Starmeroids’ planned changes to exclude disabled people and minorities from local party running have met with justified outrage
The Disability Labour group of party activists has issued a statement condemning Keir Starmer’s ‘institutionally ableist’ party after details of planned rule changes emerged that will drastically reduce the ability of disabled people and minority groups to influence the direction, attitudes and activities of their local party.
Alongside plans to severely reduce the voice of party members at Labour’s annual conferences, Starmer’s faction is planning rule changes to remove the requirement for local parties to elect equalities officers to represent ethnic minorities, disabled people and LGBTQ+ members.
‘Shocked and appalled’ Disability Labour’s statement decries the regime’s attack on the ‘small gains’ achieved by disabled members and condemns the ‘even deeper marginalisation’ that will result from the rule changes being imposed by the ‘institutionally ableist’ party:
STATEMENT ON PROPOSED LABOUR PARTY RULE CHANGES
We are shocked and appalled by the changes to the Labour Party rulebook going to conference in Liverpool. The small gains made for disabled members over the last few years have been all but lost.
We are returning to even deeper marginalisation. The small places where disabled people could use their voices and lived experience to improve the hostile world we live in are being relegated to simply functional. This is the very essence of ableism.
This action makes us as disabled people feel unwelcome in our own party and increases the feeling that the Labour Party is institutionally ableist as we warned 12 months ago. Instead of representing the rich tapestry of life it will return to being simply bland.
The attack on minorities is in no way out of character for the Starmer regime. Racism, ableism and bigotry are rife among the Labour right and his faction already moved last year to reduce the influence of people from the Black and other minority – though correctly global majority – communities, abolishing Labour’s ‘BAME’ conference and replacing it with the sham, unrepresentative puppet body exposed and disbanded under Jeremy Corbyn.
Starmer’s party has rightly been blasted for dogwhistle attacks on immigrants, its rampant Islamophobia and support for oppressive policing that will disproportionately impact minority groups, racially-driven purges, protecting right-wing racists, attacks on gypsies and left-wing Jews and promotion of candidates accused of hideous views on disabled people and minorities.
Now it is institutionalising that discrimination and bigotry even more deeply – all while Starmer continues to lie that he will empower members and local communities.
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Is there an actual link to the proposed changes?
https://labourlist.org/2023/09/labour-nec-meeting-rule-changes-clps-conference-motions-jeremy-corbyn/
Following close on the heels of : ‘Rosena Allin-Khan resigned as shadow cabinet minister for mental health with a letter to Starmer pointedly declaring that “you made clear that you do not see a space for a mental health portfolio in a Labour cabinet”.
I know there are still some fine and honourable members in the Labour Party, and originally thought ‘yes we should fight’ to regain some semblance of social democracy. But surely it is now well overdue that those people faced facts and realise that the Labour Party as we knew it has been stolen and it is never going to be regained.
I also know the arguments against forming a new Party but surely there is now absolutely nothing to lose?
There are already other parties, just pick one that most suits your politics
Me? Green
There are many good and well-meaning people in the Green Party.
Unfortunately, Socialism is not a policy of that Party.
The Greens appear to buy into the neo-liberal consensus which is at the root of so-much of today’s economic ills – At home and internationally.
Until the Greens challenge the capitalist establishment, I shall not be joining them.
I suggest forming a national Green Socialist Network coordinating between the various constituency-based campaigns to re-elect Jeremy Corbyn, Emma Dent Coad, Jamie Driscoll & similar & the 2 (more?) organisations working to remove Starmer from Holborn and St Pancras & any similar campaigns.
Those campaigns should unite nationally around a demand for proportional representation to break the hold of the duopoly of Tory & rw Labour & the neoliberal establishment that duopoly represents.
There seems to be grassroots support for electoral reform and PR in at least some of the Labour Party & this is to be encouraged across the country both within Labour and beyond.
It is only by breaking the stranglehold of our outrageously undemocratic FPTP electoral system that we will move forward with the renewal of our society, starting above all with serious efforts to avert climate change which is as big a threat to humanity as nuclear war.
Those still in that cess-pit need to leave the party right now, and join a more socialist alternative
I’m sure that Trilateral Commissioner, Sir Kier Starmer, KCB (Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath), will be hoping to notch-up another step in his authoritarian ambitions to eliminate another layer of the labour Party’s democratic structure.
Wikipedia Quote: “Social critic and academic Noam Chomsky has criticized the Trilateral Commission as undemocratic, pointing to its publication The Crisis of Democracy, which describes the strong popular interest in politics during the 1970s as an “excess of democracy”.[59] He described it as one of the most interesting and insightful books showing the modern democratic system not to really be a democracy at all, but controlled by elites. Chomsky says that the Commission discusses how the public needs to be reduced to its proper state of apathy and obedience.[60]”
It looks like Sir Kier is fulfilling his obligations to the Commission admirably.
No doubt his injection of poison will be well-rewarded in the usual way.
As a retired engineer with 50 years in the engineering industry, I experience a number of disabilities.
There must be many like me who will damn the Labour Party for this proposal.
Starmer is an appaling human being.
I think we need to leave the word ‘human’ out, as he is devoid of any empathy and humanity’. Are we sure he is not one of those devious AI robots?
Joe, they’re brutes and celebrate the fact. I despair for the future of our class, the only section of society that can effect complete change. We don’t even see the bloody tunnel.
thing is alexander, we don’t even see the pen fences that we are collectively being kept behind – the enclosures we happily accept in order to ‘protect’ our health (against a bog-standard mix of respiratory viruses that constantly change but surface every year as illness when vitamin D levels reduce and which, in 2019 they gave a name (a ‘C’ word) and fictionalised as a ‘novel’ killer-virus, although it altered global death rates hardly-at-all. (The untested, emergency authorised mRNA ‘vaccines’ they provided against it, though, are accompanied by increased death, heart disease, reduced fertility and a sudden appearance of serious ‘metabolic’-type illneses without their usual gradual development and ‘chronic’ histories, i.e. a global rise in ‘excess death’ wherever the mRNA ‘vaccines’ appeared.
“shocked and appalled”
Got NO idea WHY they’re shocked, this was always on the cards in an authoritarian party led by an unabashed, aloof, egocentric megalomaniac.
As for “appalled”, well just you vote them in – and see what they’ll get up to then. See how “welcome” you’ll feel not just in the party but in all aspects of life, once you’ve granted them the power to do as they bleedin well please.
Neither LabourList nor this site actually cite the proposals so it is difficult to understand never mind critique them with any confidence.
While neither skwawky nor labourlist cite any proposal, the fact that disability labour felt it necessary to have released their statement is surely a giveaway about the plans?
And I’m sure I read/heard somewhere not so long ago that something akin to this was one of the reasons unite & gmb walked from the policy forum the other week.
I agree that they are stongly likely to be detrimental but it is difficult to be against something if what that thing is remains unknown, a fault that lies very much with Labour who might have put the proposals in the public domain and then sought feedback. As it is, this is either mismanaged kite-flying or evasion of democratic norms, neither of which is a good look.
The disabled and those with mental health problems are losers. They have to accept being left behind. Otherwise, what does the stupendous success of Keir and Rachel mean? They absorbed the lesson of their education: “straight is the gate and few who enter therein”. If the “weak” don’t lose the “strong” don’t win. And life is all about winning. If you push the logic far enough you arrive at the fact that Hitler built the gas chambers for the disabled. Of course, we are more civilised, we simply consign them to poverty, marginalisation and misery. But what a great day it will be when Keir enters number 10 and Rachel number 11 ! They will have proved themselves. Isn’t that what life is about? Yes, it is if you’re a pusillanimous conformist like Starmer who cringes at the thought of contact with anyone who isn’t rich, powerful, successful, a go-getter….Same old drivel, same old lack of courage and vision.
Frank, thank you for bringing up the Nazi slaughter of the disabled. Timely.