Analysis comment

‘Rescinded’ Barnard harassment ordered by senior staffer – at 1am on World Suicide Prevention Day, with no process

Cruel Labour letter sent by temp on insecure contract, with no process and under orders of ‘senior’ staff member as part of vendetta – ‘rescinded’ because Labour knew it had no legal ground to stand on

On Friday, Labour sent an email to Young Labour chair Jess Barnard, warning her that she was under investigation for supposedly ‘hostile’ language – when Barnard had in fact been ‘challenging transphobia’. The party quickly wilted under legal threat from her legal representatives and ‘rescinded’ the letter with a grovelling apology, claiming it had been sent ‘in error’.

The letter had been sent to Ms Barnard, who has made no secret of the mental stress she has suffered because of a series of vicious character attacks on her and Young Labour with no hint of support for her from the party’s leadership, at 1am on Friday.

Friday was World Suicide Prevention Day.

One in a series

Rather than being an ‘error’, it appears that the email was in fact ordered by a senior staff member as part of a vendetta against Ms Barnard and others and was intended to punish her for standing up against the character assassinations and for standing in solidarity with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – and to prevent her speaking at Labour’s conference later this month.

It also appears, as one would expect given the 1am sending, that the email was sent without any due process or sign-off and using Labour’s vague social media code of conduct as an excuse – though of course no equivalent action has ever been taken against a list of right-wing Labour MPs who have told critics to ‘f*** off’ or similar, while Ms Barnard’s language in her Twitter exchanges was far more restrained despite considerable provocation.

Moreover, it appears that the sending account of the Labour email belonged to a junior staff member recently employed on an insecure temporary contract – despite Labour throwing permanent staff into unemployment because of its disastrous financial situation. It hardly needs to be said that no staffer on an insecure contract is going to unilaterally start sending emails at 1am.

And Labour’s attempt to pass off the incident as an ‘error’ holds no water at all – because Jess Barnard is only one of a large number of Labour members, including elected ‘CLP’ officers, to receive the same or very similar letters, all on the same day – an incident that left NEC member Mish Rahman touched on in a tweet on Friday primarily referring to Ms Barnard’s case:

Some party insiders have referred to the emails being sent by a ‘rogue’ staff member, but that remains to be evidenced.

A vendetta being conducted by at least one senior staff member; astonishing callousness on a day supposed to mark the prevention of suicide; an email sent entirely without due process; and a grovelling u-turn when one target of the attack pushed back. The moral and political bankruptcy and the lack of vision and substance of Keir Starmer’s Labour laid bare.

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21 comments

  1. Given the apparent lack of process this ‘senior staffer’ must be held to account.

    1. Mandelson, Blair, Straw, Ashworth, Hodge, Evans, SIR starmer … too many to name… Cooper, D Milliband, Harman, Beckett … too long… malignant tumours. U r well aware the ‘senior staffer’ is IRRELEVANT. u throw it like a dead cat. The deadly invasive growths are starmer (SIR), Evans etc, SteveH davidH SH it is well known to you.

      All like Barnard, who respond as we ALL should to wrong, must NEVER b placated into appeasements to “calm things down” etc. The tumours will ONLY do as they’ve ALWAYS done: DECEIVE. Nothing they say can be trusted. They won’t suddenly change nor be “converted”. As i’ve said b4; IMMEDIATELY Conference has ended, FULL toxins from tumours Starmer (SIR), Mandelson, Evans, Blair will resume with a vengeance. BE WARNED‼️‼️‼️

      CONGRATULATIONS Barnard
      🎉❌🌟🎉❌🌟🎉❌🌟

      1. Millions upon millions of working people will ALWAYS carry hope and potential. But rescuing the 2030s UK Labour Party will be like turning around the 1930s Nazi Party. As it warms into destroying itself, nobody has a hope in hell 🔥

        So don’t march alongside them and their Unison funders and fixers. Remove those ill-fitting jackboots, depart and create a new working class movement today…!

  2. Evans help us needs to held to account and that scum knight,they are the hands that rock the cradle and the reason for the Witchunt.Typical of “middle class man” centrist Dad Steve H Hall davidh..sh and other aliases to blame what he would see as a lowly underling to take the blame and sacking.

    1. Wirral In It Together, he IS “on an insecure temporary contract”.
      To his credit, he CHOOSE to do what was DOABLE. When told “he was not the right person to lead the party” he argued his case and said he was.
      BASIC… UNCOMPLICATED.
      We conversely waste MUCH energy & bandwidth with never ending complicated schemes re what we need to do.
      We need only ditch timorousness, KEEP ALL honey for ourselves, be straightforward, with confidence of convictions, DEVELOP tenacity, be DECISIVE, act as we do even in our own homes with any tasks.
      Productive people don’t fuss about the neighbours doing X, Y,or Z in their house. Nor bother if the neighbours would “go bonkers” if we painted the kitchen red. Instead, productive people use what they DO have, to the best of their abilities. They would never see rats gobbling up everything and wrecking their home and confuse the rats with their own children. From the language u can STILL see that some r still BLIND to what the parasites are. That is very weird. Shows the POWER of a Label. That’s why the parasites like Mandelson & Blair had the common sense to continue infesting. They used their brains, unlike Ummuna, Berger, Smeethe, Soubrey, Ellmann etc. TWatson used his brains to resign to save embarrassment due to their “Peoples Vote” plot. He expected the expected. Not rocket science. No “clever strategy”. Obvious to anyone who paused, stepped back, LISTEN widely and thought INDEPENDENTLY.

      Barnard is showing the ONLY way forward, AT LONG LAST
      🧿🎉‼️🧿🎉‼️🧿🎉‼️

  3. Wilted under legal pressure
    Sounds like they are wilting under financial pressure, time to give them a taste of their own medicine and get rid of Red Tories
    Labour Day Tuesday 5th October

    1. Doug I hope members support your real fighting back campaign on Tuesday the 5th of October and hit them were it hurts in the wallet….well done and keep walking the dog 🐕.

    2. Doug – “time to give them a taste of their own medicine”… ?

      More than “time”‼️ SUPER overdue‼️‼️

      MORE than a “taste”‼️‼️‼️

      CONCENTRATED!! A trillion KILO-LITRES boluses to ALL Red poorly masked Tories! EVERY day!! From EVERY angle!!!

      No threats. No coercion to change. No appeasements. No enticements of ANY sort. There’s ZERO need to carry on as b4. Barnard & Sharon Graham are PROVING as i’ve been saying for years now. PLUS they r doing it without what we’ve given away eg levers of control to born deceivers like Mandelson Blair Hodge & SIR starmer.

      Doug u can feel it in the air; some STILL r blind to facts. Glimpsed 2day, someone saying – after Conference, the purges will be reversed.😮😮😮 Could u imagine??? DEEP ingrained naivety. Nothing awakes them.
      STILL some who were in the party b4 i’ve been alive, FAILED to form one, but r tell us we should; THEN they will join😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 Would b funny were it not so serious.
      Why didn’t they do it??? Fascinating +++

      We need no messing about. Pure & simple – “GET RID”. And we must RECRUIT those who always start their suggestions with – “i’m just an ordinary person / carpenter / plumber / cleaner / bus driver / gardner / mother / shop worker etc. Without fail they r the people who ALWAYS impress me greatly with their grasp of KEY issues and common sense. They saw this EASILY predictable tragedy.

      We need those people URGENTLY at EVERY level, ESPECIALLY to replace ALL who now hog controls. They have proven over several decades and the last FIVE years in particular that the status quo could not survive without their sabotaging change at EVERY SINGLE TURN. Sharon Graham must COMPLETELY distance herself from the old appeaser brigade. She won COMPLETELY without them. She won me over with one turning up to speak to the widest audience, just as Jeremy did. Had no idea of either of them b4 they spoke to the widest possible audience. I posted my impression of Sharon on the very night after hearing her. My assessment was right. Coyne would be easily defeated. It was excellent of him to turn up unlike Turner despite his back room deal to urge Beckett to pull out over a MONTH b4 ballots needed returning. BOTH deserved to lose. Within ELEVEN minutes Sharon impressed me. By fifteen, only some huge blunder or revelation could stop her. Not even tiny ones came. So COMPLETELY WITHOUT ANY of all the usual doom & hopelessness sprayers obsess about, SHARON triumphed by not being a moaning ninny about externalities, nor fretting about not having tbe support of McCluskey and the other damp burdensome set.

      The old experienced people of thirty forty fifty SIXTY plus years, assessed GROSSLY incompetently what a newbie predicted in fifteen minutes and had the confidence to state that AHEAD of the curve. WHY & HOW? Using the same uncomplicated straightforward logic, Sharon Graham and all who want change must now ensure that those who failed to get basic uncomplicated matters even nearly correct, DESPITE all CLEAR present evidence; must have ZERO part in advice nor handling the parasites, nor RECRUITMENT, SELECTION for ANY positions nor most crucially – PRIORITIES and SEQUENCE.

      Their gifts / talents / contributions are in other areas. THEY can CHOOSE to tell us what they are. We r a political party; NOT a pressure group / a rabble / a protest organiser / whiners hoping those in power throw us a crumb as if we r pathetic helpless mongrels. Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thurnberg and other groups organise themselves and CREATE movements which make a noise to highlight issues. It is ABSOLUTELY spirit sapping to see the virtue chasing and sapping jumping on every band wagon others create without seeming EVER to ask how those who change and create change do. We should be IMPLEMENTORS not wagon chasers.

      We should fix the ROOT causes of problems rather than choosing some safe tiny subset of a big matter eg “Period Poverty” instead of the root cause of ALL poverty i.e. eg the privatisation of more and more profits and the socialisation of losses. We had an opportunity to be in government yet the old guard handed it away to those in and out of our party who want to keep poverty 4 “the many”.

      We need COMPLETELY NEW people leading from every corner and every position. We r neither a cult nor a charitable creche for adults. Complicated vetting is unnecessary. The slightest faintest hint of doing anything as indecent as “unifying with” or “working with” any saboteurs and coup collaborators from 2015 to GE2019 means they’ve learnt ZILCH and will be ACTIVE OBSTACLES to change. Obstacles, we don’t need. They may as well ask Twatson & McNicoll to intercede for them with Johnson to give them a peerage and then sabotage the Tories.

      Anyway only meant to agree with you Doug to say “GET RID”
      🟥🧿‼️🟥🧿‼️🟥🧿‼️

  4. If Jess Barnard married TV twunt Andrew Castle would she become a Barnard-Castle?

    (Sorry folks I’m bored outta me tree)

    1. No she might remain Castle and could offer him a choice, to take her name or keep his own.

  5. Under the Human Rights Act 1998 (the bill enshrined in UK law by T. Blair) we are all entitled to

    Marriage and Family. Every grown-up has the right to marry and have a family if they want to. …
    The Right to Your Own Things. …

    * Freedom of Thought. …
    * Freedom of Expression. …
    * The Right to Public Assembly. …
    * The Right to Democracy. …

    Social Security. …
    Workers’ Rights.

    “It lets you defend your rights in UK courts and compels public organisations – including the Government, police and local councils – to treat everyone equally, with fairness, dignity and respect”. (Liberty website).

    I’m not a legal, but undermining these rights must make it challengable in law. I would have thought that former human rights lawyer would be aware of this, particularly points 3 – 6 above. But I suspect he is also aware of the prohibitive cost for an individual to challenge it.

    1. In 2009 I had my human rights / statutory querying rights to make personal data and Freedom of Information requests of any public body in the United Kingdom removed by Cheshire West and Chester Council Monitoring Officer Simon Goacher. This was all but confirmed by the Information Commissioner’s Office some months later. The instructing solicitor for my QC -Hugh Tomlinson – advised me to show “good faith” and not to breach it while it still stood, which lasted for 20 months.

      The bullies fled when Tomlinson called their bluff and threatened court action.

      Human rights appear to be pretty meaningless in the real world. When you get gagged in a compromise agreement you get gagged. Tony Blair saw to that. It appears that a combination of contract law, having lots of ready cash (such as the contents of council tax coffers) and the desire to fend off democratic checks and balances and abuse your power will always win the day.

  6. 1 am on a Friday night.
    Someone “Posting while Pissed”?
    Using someone elses email?
    The email metadata could throw some light on this.

    1. Iamcrawfod….1am on a Friday night?ITs actually quite a good tactic if you wish to intimidate or frighten somone especially a younger person who hasn’t been through the mill.I used to email my favourite Chief executive and borough council solicitor at 3am when I was tracking a dirty land deal with a property developer and the Council.I also used the same tactics on nearly a three quarter million missing money from councils coffers on what the cheif executive called a computer glich…This witchunt has been successful and slick and I can only hope that miz Barnard can take the pressure that has broken far more experienced older Labour members.Shes obviously well connected,media and law savy but I still think that we have not heard the last of this just a ceasfire till the scum knights read “The Speach” .at the conference.IF she wishes to go further and bleed the knight in court then I would be willing to donate despite my disdain for the rotten system as I think that there’s a clear case of causing alarm and distress to a fellow Labour party member by the Labour party.Excuses are in writing,and that in know way mitigates ignorance of the law as many criminals have found out.

  7. Why is information being disseminated via the guardian’s Heather Stewart? Can’t the people responsible speak for themselves? It’s disrespectful.

    On which, Stewart seems to have become Starmer’s chief apologist. Read her columns and you’ll be in little doubt that she, like most of her fellow political columnist colleagues, sees UK politics through a prism provided by New Labour.

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