Six months down the line many like her who never express themselves on social media will already be water under the bridge.

    1. But we did fight. We fought and fought and fought. And learned that we can’t succeed against those who fight dirty.

      And we learned that we should have won in 2017, but a bunch of twats threw it.

      How can we fight for a party that despises the worker?

    2. I am hoping that somthing happens,its all gone too far away from the real meaning of the working-class based Labour party.The hypocrisy of a knight led Labour party still beggers belief,but my membership runs out along with me at the end of the month.I would love to see a rebellion against the establishment Labour party and genuine mps take over.,but lodgic dictates why should they do it now when they left Corbyn and the membership to flounder on the rocks.I await with some urgency.and rejoice that the penny has dropped that we are bleeding away the membership and the funding.if this right wing establishment pantomime carrys on.

      1. Ps iTs a first for me to be called a sockpuppet by anyone especially coming from Squawkbox whom I have a lot of respect and understanding of their position in needing the survival of a principled left wing Labour party.They have put their neck on the line for the working-class and the Democratic socialist labour party ITs an entirely different proposition for me and many others who can afford the Luxury of independent thinking because of our financial position.and take a stand to walk away and concentrate on a different avenue to see a fair and just society.. I am still thinking abou after today’s events comrades.

  4. Nothing on it in the MSM or social media yet that I’ve seen, but it seems to me that the economic ill effects of this crisis on jobs may be more evenly spread between the working class and the educated middle class than we’ve seen before.
    When all the sums are done and they understand the incompetence of Johnson and Cummings the middle classes might be angrier than they’ve ever been I think. Maybe as angry as us.
    Sadly, Starmer will likely be a more attractive proposition to the middle class than Corbyn or Lavery though so it takes me back to thinking we’re screwed if he’s still in charge by then.
    Whether he can cope is questionable but he may get a longer honeymoon than is usual to prove he can’t.

  5. Said it before and clearer now,
    Ian Lavery is the perfect interim leader and hatchet man, Ian does the dirty work and hands over to the next generation
    Gives new leader a blank sheet and the party clear red water free from interference

  6. Am hearing that song in my head about too little too late…

    It’s easy for Ian (seems decent) to tell people to stay in the arena but the reality of being there isn’t his world. I’m a carer, so I have to survive on £3k a year, whilst saving taxpayers £20k+ a year. Moving upwards, minimum wage earner gets less than £20k per year. Income for most of us is stagnant. Bills aren’t.

    Meanwhile, Ian fights the good fight on well over £70k a year (plus expenses etc etc etc etc etc etc etc).

    Really struggling to find the loyalty or dedication to follow someone who could have done this last year.

    Labour is a fucking siren. Just a different style of the Nigel Farage ilk.

  7. Starmer’s sacking of RLB led to ‘unintended’ consequences? Are you sure?

    The problem is now that ‘the diamond woman’ Maxine Peake has successfully stitched up RLB & shown that any criticism of Israel is ‘once again fake news’. The serious question is what damage has this done to the Palestinian cause & should you ever trust the judgement of RLB? Beware Media Celebs posing as ‘Fake Socialists’.

    1. Maxine Peake didn’t force Long-Bailey to retweet her piece. It’s ridiculous to suggest that – MP’s more than anyone have to take responsibility for their own public statements and actions.
      On top of that, Peake told the truth and therefore so did Long-Bailey.
      The only stitch-ups were by Starmer, the MSM and the same scum that deliberately threw the last two elections – Labour’s BlairNazis.

  8. If Lavery was ‘The man’ WHY didn’t he throw his hat into the ring last time out?

    ‘Change from within’? Yeah, well we heard that from all colours of government about the EU. And guess what? Nowt changed; the EU continued taking the piss and in the end we said: ‘Sound – see ya’.

    Some things just cannot be changed. The centrists and careerists are too entrenched to be dug out. The rot has set in and it’s irreversible.

    We didn’t finish the course of antibiotics; the bacteria have developed resistance, and we’ve got no new antibiotic to counter it.

    Anyone thinking they can change that party is pissing into the wind. You cannot break a rock with eggs.

    1. Indeed, The Toffee. Spare us the posturing Labour pseudo-Left bullshit, Lavery ! Ian Lavery , the , according to Skwawkbox, ‘big Left Winger’, in fact has a lot of hard questions to answer about his very sizeable personal benefits taken from the by then almost totally defunct NUM, when its leader – and that isn’t just a smear by the capitalist press , but hard fact. It probably wasn’t ‘illegal’, but was only ‘legal’ in the same way the ‘Rover Four’ drew down £40m for themselves when the Rover car company collapsed. Lavery and McDonnell, Abbott, Trickett, Jeremy, et al, and the rest of the cowardly rabble of the PLP old ‘Left ‘, simply want to keep the illusion alive that Labour can ever be a genuine fighting vehicle for socialism, or even for effective resistance to austerity, to secure enough of a naive Left-leaning membership cohort in the Party to support their continued personal gravy train of safe parliamentary careers. Laverty didn’t fall for the adoption of the electorally suicidal pro EU and 2nd Referendum policy which destroyed the Labour vote FOREVER in our key Labour heartlands, but only because his seat was a Leave-supporting seat- unlike the likes of Abbott, Jeremy, or McDonnell. They secured their own seats, and continued gravy train , before supporting the clear socialist politics of opposing the neoliberalism enforcement machine of the EU (which they had always done as backbench Leftie MPs throughout their political careers ! ).

      The Labour Party is definitively fucked as a potential socialist, or even mildly Left wing, political party. From now on it will be a Tory-lite neo Blairite ‘Reserve Party of Capitalism’, indistinguishable from the Lib Dems (or the more paternalistic, ‘One Nation’ wing of the Tories)

      Fortunately the triumphalist arrogance , and short-sighted hubris of the now fully back in charge Starmerite/ Blairite Tory-Lites, shown by their cynical stitch-up of the dim and opportunist Long-Bailey, shows that they are determined to ruthlessly pursue a root and branch purge of the ‘Left’ in both PLP and the membership. Yep, I do indeed deliberately say, ‘fortunately’, because only when all hope for a revival of the weak, ever-compromising Left Liberal radical politics of ‘Corbynism’ has been extinguished will the radical Left in the Labour Party, amongst whom are a sizeable cohort of real socialists, finally give up the ‘reform the Labour Party ‘ duff project which has seduced and distracted UK socialists for generations, and embrace the actual next core political task – ie, the huge effort required to build a socialist mass party, outside of the now electorally and politically defunct Labour Party, rooted in the working class , not the dilettante middle class Left Liberals that the supposed ‘Left’ of the Labour Party during the 2015 to 2019 ‘Corbyn Surge’ has actually been mainly composed of .

    2. Tysky Sour
      Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker
      Core message amongst young left wing Labour members and supporters is ‘you cannot deal with bad actors’ its over and time for them to leave and form this mythical General Election winning machine parth
      Which leaves our party in our hands and our future is ours for the making
      Rejoin and recruit

  9. The Labour Party was founded on the struggles of ordinary working people over centuries of repression, bloodshed ( think of the Peterloo massacre, Churchill having the troops fire on Welsh miners, the deployment of mounted police to attack miners etc), imprisonments and starvation. The right to vote for working class men and women , free healthcare at the point of delivery, decent housing, decent education etc only came about through struggle but above all through solidarity. To believe that a decent, fair and truly democratic society can happen overnight is a fools errand. By splintering into a myriad of factions ( Balkanisation) plays exactly into the establishment’s hand and lets not forget their strategy whether in foreign or domestic policy is divide and rule!!!

    1. ………..is this white privilege? May I suggest the ‘class struggle’ demonstrates how the term ‘white privilege’ can only be applied to the privileges enjoyed by the bourgeoisie & the aristocracy, & it is dangerous & inaccurate to apply that description in any other context.

      1. About 180 years ago after almost 650 years of murder, theft and brutality on the British Empires first seizing of other people’s land a famine broke out which while millions of people were dying of starvation the absentee aristocratic landowners sent 4000 ships laden with food out of the country in order to build grand country houses and up keep their lifestyles. As a consequence of this, the country never, even to day, regained its original population size. This is but one example of many atrocities committed in that land.The inhabitants are most mostly white so the class struggle cuts across all races.

    1. Recruit and vote for agreed left wing slate
      Get act together and clear out Cockwombles starting with Blair

  10. You didn’t fight back against this when you controlled the party apparatus and had the support of the members. Instead you kept trying to appease them by throwing good people under the bus. The left have been cut off at the knees. This is just the start. Go out with a bang not a whimper.

    1. Arwyn Thomas, when Corbyn was leader the Blairites still “controlled the party apparatus.”
      That was a bigger problem than the Tories’ ownership of the media – without the party machine working against a Corbyn win the Tories would have been dead in a ditch.

  11. For a stunningly blatant example of the utter contempt the old PLP Lefties have for the intelligence of the rank and file Momentum membership , just have a read of the cynical drivel by Trickett in the Morning Star today , making all sorts of ludicrous policy promises for the Lansmanite ‘Momentum Renewal mob ! https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/renewing-how-we-work-most-fundamental-way-possible
    All these bogus promises on future ‘member democracy’ within the currently totally top-down undemocratic Momentum regime ! Since, as Skwawkbox has repeatedly demonstrated, ‘Momentum Renewal’ is simply the old Lansman claque rebranded, it is strange that this existing ‘Leadership’ claque never implemented its promised ‘online (plebiscite) democracy’ during the last three post Lansman Coup years of Momentum’s dire politics-less role as tame Lansman and claque opinion loudhailer and vehicle for Momentum insider careerist aspirations !

    Sadly the ‘Forward Momentum’ rival slate are also, in the main, another bunch of careerists, and even when not, still cleave ideologically to those toxic Momentum policies like , a deep abiding uncritical love for the EU, and unlimited global Freedom of Movement (ie, continuing unlimited labour supply to undercut UK workers of all ethnicities) , toxic, often insane identity politics, and a complete lack of interest in basic socialist policies like comprehensive democratic state-led economic planning.

    Which means that both sets of dilettante middle class Left Liberal poseurs can never break out of the metropolitan ‘Left’ bubble and win over the working class to socialist politics , or the now corrupt beyond repair Labour Party. All Momentum can do is waste a lot of socialists’ (and potential socialists – given political education) time in more futile battles with the now totally dominant Labour Right , to try yet again, ad nauseam, to ‘turn Labour Leftwards’ . A useless, hopeless, mission now, but for those like Trickett in the PLP for life on £70,000 plus huge expenses each year , and big pensions, a very comfortable endless Parliamentary game for them to play, at the expense of building a new socialist party outside the ruin of Labour.

  12. The only way I will start voting again at all is if Ian Lavery is made leader of the Labour party. I will accept nothing less.

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