Group condemns ‘unaccountable party bureaucrats’ and calls on Labour to reinstate all three dropped women to shortlist, who it says ‘have conducted themselves with great dignity’
The Labour Black Socialists group has issued a statement expressing its extreme disappointment with Labour’s conduct in the Liverpool mayoral selection and calling on the party to reinstate the three women councillors on the original shortlist, who were dropped by the party without explanation.
The statement reads:
Labour Black Socialists are extremely disappointed with the way the outcome of the Liverpool Mayoral selection process has been handled.
The members went through a hustings process to select three very experienced women on a shortlist. It appears to be that one of the prospective candidates was then marked out as the wrong type of black woman by influential people in the Labour party hierarchy. The choice of members was therefore suspended, all three potential candidates were scheduled for re-interview, and they were then summarily cancelled out of the selection process. All without explanation and in violation of the Labour party Rule Book and natural justice.
Because of the furore that followed, the Labour party tried to cancel the elected mayor process and in Council that motion was defeated. We believe that this motion was intended to pre-empt High Court action by one of the previous three candidates.
Then to make matters worse the Labour party came up with a new shortlist, from heaven knows where. The two new candidates lack experience, with one only a councillor since 2019 and not even planning to stand again in May. It is unclear how these people would be able to command the confidence of their colleagues in the bruising game of council meetings.
It seems that the rule book is not being followed. There is a lack of transparency and accountability in the nomination and selection processes. It appears that the Labour party only agrees to democratic processes where the outcomes are consistent with the wishes of the party bureaucracy. That type of governance is unbecoming of a party that sees itself as a government-in-waiting.
Instead of putting square pegs in round holes the Labour party should just let the original three highly experienced women stand and let the voters make a democratic choice. However, it does appear that only a decision from a court of law could persuade the Labour party to follow its own Rule Book and abide by the laws of the country.
For now, the three women candidates have conducted themselves with great dignity which stands them in good stead should they be reinstated. As for the members of the Labour party in Liverpool and the councillors it is a joy to behold as you stand up to bureaucratic instructions from afar. If socialism means anything it means control by people on the front line be it at work or in the community. Where did these unaccountable Labour Party bureaucrats learn their corporate misgovernance skills?
BAME MPs, councillors, activists and others have also written an open letter to Labour leader Keir Starmer and acting general secretary David Evans with a similar call.
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If only we had a members led party. This incident illustrates how important it is to resurrect the failed project to democratise the party.
Steven H, the Democratising of party did not fail it was sabotaged by people like Ken and Barbie and others.
Sabine – Not according to Len McCluskey
https://labourlist.org/2018/09/len-mccluskey-accusing-unite-of-machine-politics-undermines-jeremy-corbyn/
These plans [Trigger Ballots] were presented with the full backing of Jeremy Corbyn at the NEC as a sensible and democratic way forward. I only regret that the leadership did not make that clearer at conference, since doing so would surely have taken much of the sting out of the debate even if some delegates might have remained unhappy.
The position of Unite has been misrepresented, including by some who should know better. It is one thing for a couple of delegates to shout “shame on the unions” in the heat of the moment. We have all made heckles we might regret later. But it is quite another for an MP of Chris Williamson’s standing on the left to accuse Unite of voting against the union’s policy on mandatory reselection. That is simply false.
Unite has indeed got a policy in support of mandatory reselection. Had that issue been voted on directly, the Unite delegation would have voted in line with policy. But we have another policy, which I recommend to Chris and all Labour MPs: we support Jeremy Corbyn.
If Jeremy and his team – taking the overview of the entire political landscape, including the situation within the parliamentary party and the leadership of Momentum – urge a particular course of action, Unite is not going to go against that without the most serious reasons. The changes adopted may not be “mandatory reselection” as some define it but it is at the very least a “selective mandatory reselection” that will make it far easier for local parties to choose a different Labour candidate if that is their wish. That is probably why the Momentum national leadership joined nearly all trade unions in supporting it.
For Unite, this is not an issue of theological purity. It is above all about supporting the Labour leadership, something that brings together the vast majority of the party today. And it is about advancing democratic reform in the party hand-in-hand with advancing to government, and ensuring that we maintain the vibrant unity that has carried Jeremy Corbyn to the party leadership. That is what took us to the threshold of power last year, and will surely see off the Tories and prompt the election of a radical Labour government as soon as we get the chance.
Sabine, I believe it was sabotaged by the PLP and Corbyn been Corbyn. I don’t know how much of this is true but I have heard that some notable members of the Shadow Cabinet in a meeting with Corbyn informed him that either he stopped supporting Open Selection or they will resign from the Shadow Cabinet, because the PLP didn’t like the idea including most members of the Shadow Cabinet.
Corbyn as per usual decided to placate the PLP and instead of advocating for Open Selections decided to support a previous consultation with CLPs and for trigger ballots only to go ahead if a third of branches were in favour.
Maria – From what I’ve read hat is also my understanding. Mandatory reselection had Unite’s support so there is little doubt that Jeremy could have called their bluff and won the conference vote with ease. I’m pretty sure that those shadow cabinet members who were threatening him would also be very conscious that if they carried out their threats then they would be unlikely to be a Labour candidate in the next GE.
JC unfortunately failed to recognise that he was the one that had the power in this situation.
Without democracy the party is dead. The sad truth is that the Labour party has been a dead man walking, living off the people’s repulsion from greedy and arrogant Tories, for a century. The original sin was the manipulation of TU Block votes which was so simple that it proved impossible to resist. Once it was established that the ultimate power over the party lay in the hands of a few individuals or committees with the voting power and financial resources to defy the membership and the ability to control not only every conference but most CLPs as well, members were reduced to praying for Frank Cousinses or Hugh Scandlans to come along simply in the hope that they would lend their support to open discussion and debate.
As the history of the Corbyn years shows, however, the careerists and colllegeboys have got such a tight grip on the Party, the Unions and the remains of the Labour Movement that it will take a massacre-non-violent it is to be hoped- to dislodge them.
The alternative of socialists founding informally networked societies based on community organisation-social movements- ‘ginger groups’ and educational collectives needs to be explored. There is almost as little point in founding another Socialist party as there is in banging heads against a brick wall reinforced by imperialists and calling it ‘staying and fighting’. Masochism is a sickness.
So Another stay and fight and? So where is the big idea to radically change the party?
This is why I get so annoyed with the stay and fight brigade because they prefer stasis or getting paid to recommend this? Who knows but sorry you want people to waste the next 20 years getting nowhere and regurgitated Tory lite BS with a Labour rosette. Because I was raised a socialist and my parents whould never forgive me walking away from my ideology and it’s bugger all to do with purity it’s respect.
These cultist have NOne most of these so called socialists are either so scared to do anything or socialist in name only I am tired of nice words NO actions. Either we say no I won’t help support a BS party within a party this cult of new Labour 2.0 because that’s all there is left in Labour.
We have a stark choice split or redo because this cult isn’t working for socialists and never will even if you get rid of a few it’s deck chairs on the titanic as long as the right wing has power and that will never change there like cancer once in the body damn near impossible to remove.
That’s why I call for a new party. Don’t care about purity but do care there is never any right wing allowed or were just repeat the same mistakes of the past and it’s time we learn them! I just want a socialist party to elect and help support. I have no home in Labour any more and sure as heck not going to help this bunch get elected.
Reply to Steve H Totally agree thatwe need a members led party but until we get that members who are discriminated against on the grounds of race should take legal action.
In this particular case it looks like a black woman was denied the opportunity to compete for the job of mayor and in the absence of any explanation for denying her the opportunity the burden of proof in respect of race discrimination passes to the party – the party has to show that it did not discriminate against her. She should seek redress at an employment tribunal in my opinion or at least get legal advice about doing so.
Smartboy – I very much doubt that employment law is applicable to elected political posts and as 1 of the newly announced shortlist is a middle aged black woman the racial discrimination also looks like a non starter
Reply to Steve H
If a person is denied the opportunity to compete for a job (whether elected or appointed) on the basis of race then it is my understanding that employment law applies. However I was unaware of the fact that another Black person has been shortlisted. This would make challenging the decision difficult – probably why he was selected – whatever else the selection panel members are, they are not stupid.
Smartboy, I agree Rothery should seek redress to the Courts, but why through an Employment Tribunal? She isn’t a Labour Party employee.
I very much doubt anyone like Steve H that supports Titles and entitlement will have sleepless nights worrying about racism by the establishment Labour party.
Joseph – ….and yet you left one constitutional monarchy to live in another far more corrupt constitutional monarchy
The reason I can sleep safely in my bed is that unlike you I don’t live in a corrupt state that maintains its power by oppression..
Reply to Maria Vazquez
I think for employment matters Employment Tribunals are the best place to get quick inexpensive decisions. Decisions of Employment Tribunals can also be appealed up to the Supreme Court.
You do not have to be an employee to take a case to a Tribunal. If, say, a factory refused to interview or shortlist for interview a person on the basis of their race , gender or other “protected characteristic” then the person can lodge tribunal – discrimination- proceedings. This case is only slightly different in that once the person has been shortlisted they have to be elected to the job not selected in the usual way. However in my opinion -I’m not legally qualified so I can’t say for sure- I think that a Employment Tribunal could rule on the failure to shortlist is these circumstances. If I am wrong then the Tribunal Office would say they had no jurisdiction to hear the case and it could still be lodged with the court .
Fuck off Steve Scum!
If you want the party democratised, Steve, you need to support the ouster of Starmer. He and his mate, Lavrenti Beria Evans, have done more to restrict internal party democracy than anyone since Blair and Mandy. Starmer and Lavrenti are never going to stop restricting internal democracy and free speech and they’re never going to stop. And you know it.
kenburch – Ok, so you get rid of Starmer and he’s inevitably replaced by a Blairite (they don’t support democratisation).
What next?
I’m guessing you haven’t really thought this one through.
We don’t know he’d be replaced by a Blairite- there are enough left-wing MPs to get a Left candidate on the ballot now. And quite frankly, it’s hard to argue that Starmer isn’t a Blairite. You can’t seriously argue that the Left should have to just shut up and take the abuse from him and Lavrenti, or that what Starmer has done to the Left has to be done for Labour to win the next election. The voters didn’t like Corbyn personally- they aren’t demanding that the party repudiate everything and everyone associated him and lower itself to where it was before 2015- when it was rigidly right-wing and its leader was whipping the PLP to abstain on-i.e., support- Tory benefit cuts.
The 2010 and 2015 elections proved that Labour has no future as a party of austerity and poorbashing and compulsory British nationalism. Why even consider going back to any of that, given how it played out in those years? Going back to that- and going back to the right-wing, antiworker Remain position, means the party can never recover in Wales and Scotland, where Labour came to be seen as rigidly reactionary, and in the Red Wall in England where Labour, in going back to the fight to keep the UK in the EU, an institution seen by the vast majority in the Red Wall as having deliberately kept the Red Wall areas out in the cold economically while giving the Southof England, London, and Scotland massive prosperity.
And the flag fetish- and its accompanying implication that Corbyn was somehow “anti-British”- has proved to be an utter failure. People want to belong, it’s true- they aren’t obsessed with seeing the Imperial Conquest Flag relentlessly shoved down their throats.
You Steve H would argue that the Royals are a democratic institution.You probably think titles and privalage furthur equality.ITs just as daft has sticking a colour code on Socialism which will always be “international and promote equality for all ..Your type of political manoeuvre furthur division and the right wing. You are much like a Tory budget” A wolf in sheeps clothing “
Joseph – Do you have any evidence to support your incoherent ‘assertions’ or are you playing the ex-pat troll pontificating from the other side of the world again.
Steve H I hit a nerve there didn’t I ..Supporting an archaic system of establishment government and a Titled clown as PM and a Royal family packed full of racist fascist supporting bigots….Their time has come and weve seen it all before,A young couple hounded by the Royals because they don’t want to be part of the establishment system.A coming together in marriage of a “Ginger” Royal with a girl with a good suntan and the abilities to make a living in the cutthroat world of Hollywood.The old bitch with her Q jumping husband making up storys of bullying,.Well no wonder you steve h are uncomfortable with the MSM character assassination,only this time its not the hysteria of a young princess Diana RIP it is a young black woman that knows what a farce the whole stinking establishment system is..You mr H davidh support and argue for that crumbling system of Highnesses and lownesess and all the disgusting pomp and ceremony that goes with a archaic bigoted organisation “The Firm,packed with fascists,paedophile princes and racist old sods that exploit their position to Q jump for a heart opp ,when our lot the working-class wait in a Q to drop dead….Virus?,doesn’t seem to be a problem when it comes to the establishment system of course.And mr bloody H is that the best you can come up with …communist thrown at me?.Thats your slithering idea of a insult,you perverted neo liberal fascist.Socialist is what you would like to throw at me isnt it mr f…ing right wing paid troll…Ps explain to your Caribbean island black pals how you sold out to the old Slave masters for a few shekels?
Joseph – Thanks for the novelette that you felt the compelled to write so you could tell me about the nerve that you thought you’d touched. Are you a closet royalist, you certainly have a far greater interest in the British royal family than I do. What have I ever written that made you think that I would share your obsession with your ‘betters’ and identity politics.
As you are justifiably scared to speak out about the injustice and corruption that surrounds you in Cambodia does all pontificating from afar about your titled ‘betters’ in the UK act like a nice safe release valve for your frustrations.
The sooner we get a Party Conference, the better. It would, at least, haul-in this nonsense.
…and the sooner Starmer, Evans, Smeeth, Akehurst, etc understand it is not their party – their plaything – but belongs to the Members.
They are simply functionaries. From the leader down. There to do the bidding of the Members – whatever that may be.
George – Hence Corbyn (as he admitted himself) having no choice but to acquiesce to the wishes of the membership regarding a CV when he was leader.
Yes, that’s correct. Rightly or wrongly, the Membership got their way, which is how it should be. If only there had been more time for debating the subject.
Unfortunately, it was sprung on Conference, so we are where we are.
If only some of the decisions, taken in the past year, had been allowed to go to Conference, the party may not be in the parlous state of civil war, that it is.
As A ex member of LP I must admit that fail to understand people such as you Steve. Maybe there should be another party to represent true socialist values rather than Tory lite which really is what Blair and Starmer are on about.
All members of LP must recognise the political illiteracy of a large percentage of the Brits particularly the middle aged and the older ones which I belong to. So there needs to be education. At the moment their political education comes from the MSM which is largely owned by billionaire’s who are not the slightest bit interested in changing anything as the status quo suits them so why change anything Blair had a huge majority but while did a range of good things like sure Start ,proper funding for NHS ect, he did not attempt to change the economics of Neoliberalism that Thatcher started. It is one of the reasons after 45 + years we are in the mess we are in. Big business plus the 1% who have maintained and indeed gained massive amounts of money as a result are at the root the of UK being the most unequal country in Europe.
The side effects of all this was brexit and the Tory policy of Austerity under Osborne which starved public services of funding. The rich simply got richer and the poor poorer.
Over the years Blair did little to change the narrative of Neoliberalism which as a result fed into the so called Red wall which after Thatcher’s Deindustrialise of the north that, successive Gov did not address , as a result this fed into anti Europe agenda as a convenient scapegoat for all of their frustrations. The likes of Johnson who in his columns, told a pack of lies about Europe. Him and the rest of MSM reinforced this agenda as it was convenient to their own political ambitions to create a off sure Island like Singapore so they could have marginal taxes to increase their ill gotten gains at the expense of most UK .
The public were conned. It was quite easy to do this because of the lack of political sophistication that the UK is suffering from.
Corbyn was elected to leadership of Labour party because a large percentage of the more educated Brits were fed up with Austerity and what they saw of Labour party not supporting the so called working class. Plus Blair and his illegal war. I was one of those who left the LP as a result. Corbyn came across as a breath of fresh air. He was a person who would carry out what he said. the result of this was a splintering of LP the centralists Blairites and others from people that wanted a honest politician who would change things in favour of the many.
Obviously that was not going to suite the right wing MSM nor the old Blairites. So after getting very close to winning the 2017 election. which Corbyn probably would have done had not been for labours 5th Column composed Labour Governance Right wing MPs like Austin Woodcock Streeting Mann Hodge Smeeth Berger. The MSM went into over drive with the biggest onslaught on any leader of a political party in history. It was a disgrace and quite obscene to say the least whether you agreed with Corbyn and Labour or not. MPs like Jess Phillips et al, went along with the ride. Hodge Mann along with the so called Labour Friends of Israel. They were supported by Israel because it was feared that Corbyn Gov would put restrictions on any arms being exported to Israel until certain conditions were met. Also the Lands taken by Israel vis illegal occupation.
Anti Semitism was the chosen weapon to level at any so called left wing MPs who dared to criticise Israeli’s Politics and actions supporting the Palestinian’s Rights. It was fanned into life by MSM and became a form of McCarthyism. The truth is that it was very small in LP membership of over 500000 about 0.05%. Still that did not stop MPs like Hodge Mann Streeting Smeeth Berger Woodcock writing articles in the right wing press such as the Mail and Telegraph condemning the Labour leader and those who supported him as being anti-Semitic . The anti Corbyn campaigned supported by the Right wing so Labour MPs and their supporters weaponised A/S for political purposes. Add into this the Brexit problem which Corbyn should have been much clearer about his own position. Actually I thought it was a good Idea to put it to a second vote than come up with a strategy if the majority still wanted to leave the EU.
So the reality is quite complex. The ignorance of UK electorate The lies about Europe. Most people have been conned. Brexit exhaustion. The simple mantra GET BREXIT DONE. worked for the Con Man Johnson plus the right wing so called Labour MPs who laughed and joked re Corbyn’s defeat in Dec 2019
The hard fact is Corbyn did INSPIRE and increased LP MEMBERSHIP massively.
So many celebrities supported Corbyn and his manifesto. He may be was not strong enough to kick out the right wing MPs like Hodge instead of trying to plicate them. Tony Benn would not have tolerated it. Now look at what STarmer and his supporters are doing to the LP. Kicking out very good so called left wing MPs on any slight misdemeanour. Using Anti Semitism as a weapon and in the process destroying the fragile coalition that is the LP as it moves to the failed centre vis the advise of focus groups. It is not strong leadership.
It does not inspire.. Corbyn did whatever his weakness was supposed to be. It seems to me he was very strong to tolerate the amount of hate false views and total misrepresentation of who he was. Of cause he is not perfect nobody is, but he had his heart in the right place. The False charges by a certain section of Media and Labour party referring to the greatest anti racist of the last 40 years anti Semitic was a disgrace and MPs like Hodge Smeeth Berger Mann Woodcock et al aught to be ashamed of themselves.
I certainly will not re-join Labour party while those right wing MPs remain
Lastly if Starmer has any sense of justice he should release the Forde Report right away unabridged not sanitized.
There was no good reason to try and force Corbyn to push for a second referendum BEFORE the election- everyone knew that a second ref was never going to be approved by that parliament and that Labour could only make itself a hated party in its heartlands by pushing for that antiworker cause, and everyone in the party also knew that it was daft to treat stopping Brexit before unifying to try and get the Tories out.
Some people had voted Remain because they were working on the deluded assumption that staying in the right-wing, permanently unchangeable EU was somehow the only way to defend immigrants and oppose xenophobia, but the People’s Vote campaign was almost entirely about staying in the EU because Eu rules make socialism impossible- the only socialist policies still in place in the Scandinavian countries were those passed before the EU was created.
Rather than carrying on the pointless fight to rejoin an unchangeable and eternally antiworker body that mandates austerity and the irreversibility of privatisation, people who want the UK to be part of Europe should be working to create a NEW Europe-wide body, one that never imposes constraints on the economic, spending and taxation policies of any member state, one that never treats any government in the humiliating way SYRIZA was treated, one in which all decisions are made democratically, Europe-wide, from below.
The EU can never be that body. It can only be the tool of the wealthy and the bosses.
And there has to be an economically egalitarian means of fighting xenophobia. It’s morally obscene to argue that the only possible options are Brussels or Farage.
Have the Kremlin issued a statement yet as to why the original candidates were ditched? Looks like Keir ‘Stalin’ Starmer is going to get a hard time on this. I don’t see why Rothery shouldn’t get an injunction to stop this interference in the election and even stop the election and then go for full judicial review, the costs of which, by the sound of it the Labour Party will be liable for. (The only section of society Lab Party HQ wants to enrich are well off lawyers, with the subscriptions of the poor and needy).
Maybe Rothery is ‘the wrong type of black’ but it would be common courtesy and natural justice to know why she and the others are suddenly disqualified. Or as Stalin used to prefer, will they be taken out and shot?
George, they do not represent us though. We are just seen as cash-cows and free labour, expected to not think, shut up and do as told.
How bad is it if political engagement is being seen/sold as a reenactment of “the wars of the Roses” contest between Lancashire and Yorkshire clps. Leadership has really lost its way.
Yes, you’re right Sabine. Control-freakery is no substitute for leadership.
It, also, covers the fact, those people at Southside have no policies, nor a political philosophy.
The leadership was fraudulently won. About time, we had another leadership contest.
A straight run-off – Starmer v Corbyn.
George – According to recent polls the majority (60%+) of Labour supporters still support Keir Starmer’s leadership plus there was a poll of Labour members during the 2020 campaign that asked if Corbyn was on the ballot paper alongside KS, LN & RLB how would you vote. The result was that RLB lost nearly all her votes, Corbyn got about 30% and Keir still won with an outright majority in the first round.
Steve H – never saw that poll. I’ll have to take your word for it.
By the way, the latest YouGov Poll:
YouGov
@YouGov
Our latest Westminster voting intention has the Conservatives taking a 13 point lead:
Con: 45% (+4 from 25-26 Feb)
Lab: 32% (-4)
Green: 7% (n/c)
Lib Dem: 6% (+1)
SNP: 5% (n/c)
Reform UK: 3% (n/c)
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/03/04/voting-intention-con-45-lab-32-3-4-mar?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=voting_intention
Image
5:28 PM · Mar 4, 2021·Twitter Web App
…and another one :
YouGov
@YouGov
Replying to
@YouGov
Which of the following do you think would make the best Prime Minister? (3-4 Mar)
Boris Johnson: 36% (+1 from 25-26 Feb)
Keir Starmer: 28% (-3)
Don’t know: 33%
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/03/04/voting-intention-con-45-lab-32-3-4-mar?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=voting_intention
Image
5:29 PM · Mar 4, 2021·Twitter Web App
‘Oh, good grief’ – are the words, I think, you may be looking for.
Links please, and dates. Starmer’s lost members and voters week by week and the latest YouGov poll on Westminster voting intention has Conservatives on 45% and Labour on 32%.
I would not get too hung up over whether Rothery was excluded because she was Black, they are hardly going to admit that even if it was the case, more likely Councillor Anne O’Byrne was the target since a report concerning car park auditing is due out before the local elections, the LP could be judging her guilty before she can prove her innocence to save any subsequent embarrassment. In Rothery’s case more likely Corbyn’s endorsement was the kiss of death. From their point of view better to exclude them all and start again, but that is fundamentally unfair especially with no reasons given.
There’s no decent reason to proscribe everyone who ever had even the most tangential connection with Corbyn. That would mean no socialist- there was never any such thing as an anti-Corbyn socialist within the party- would ever get a Labour nomination for anything again, or possibly even ever be allowed to hold party membership again- and it would guarantee that no Labour manifesto would ever to be to the left of the Tories on any major issue again.
OByrne will never be allowed to park her car on the pontins holiday car park at.. Southport.I can remember swimming in the sea at Southport and said to my brother “its almost tropical the water”We were only kids and then we noticed the turds and paper and long jelleyfish?.I have never returned to Southport in half a century and I understand from Irish friends its got worse and more snooty..Thats a little bit like the Labour party right wing and left liberals swimming in their fault sewage…I doubt like many that I will ever return to the Labour party.
When will the socialist learn the hard lesson the cult of new Labour 2.0 doesn’t care how much you condemn them. How many motions you pass, how many motions of no confidence because there meaningless!!!
So have some damn respect and realist the only power you have is to stop giving them money. Stop helping there cultist gets elected either help set up a proper socialist Labour party or wait and do nothing.
The longer you stay the worse it will get. We had all this BS on Blair cult mark 1 with new Labour learn from past mistakes and stop assisting tory-lite masquerading as Labour…
A lot of people make a good living out of being “Labour” .The little people do all the work and supply all the funds to continue the establishment Labour party…But the penny dropped and the rest will follow. “You cannot make a silk purse out of a pigs ear” .And.. “I never wanted to be a MP,I wanted the do something” Bernadette Devlin Peoples democracy party,civil rights movement Ulster ,just after “Bloody Sunday” .Where we started can somtimes be more productive than sitting in the big house.or shouting down the system in a council chamber.ITs all an elaborate illussion of democracy and its existence is crumbling.
“as 1 of the newly announced shortlist is a middle aged black woman the racial discrimination also looks like a non starter” – you don’t suppose that that is why they did it do you. Surely not. Such a fine upstanding group of people wouldn’t stoop to such tactics ………. would they?
goldbach – Even if it was it wouldn’t make any difference.
Can you get off your idpol merry-go-round. There are no “wrong types of black women” any more than there are “wrong type of jews.” There are socialists who threaten the continued hegemony of bourgeois rule/thought and faux socialists who think that capitalism is capable of compromise, the sort who seem radical enough now but somewhere in the future will find jobs as lobbyists for big pharma, the arms trade, banks etc. (think my erstwhile colleagues Milburn and Byers plus Blunkett, Johnson A.,Smith O., Milliband D., etc etc and I could name numerous non-white men and women and plenty of homosexuals who also fit the bill).
What exists is “the wrong type of socialists,” people whose understanding of the class struggle and grasp of dialectical materialism is so shallow that they can be engulfed by bourgeois ways of thinking in the blink of an eye.
I think something that distinguished Corbyn was his innate inability to morph from proto-revoutionary resistant to bourgeois shill – a quality that thousands of people could see plain as day and led them to support him, even if they didn’t always express it in those terms.
That is why he had to be faced down, no matter the cost. That he (and the aspirations of the great mass of people that he represented) were defeated with the aid of internal traitors and cowards only staved off the day of reckoning. Had we/he prevailed, he would have been a) assassinated b) on the wrong end of a “run on the pound” c) knifed by the aforementioned cowards and traitors further down the line d) removed by a coup or foreign intervention or e) got rid off my any other means necessary.
What he lacked in my opinion (by holding his enemies just a touch too close?) was the hard shell and steely determination that are the only tools that will permit any revolutionary to survive: Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro were two such who did – and it’s very easy for the armchair socialists of the British left and defenders of British exceptionalism to diss such determination here – as if racism and sexism were choices of ice-cream flavours rather than deeply ingrained outcomes of all previous class struggles, patriarchy and imperialism.
It’s only when the British left/working class wake up to this fact and understand that the ruling class will not hesitate to crush their guitar-playing hands with rifle butts or throw them out of helicopters should it ever prove necessary (regardless of their race, gender or sexuality), that we will be able to make any real progress without falling into the US inspired morass of identity politics.
Stalin was not a revolutionary- he was a reactionary.
A revolutionary would never have sold out revolutionary struggles- as Stalin did in Spain before the Great Patriotic War and in Greece afterward, preventing revolutionary socialist victories in both countries and consigning comrades in both to imprisonment, torture and execution by the fascist states his abandonment put in power in both;
A revolutionary would never have forced parties allied with his party in other countries to destroy their support and lose any chance of ever coming to power in the countries where they existed- it’s largely Stain’s fault that neither France nor Italy ever had a Communist government; had he allowed the PCI and the PCF to display any independence from him at all they’d have won elections- by forcing them unquestioningly defending every brutal and stupid decision he made- like his insistence on repeatedly trading off most of the Soviet wheat crop for weaponry for the Red Army in an era when nothing would have done more to secure his party’s grip on power than making sure no one in the USSR ever went hungry. or like forcing them to defend the purge trials, or forcing them to defend the ultimate betrayal, the abandonment of antifascism-including the agreement to send German Communist exiles in Moscow back to Germany to face imprisonment or execution;
A revolutionary would not have destroyed the creative renaissance the 1917 revolution- a revolution whose promises were largely anarcho-syndicalist and whose democratic character, including the democratisation of the workplace, never needed to be suppressed and replaced by the militarisation of production and the absolute suppression of dissent- and replaced the brilliant innovations of Constructivism and radical literary experimentation with a brutal mandate that reduced Soviet art to nothing but the dreary, pointless nothingness of “Socialist Realism”, and all those endless depictions of Heroic Bloody Ivan And Ludmila And Their Tractors And The Bauxite Quota.
And a revolutionary would not abandon the project of liberating all areas of human life and insist, instead, on reducing the whole thing to nothing but Orthodox Nationalism With Red Flags.
None of that had anything to do with revolution. Revolution can only be made from below- it can never be imposed from above by secret police.
Thanks for the (faux) history lesson kenburch, the original post was using the examples of Stalin and Castro to demonstrate steely resolve, are you denying their example of that double edged sword with your silly Trotskyist outburst.
Don’t try to undersell the creation of the USSR.IT was the greatest achievement of international socialism,and was destroyed by the coming together of the global financial power and the machinations of the Vatican.
Joseph – If the creation of the USSR was socialism’s greatest ever achievement (where did that end up) then is it any wonder that everything ends up like Orwell’s Animal Farm where the will of the few is imposed on the many whether they like the idea or not.
My history was accurate. Stalin betrayed the antifascist cause in Spain by refusing to properly arm the CNT/FAI and the POUM and by withdrawing the International Brigades, thus handing Franco a victory he never otherwise would have won. He betrayed all antifascists by signing the PACT and, for all practical purposes allying the USSR with Hitler for two years, while forcing all international branches of the Party to defend his betrayal- a choice which did nothing to bolster the USSR’s security at all- he had also undermined the USSR’s security right before this by making the indefensible stupid decision to execute much of his officer corps.
Stalin betrayed the Left by withdrawing support for the Greek Left after the War, and by forcing newly Communist Poland, Hungary, Czecholovakis and the DDR-the last of which was the place which had done more to earn the right to create an independent socialist direction than any of the others- to exactly replicate every choice HE made, by crushing the workers in East Berlin when they had every right to rise against austerity.
He betrayed the left by INCREASING repression in the USSR after the war and launching additional purges, at a time when there was never going to be any justification for any further repression within the USSR and its allied states at all. He launched, shortly before his death, a new pogrom against the Jews, less than a decade after the Holocaust- something he had no possible reason to do.
His successors betrayed the Left by crushing the anti-Stalinist rising in Hungary in ’56, Gomulka’s attempt to create non-repressive Communism in Poland, and Dubcek’s Prague Spring in ’68.
Stalin’s successors then destroyed the real chances the French and Italian Communist Parties had of winning power electorally by refusing to allow them to display any independence from “the line”- even though letting those parties do what they’d have needed to do to win would have done nothing but bolster the USSR’s internal stature. And they helped destroy the Sixties New Left by continuing the needless repression within the USSR, by ordering the PCF wing of the French labour movement to withdraw from the general strike in ’68 when DeGaulle and French capitalism were on the verge of being overthown.
They helped end the USSR, when Gorbachev could have saved it and freed it from the dead, repressive past, by trying to overthrow him and restore full Stalinist terror- helping to create the conditions for the rise of Vladimir Putin, who is now trying to create Stalinism minus socialism.
The Stalinist tradition did nothing but kill the Left and any possibility of transformative change, from 1924 through 1991.
Everything I wrote there is absolute historical truth.
There is no “Left” defense of any of it.
And “steely resolve” is all well and good among people on the Left- I actually have some respect for Fidel, though his homophobia and his agreement to incorporate any part of the “actually existing socialism” model of places like the USSR and the DDR was a massive mistake- but only if it’s steely resolve to fight the reactionaries, not the revolutionaries.
I’m no Trotskyist- I identify as a radical left-wing libertarian socialist and despise Trotsky for helping crush the soldiers and sailors of Krondstadt- the ones who were fighting to preserve the Revolution and to restore workers control of factories and the real decision-making powers of the local soviets-the only things in the Bolshevik program that could ever actually have been called “revolutionary”. Neither a “workers state” nor “the leading role of the Party” have any valid role to play in the construction of socialism.
kenburch – “My history was accurate.
Apart from the odd (in every sense of the word) communist who cares?
The overwhelming majority of the UK electorate don’t GAF. The only thought they ever have about communism in the UK is F’ Off we’re not interested.
You do not answer my point by simply repeating yourself in more bloody detail kenburch.
This is really interesting and informative kenburch, thank you
We have all these labour left wing Alliance groups yet after the 5 years of absolute betrayal (The list of betrayal is longer than my arm) it seems to have taught us nothing! Surely it is time for all us people of good will to move on and if not why not? What is the point of continuously flogging the same donkey and expecting a different result? Some of the most disgusting examples of humanity are sitting as Labour MPs and Labour Councillors. Labour is a right wing party and should be treated as a right wing party and discarded, dumped trampled on, get off your knees and walk away!
I have supported and been a member of the labour party all my life, I am 60 now and I feel like a fool! Never again will I vote Labour.
@Andrew
They need you more than you need them.
They obviously don’t think so nvla, they think they can rely on the corporate media and the wretched BBC to get them across the electoral line, once they have purged the LP of all socialists and all radical ideas that is. They are not suitable company for anyone who regards themselves Left.
NVLA – Are you sure about that?
Andrew …ditto and I am even older,it took a long time for the penny to drop.Stay and fight is corrosive and attractive.Propping up a rotten system is futile..!
Joseph – You have always been at odds with Labour party policy, we’re not Communists like you.
Went really well when Kinnock played a similar game, didn’t it?
It won him the title of Longest-Serving Utter Failure As A Party Leader…nine years of nothing but futility.
And Kinnock and his brood have made a lot of money out of “being Labour”
Labour ‘Black’ Socialists……..’See me, see my colour!’