Damning statement from black Labour members after Liverpool mayoral candidate’s court bid for reinstatement fails, with group saying reports of discrimination by Labour and its officials are arriving ‘almost daily’
ANNA ROTHERY RULING: WHAT’S TO BE DONE
The Labour Party successfully managed to argue against the High Court reversing its decision to exclude Anna Rothery from the shortlist for the Liverpool mayoral election. This case points to the difficulties in using the courts to secure administrative justice and possibly the moral inconsistency of the current Labour party leadership.
It is interesting that the Labour Party had managed to argue in court that it feared political risk because Anna Rothery had allegedly called into question the integrity of one of the candidates in the process before the shortlist which the Labour Party had summarily cancelled. The court found that the matter under consideration was one of quintessentially political judgement. That means that there might be significant and conflicting views on the matter at hand.
The Labour Party had argued that it had taken into account all known material factors and admitted that knowing where to strike the balance is difficult. However, after due consideration by its experts, the party had made a political decision to cancel the three women shortlist and start with a new candidate list. The judge agreed that this was not a legal issue but a matter of internal Labour party politics for which the leadership had taken the decision and had to be held to account to its members.
The court is averse to interfering in this matter. It raises the question about the strength of the bases on which the interdict was sought and the evidence that was presented to the court. In court truth does not matter, despite claims to the contrary. Evidence and argument are important. This is a lesson for activists who might want to pursue court actions to secure administrative justice. Losing is a likely outcome.
Once we step outside this courtroom and we look at Anna Rothery as a candidate and her manifesto then one could argue that under the current Labour Party leadership, she is lucky to have reached the cancelled shortlist in the first place. Her policy platform was at odds with that of the current leadership and a high-profile pro-poor candidate could not be the leading contender. Liverpool is too important for the current leadership to lose to the wrong kind of mayor.
We see this type of manoeuvering almost daily. LBS is receiving details of cases where, especially the ‘wrong’ type of candidate for positions in branches, CLPs, city and regional structures are disqualified after they have gone through a process.
Quintessential political judgements are used by the regional and national officers to disqualify left-wing and black members. Anna Rothery’s case is just an instance. This happens daily. And the same judgements are made to retain the membership of people who break international and humanitarian law, (Iraq, Apartheid South Africa for example), racists and Islamophobes.
Anna Rothery was defeated by the neoliberal wing of the Labour Party. One cannot have a candidate who puts the poor people of Liverpool at the heart of her political agenda whilst the regional and national leadership is committed to serving the corporate elite. The leadership could not risk being politically embarrassed every day. This points to the limits of the Labour Party as a vehicle for social justice. It is good to be involved as a member of the Labour Party as a vehicle for social change towards justice.
But there must be a social movement outside the Labour Party that pushes the party to its limits away from its commitments to neoliberalism towards fighting poverty, racism and war. Because of its commitments to the corporate sector this leadership cannot afford to have candidates like Anna Rothery because the most important challenges facing humanity might just be put on the agenda i.e., climate change, nuclear war and the democracy deficit due to neoliberal destruction of the welfare state. Nationalism, patriotism and flag-waving will not address the anti-poor orientation of the corporate class that rules the country. One needs politicians, especially at local government where much of public policy shapes the lives of ordinary people and a radical social movement outside the formal political structures. The role of those social movements is to push and support left-wing activists who operate within the narrow confines of bureaucracy.
LBS remains committed to its view that Anna Rothery was cancelled as candidate because she is the wrong type of woman, ethnicity and class. In fact, the wrong types of members are suspended, expelled and excluded from elections every day. We have to stay and fight. Defeating this right-wing drift within the Labour Party is part of the fight against the Tories. Anna Rothery’s politics is a destabilisation of this development. But this is not the first time that it has happened in the Labour Party. Stay, conscientise, organise and mobilise voters.
It is also necessary for the trade unions to decide whether they can continue supporting this right-wing in the party. First, they came for the members and some trade unions did nothing. Then they came for the candidates and some trade unions did nothing. Then they came for the trade unions and there was no one to stand in solidarity with them.
Build the social movements outside the Labour Party on issues affecting real people in housing, education, employment, environment, war and peace, healthcare and social care. Perhaps we cannot rely on the Labour Party after all. 14.5 million UK people cannot depend on the Labour Party. It depends on which Labour Party pitches up on the day. People in Yemen cannot depend on the Labour Party. Climate change and nuclear war, well what can we say.
As for members who are on the receiving end of bureaucratic cover-ups of racist abuse, Islamophobia
LBS asks people to send us the details to labourblacksocialists@gmail.com. We have to have the evidence in order to hold the Labour Party to account. We’re collating evidence from members and encouraging them to speak out about their experiences.To Anna Rothery and the other two cancelled women candidates you have conducted yourself with great dignity. To the activists who came out in solidarity, continue the fight inside the Liverpool Council because austerity is coming and build the social movements outside the Council and the Labour Party. The future looks bright for us.
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… and more TRUE Labour than Tory in pure disguise who have been sucking the decent blood out of the party eg Sir Starmer. We have no choice but to use all our collective powers to the Starmer Blair cabal lose☢️📌☢️📌☢️📌
The party needs you more than you need the party
NVLA, the first bit is 100% correct. The answer to the second part lies in the questions – 1️⃣ – Why do u think the Right Wing bother to parasitise the party❓ 2️⃣ – Why did Blair etc join❓ 3️⃣- Why did they not leave after Jeremy defeated them effectively THREE times❓4️⃣ – Why did they devote so much resources to regain control if the party as QUICKLY as possible rather than wait❓ 5️⃣ – Why did they not try to appease Jeremy even in the limpest way❓
6️⃣ – We read here of the omnipotence of the MSM including repetition of lies / myths. We read REPEATEDLY of the power of the Zionist. BILLIONS of pounds are on tap for the right. QUESTION – Why then don’t they who have managed to keep power, go set up a new party rather than bother with us in the Labour party❓❓❓
ps One hundred and twenty five thousand excess deaths due to Covid-19. BILLIONS of pounds stuffed in the pockets of chums of the one percent.
QUESTION – Have we seen or heard an attempt to overturn those obscenities by Blair, Campbell, Starmer, Hodge, Straw, Berger, Blunket, Beckett, Ashworth, Smeeth, Oldknow, Theresa May, Duncan-Smith, Streeting, Ellman, Charles Clarke, Gina Miller, et al with even one thousandth of the airtime, millions, energy determination, court cases … as they did to reverse the Referendum❓❓❓ Think of it.
125,000 to an early grave due to the policies of a prime minister ENDORSED by Blair before the General Election.
What sort of judgement is that❓❓❓ These things must be repeated by everyone to demolish the myths entrenched by the MSM repeating them. Why complain of the MSM yet fail to use the rare gem that us Skwawkbox.org❓❓❓
Signpost spouts on about demolishing myths when HE – more than any other shill on this site – endlessly concocts and contrives myths – ie falsehoods – about Jeremy and the left, all of which are designed to discredit Jeremy and the left, and which he repeats on a daily basis.
As for ‘demolishing the myths’ the MSM disseminate, as in countering their lies and falsehoods, there’s just one small problem of course, as signpost knows full well (as does anyone who gives it but a moments thought), and that is that the MSM has about fifty times the reach of the left-wing news media/blogs. In OTHER words, it’s NO contest!
If LBS think Rothery’s been hard done by they can always refuse to subscribe to/ vote for stammerite labour; which in no way reciprocates – or has reciprocated – any support LBS might’ve previously given.
Stammerite labour delude themselves that people who will never vote toerag will always vote for them; and have dragged the party even to the right of the ‘rags in terms of their newly-assumed authoritarianist fascism.
And they believe they’re all bar guaranteed votes from the likes of me, or LBS, or other disenfranchised sectors of society.
Like dummkopf-schmitt, believeig the way to eradicate poverty is to administer more poverty-assuring policies upon people, stammer thinks robbing the left of their voice will ensure they are subjugated and compliant.
Stammerite labour think they can disenfranchise their members AND the electorate even further and that they’ll still back them because socialists are conservative-averse. They haven’t learned a fucking thing from the last election; in fact they’re doubling down on their idiotic self-assurance of that mythical allegory
They’ve gone even more fascistic than the toerags thought was possible. The toerags thought their current corrupt practices were getting near the knuckle, but fuck me – the greasy-headed generalissimo has given them food for thought…Won’t be long before we see the fruits of stammerism blooming in the (left-of-stammerist) conservative government pretty soon..
Stammerite labour can get to f**k as far as I’m concerned. And that goes for those who think there’s any hope of redemption. It’s gone way beyond that.
There is nobody from the left I now trust to actually bring the party back to it’s origins. The labour party – as I understood it to be – is dead. Has been for 30 years or more.
Stay and fight = Flog dead horse.
Increasingly, it appears that Starmer’s Labour are becoming incapable of properly representing working people. Is there now no way, inside of the party, that Liverpool can be offered it’s own mayoral choice?
There’s much to admire about this statement and by and large I endorse it.
My problem comes with the assertion that Anna is “the wrong type of woman, ethnicity and class.”
On that logic, the woman who’s being shooed in is also “the wrong type of woman, ethnicity and class.”
Class maybe, but only in the sense that “The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.”
The Labour Party is currently being hoist with its idpol petard. Littered with panthers like Lammy, feminists like Harman and working-class heroes like Spellar, the future looks….?
What the Labour Party lacks is not LGB people or members of any other group. Referring to people as members of the gay community, black community etc. is nonsense because it cannot do anything to explain the existence of reactionary shits like Chris Bryant, Trevor Phillips, John Woodcock, Margaret Hodge etc., let alone all the gays, blacks women and working class people who are Tory MPs. It helps to explain absolutely nothing.
What the Labour Party lacks is an understanding of of how the class struggle continues within and without the party and across the whole spectrum of society, whether the members like it or not, regardless of the identities that trendy US ideas would have us assume.
What the Labour Party lacks is socialists and scientific socialists at that.
What the Labour Party and the movement in general lacks above all is education in Marxism. It’s never too late too start!
LOOK AT WHO THEY PUT UP TO LEAD THE NEW WOMEN PARTY OF LABOR … FORMER IDF SOLDIER
“………..until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes, everywhere is war”.