Chairs say they are first of many locals about to quit party – and some will stand against Labour in local elections
The chairs of both constituency Labour parties (CLPs) in the London Borough of Newham have dramatically resigned both their positions and their party mbership in the last few minutes, citing their disgust at Keir Starmer’s war on democracy, his lack of.opposition, his treatment of former party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s high and rising tide of Islamophobia.
East Ham chair Tahir Mirza’s letter of resignation lists Labour’s sorry history under Starmer – and warns that sole of thise leaving intend to stand against Labour in the spring’s local elections:
28th January 2022
LP Membership No: L0111065
I, Tahir Mirza, chair of East Ham Constituency Labour Party, am resigning my membership of the Labour Party with immediate effect, along with other current party members to follow.
I am resigning because, on a local scale, democratic rights and principles no longer have any value in either East or West Ham CLPs, both of which have been suspended since March 2021. The motive for this shutdown of party democracy is clearly to suppress free political rights, and to clear the way to allow candidates imposed by unaccountable party bureaucrats to be parachuted into office, rather than selected democratically by party members who have contributed their time, energies and financial donations into the party over many years. Local councillors have betrayed their electors by imposing harsh policies of Tory cuts, privatisations and gentrification, and have even shown Islamophobic behaviour towards party members.
On a national level, the current leadership of the party is offering no meaningful opposition to the most corrupt and reactionary Tory government in living memory, and stands for nothing except a wholesale purge of socialists from the party, using libellous smears of antisemitism and covert acts of Islamophobia.
We are especially outraged by the continued exclusion from the Parliamentary Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, a hugely popular local MP and the most successful party leader in living memory.
We will continue our fight for the rights of Newham residents on such issues as emission charges, parking permits, the Silvertown tunnel, Stratford Circus, Queens Market, the Browning Road bridge, Durning Hall, the MSG Sphere, housing, road closures, a genuine climate change programme, and in-house services.
Our comrades have decided to stand in the local election and fight for the rights of Newham residents. Newham’s “red wall” will be brought down by EX-labour members and replaced by a real socialist wall.
This is just a start. Many more members and officers of East Ham and West Ham CLPs will be resigning in the coming days in protest at the bureaucratic antics of the current party leadership. We stand ‘For the many, Not the few’.
Tahir Mirza
West ham chair Carel Buxton adds that Starmer’s – and the local party regime’s – Tory-mimicking betrays the people who need genuine change and a real Labour government:
LP Membership Number: L1245304
My Resignation from the Labour Party – Carel Buxton, Chair of West Ham CLP
Today I am resigning from the Labour Party and as Chair of West Ham CLP. I am doing so because the party under Sir Starmer no longer represents the interests of ordinary working people. It is now a pale version of the Tory party and offers no real opposition while at local level it passes on cuts from central government instead of fighting for more funding.
I first joined Labour in 1973 and rejoined when Ed Milliband became leader. Over several years I have been an active campaigner involved in both local and national elections as well as grassroots campaigning. I have worked hard for the LP in difficult circumstances and, at times, against opposition from within the party. Last year West Ham CLP along with East Ham was suspended on spurious grounds. The national party has taken away our right to have meetings and have silenced the voices of thousands of members. Newham is not alone. Suspensions of CLPs as well as individuals has happened across the country. Hundreds have had their membership ‘terminated’ on the flimsiest of reasons and often with no reason given. This is not the actions of a democratic party. This week we saw the NEC vote against reinstatement of our former leader, while a Tory MP with an obscene voting record can cross the house and become a ‘Labour’ MP. This is not the Labour Party I signed up for and I believe it is now morally as well as politically bankrupt.
At a local level Newham Council is incompetent. The evidence is all around us in the dirty streets, in the potholes in our roads and bins left unemptied. As it is one hundred percent Labour you would expect it to wield its power in support of local residents, but it doesn’t. A Labour Council should be campaigning and organising against the Silvertown Tunnel that will bring more pollution to Newham, but it isn’t. A Labour Council should be campaigning and organising against the MSG Sphere but instead it closes our City Farm and threatens Stratford Circus and Queens Market. We have the grotesque spectacle of gentrification across Newham. Luxury Flats spring up at unaffordable prices and the housing waiting list grows. Perhaps the final straw for locals was the report in the press of the Newham traffic camera netting a profit of £5.2million a year. So much for people at the heart of everything we do.
I take no pleasure in writing this resignation. My family have been Labour for generations: my father joined the party in 1951 and my grandmother in the 1930s. Labour has sold out its principles under Sir Starmer, who has reneged on every promise he made to win the leadership. Labour can no longer be trusted. We will keep fighting and supporting grassroots campaigns as a Shadow CLP: Newham Socialist Labour. We stand ‘For the many, Not the few’.
Carel Buxton
In 2017, 85% of Muslims who voted backed Corbyn’s Labour. In recent polling, 55% of those voters said they could not now vote for Labour. The Labour right’s rampant Islamophobia at the heart of LOTO is costing Labour its Muslim voters and others dismayed at the racism of the right.
Under the Starmer regime, Labour is struggling even to find local members willing to stand as candidates in local government elections in mamy areas and has resorted to begging people to put themselves forward. Now those who have served the party for years are downing tools in disgust at the politically bankrupt and morally repugnant so-called leadership and its war on democracy and decency.
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The Labour ship, not, just, creaking, but springing leaks all over the place.
Stand by the lifeboats!!
The events of this week, make me think there were people, just, waiting to see if JC would have The Whip returned.
Now, it’s become clear that he won’t, it makes many decisions easier. There, now, seems to be a stampede for the doors.
Solidarity, with the Newham two! Solidarity with the Labour HQ strikers!
Abandon ship folks…..Labour Titanic is going down. But Keith will be first off the boat. He won’t save you.😳
…Well we already knew what his form’s like with parachutes
…Oh suit yer sodding selves, then. 😕🚕
And both fine Socialists would be welcome in a new Left Wing Democratic Socialist Party.
Time for the scales to fall from the eyes of those Socialists still in Labour, it’s time to make history!
If you don’t mind me saying so Bazza, you are spouting complete and utter bollox! You are, in effect, saying that all the left-wing socialists who are still in the LP must be blind to all that Starmer and the Blairites have been doing during the course of the past eighteen months or so. And THAT is a fucking insult! Yeah, they;re so stupid they haven’t picked up on any of it!
As I said in a recent post to the ‘disabledgrandad’ fascist shill, left-wing orientated CLPs are very active in their local communities, campaigning against this, or campaigning for that, and publicising local issues and bringing it to the attention of local people. And many of them have been doing so for many years and – as I have no doubt was the case for the two Newham CLP chairs, for example – it isn’t easy to come to a decision to give all that up and let go of it – ie let go of something that’s an innate part of you, and what you are.
So please stop denigrating such people you complete and utter ahole!!!
I reckon we’re going to see more of these. Quite how many? No idea, but it’s going to be hard to hide.
I’m relishing May, if only to tell the possible canvassers why I will not be voting for labour, and that they can use the toilet if they need one (imagine wondering a housing estate busting for a pee whilst trying to sell keef…)
I also reckon we’re going to see a low turnout. Apathy or boycott?
Alan.
And you are like the Knight who said said Kni!
(Monty Python’s and The Holy Grail).
Neo-Liberal Right wing Labour are in complete control.
They have cut your arms off.
They have cut your legs off.
And all you have is your head.
And you say “Come on, I’ll nut you!”
>>As I said in a recent post to the ‘disabledgrandad’ fascist shill
WOW! Here I am a disabled grandad yup socialist has been one my whole life like my parents and grandparents both who helped set up Labour!
The most important lesson they taught me is if someone attacks you then you know either they hate the truth you are telling or your ideas and idology. So carry on as you know you have done nothing wrong!
Hay ho if that makes me a fascist then fantastic! I know what my idology is and isn’t. It certainly will never be Tory or right-wing thanks.
Well, then Mr Allan I will continue being an evil left-wing fascist here in deep Tory country in the south East working with the new Socialist parties as our previous home has been taken over by right-wing cancer and is terminal. Telling my truth online if you don’t like It may I humbly suggest you do one!
I am a big boy in more than one definition with broad shoulders and people making up BS about me is funny if you believe it will upset or concern me your on to a loser there I am afraid.
Oh and Mr Allan I am far from a shill unlike some other name here. If I am a shill then someone owes me some money and had better pay up PDQ!
so TATA and have a fantastic left-wing day comrade.
Says Bazza, the armchair warrior! And needless to say, completely ‘ignores’ the valid points I made.
So WHAT have YOU been doing to bring about this new socialist party? Fuck all obviously given all the time you spend posting on here every day! Yeah Bazza – like a few other regular posters who are forever denigrating the left – you’re obviously superior beings and all the people you denigrate are inferior and stupid of course!
And the very fact that you responded the way you did – and SOoo quickly! (yeah, yet ANOTHER ‘steveh’ who just happened to see my post shortly after I posted it AND post a ‘response’ to it!) – says it ALL!!
And isn’t it odd – as I’ve said before – how there are so many people who are supposedly left-wing socialists, posting on a left-wing news blog practically every day in practically every thread *AND* who are forever castigating and denigrating the left-wing of the party – ie Jeremy Corbyn, the SCG, and left-wing members and activists!
PLEASE don’t be taken in by them, because if they were for real, they would have respect for Jeremy and the other socialist MPs and left-wing CLP activists and members AND, as such, not be criticising them all the time (for not leaving the LP and starting a new party etc, etc), but letting THEM decide what they do.
It’s all designed to sow division, just like the fascists who run the show and those who own and/or control the MSM *DO*. What a coincidence, eh!!
Oh LOOK, the fascist troll – for the first time EVER – has posted a ‘response’ to me! Oh, right, and he TOO – purely coincidentally and just by chance of course – just happened to see my post shortly after I posted it! Oh, but his mum and dad were socialists, so THAT of course proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that he can’t possibly be a shill/troll.
Yeah, ALL the shills have got their back stories! And make references to them time and time again in their posts!!
I’ve lived in E & W Ham. That it has come to this for veteran LP members Carel and Tahir is a devastating comment on Starmer.
Mr Allan or what ever the heck you are another Steve H special account for all I care.
I responded because of the use of the word you called me not very comrade like was it? Supposedly by another comrade. While I rail against the soft left that stays in Labour for being fools I never claim they are scum or call them vile names.
Next I respond when and if I bother to read the comments I don’t often follow threads I say what I say then move the fuck on with my life unlike you I don’t inhabit the comment sections and being disabled in chronic pain I have limited time and strength.
To waste debating with fools that insult me and my beliefs when you know nothing of who and what I am or have done? Just because I won’t appease or bend like so many others will! If that’s so evil to have solid principles and sticking with them then there is no point in continuing to discuss with you. For what ever reason you disagree with my views. Viewpoints are like assholes everyone has one and they mostly stink.
So I leave you with this thought you really need to calm down or your going to stroke out working yourself up in these comments sections it’s not healthy old chap! So ta ta have a wonderful day enjoy that sock draw.
We are now seeing the best of what remained in the labour party the left leave in disgust at the filthy right wings ruination of the party. Hopefully the so called SOG will follow. I wonder what (SH) The Mossad Urchin will have to say?? LOL
2/1 It is Corbyn’s fault
3/1 They will get a negative number of votes when they stand
Evens – They will no longer have any influence in the party
Evens – What about representing their constituents’ interests
1Bn/1 – The LP has become useless
2/1 The baby goats look happy today
Evens – There will be some data posted that has already been posted 34 times
3/1 – Some comment about the “self-appointed guardians of the left” [by the self-appointed guardian of the right]
All the lot and he wins an evening with Luke Akehurst.
We’ll see what happens in May.
Yes, we will, Steve H, yes we will.
Very generous odds there @goldbach!
(PS:- You didn’t offer a ‘wait and see’ price, and I’d have won 3p for the mortgage I’d have taken out on my kidneys to place on it)
In May?
Sunderland will still be in the third division.
Johnson will have been replaced by Sunak/Hunt?
Russia will not have invaded Ukraine (a cert because they never intended to) and the media will hail this as a triumph.
The Beeb will still be acting as the mouthpiece of the establishment.
So will the Grauniad.
The Nordstream pipeline will be operating but energy prices will continue to rise.
It will rain ………………….. on Starmer’s parade.
George Peel-
Given the pasting Johnson is receiving by the press you’d fear Labour may do well…Maybe that’s the whole purpose of this flood of the ‘partygate’ stories from two years ago?… To protect ‘asset’ Starmer?
Real question being: Do the UK public want their leaders’ picked for them, behind closed-door by some self-appointed masonic-like elite?
Done and dusted!
GODDDDDD – YOU LOT! 🙄 TSK!
WASSAMARRA WITCHU? IT’S ONLY TWO PARTY MEMBERS…THERE’S LOADS LEFT, Y’KNOW??!!
(Am I doing this right, wee man? 🤔)
Turds do tend to float though don’t they.
You have to blame Corbyn Toffee……How many more times does he have to tell you, it’s all Corbyn’s fault.
All is going according to plan:
1/ Expel all socialists from the party.
2/ Prevent any revival of socialism (remember what happened in 2015) by eradicating any traces of democracy and centralising all patronage, particularly nomination for office, with agents of the PLP.
3/ Raise money for elections by offering capitalists and the US Embassy, an alternative team of apologists.
4/ File Mission Accomplished reports with the Trilateral Commission. cc Israeli Embassy. NATO HQ.
Socialism has been well and truly revived elsewhere. It’s not going away.
Still no wisecrack from the resident gobshite..
He’s been posting on other earlier threads recently enough, though 😙🎶
The only use the remaining left MPs Councillors etc etc are being used for in this shitting vile Labour party is to keep spewing anything people see as real Labour and real Labour values. The remaining hangers oners are basically a nice protective shell in the shape of the star of David and it’s nicely wrapped around all those Red Tories that now control all of what is left of the Labour party. Now just leave and rebuild we don’t have another 50 years to wait for yet mistake that everyone wanted simply to have taken away again. There is only one way forward and that is a New Party without all those fucking fakes and right wingers.
So that’s 3 reports delayed.
The Gray Report, Forde Report, and the DWP Sanctions Report the latter of which some suggest demonstrates how benefit sanctions are a complete waste of time!
Whilst we believe they are also Pure Tory Evil!
Right Wing Tories and Right Wing Labour – THE ENEMIES OF EVIDENCE?
Oh and see ‘Tankie’ Truss spent £500k on a flight when a commercial flight would have cost £3,500, we could have all bought a very nice house for the savings on this one flight!
Then the same Lucretia Borgia also spent thousands of our money treating the US Trade Ambassador in a London restaurant whilst voting to cut £20 a week from the poorest citizens on Universal Credit (a thousand pounds a year).
And her and her fellow political Right Wing Moron Raab once wrote a book saying working people in this country are lazy, perhaps there’s nothing worse than being lectured by Neo-Liberal Capitalist Legal Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!
In 1892 Keir Hardie won the seat of West Ham for Independent Labour in 2022 Keir Starmer has ripped the party apart there (and everywhere else).
My suggestion, for what it is worth, is for everyone in a local CLP who is pro Corbyn policies and anti Starmer policies should quit and set up local “Socialist Labour” groups and affiliate with other such groups. Invite ex members to join. Charge a monthly fee below the current Labour membership fee. All that money would go to the local group, none to a central group. That would give them a large pot to support their preferred candidate (which could be Labour Councillors who remain, if they deserve it) and a fighting fund for a General Election candidate.
Spot on please promote that idea mate.
Great idea Andrew Jenkinson.
Andrew – Which of Labour’s current policies don’t you agree with and why?
Have you read Labour’s new Green Paper on Employment Rights.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Employment-Rights-Green-Paper.pdf
Andrew – You can find a list of the policies that were announced and/or confirmed at this years conference here.
https://skwawkbox.org/2021/11/12/labours-latest-data-breach-communication-reveals-more-breaches/#comment-205230
‘Which of Labour’s current policies don’t you agree with and why?’ followed by ‘You can find a list of the policies that were announced and/or blah, blah, blah’.
I hadn’t realised we had to write an essay set by you when commenting here. Bloody patronising or what.
Julia – of course you are not compelled to do anything but don’t you think it is a little strange that although contributors to these pages frequently make assertions about Labour’s policies under Keir’s leadership nobody seems to be able to quote any of these so called RW Tory policies
@Another Angry Voice nails it :
Guardian hacks + Labour figures whining the Sue Grey report into lockdown-busting Tory parties is taking too long (a few weeks)
The same people have fuck all to say about the Forde Report into racism, bullying + electoral sabotage by the Labour right getting buried for years!
—————-
Seriously warped UK!
If we’re talking about reports that have been buried for years, how about “The Work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to anti-semitism, 2014-2019”?
The Moslem population are being gradually backed into a corner by the two main parties in Britain…The Moslem population are being forced into a very dangerous situation when they no longer have any representation in Britain .I would urge them to remember that the working-class people of Britain and across the world are being harvested from any representation and to keep the faith in ordinary people who will fight back together with them and restore true democracy in a world dominated by Neo liberal government…Fascism and hatred are the mark of the beast.but the rise of the working-class movement is inevitable and needed like never before.
Our Muslim population is having an excellent representation by The Workers Party of Britain, check us out.
Alan, I left Labour after 40 years ten seconds after the Neo-Liberal Lump of wood was elected.
I can only speak from my experience in my city.
My brilliant Socialist trade union branch (when Covid hit) had met on Zoom 40 times before Labour remembered it had members!
And over the recent years (complying with Covid rules) we have been out on the streets campaigning on a range of issues supporting diverse working people over 100 times!
Whilst Labour members (who were not our members) turned up to help on a couple occasions (though these were Lefties).
And we campaign ALL YEAR ROUND as we will be doing EVERY WEEK over the coming years!
And WE POLITICISE diverse working people TO EMPOWER THEM whilst Labour just puts out a few leaflets at election time.
And working with grassroots groups such as parents with Disabled children we have had victories.
Proud of my socialist union and its theory and practice.
Strong letters from both.
And to stand in opposition
Game on people…
All the people is a nidus to start growing the crystal of hope..
We await a new Party
If JC launches one, domino effect…
The Labour leadership is poison.
It can be trusted – But always to do the wrong thing.
Well said – The two resignation letters..
Every word true.
THE RICH MAY HAVE MONEY TO BURN BUT WE HAVE THE MATCHES