UK Labour leadership

Pictures have emerged showing Nichole Brennan holding a sign calling Israel a “racist, apartheid state” in a protest two years ago at Hove Town Hall against the adoption of the International Definition of Antisemitism by the local authority. The Definition lists “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”) as an example of antisemitism.

Brighton and Hove City Council adopted the Definition.

In a statement, Cllr Brennan said: “I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused to the Jewish community and I sincerely regret campaigning in this way…This happened two years ago, before I was a councillor. At the time I was not as knowledgeable about the [D]efinition of antisemitism as I am now. I do not seek to excuse my actions.”

She went on to say: “I have referred myself to the Labour Party and will fully cooperate with any investigation and have stepped aside from my role as deputy chair of housing and lead for homelessness and rough sleeping, pending its outcome.”

Cllr Brennan reportedly added that she now fully supports the Definition.

https://antisemitism.uk/brighton-and-hove-labour-councillor-apologises-and-resigns-leadership-role-pending-investigation-over-potentially-antisemitic-protest/

Worse than McCarthyism.  Entering show trial recantion world.

More people wanting the leadership race to be delayed until after the coronavirus pandemic has been resolved:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2020/03/22/a-storm-is-brewing-over-the...

nicky wrote:

What a disaster it would be to put off the vote and maintain an inept and thoroughly impotent leader.

it is blindingly apparent that the great majority of Labour members want to turn their backs on Corbyn. By almost two to one they do not even want him in the shadow cabinet. To keep him in place by canceling the vote, the Corbynites want to engineer a coup comparable to Trump calling off the November election. And subvert a democratic vote they know they cannot win.

it is a postal ballot so there is minimal health risk. 

Postponement would be like using the excuse of WW Two to maintain the discredited Neville Chamberlain as PM.

That is going way the hell too far.  In what universe did Corbyn EVER do anything remotely comparable to appeasing the Third Reich by handing it control of the Sudentenland?

There you go again Ken. 

Is there no limit to your appetitive to misquote and mis-attribute?

I didn’t compare anyone to Nazis (and will refrain from any comparisons with you and the big lie.)

Some of Corbyn’s supporters called for a delay in the leadership vote because of the corona emergency. I merely compared it to the replacement of Chamberlain, another useless leader, in 1940 despite the wartime emergency.

By the way, there are now calls to bring the leadership vote forward in order to provide Labour  as soon as possible with a credible leader who can respond more effectively to the crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/24/labours-long-leadership-battle-hampering-coronavirus-response

If only Corbyn had alsorecognized in 2015 that he was unqualified for the job....

In 2015 Starmer had only briefly been elected an MP. It is not surprising he did not run despite an impressive career in law.

As for Corbyn’s supposed “eloquence” in the current crisis perhaps you can read the Guardian article I posted which reports widespread frustration at his incompetent contribution to the pandemic.

nicky wrote:

As for Corbyn’s supposed “eloquence” in the current crisis perhaps you can read the Guardian article I posted which reports widespread frustration at his incompetent contribution to the pandemic.

I read that article, and it is trash. When Corbyn stepped down, nobody had any idea that there would be a coronavirus pandemic that would shut down the whole world. It's not unusual for an outgoing leader to stick around while a successor is chosen, and the timeline that was proposed at the time is not that uncommon for political parites. Shame on the Labour Party to use the coronavirus as an excuse to grind an axe with Corbyn, and shame on the Guardian for giving that any air time. On this basis alone, Labour deserves to die and something better should rise up from the ashes. As the final paragraph in that article states:

Quote:

But a Labour source said: “Using a time of national crisis to get in a last dig at Jeremy is divisive, silly and about as low as you can go. They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Ken confabulates:

"How can you justify these people deciding, in the end, that ousting Corbyn was more important than beating the Tories. 

That's what they decided.

That's what YOU decided."

When did I ever say this? You really should not engage in this repeated mendacity.

What Corbyn and his crew did decide was that it was better for them to preside over a monumental defeat and maintain control over Labour or step aside for a leader who could win the election.

nicky wrote:

Ken confabulates:

"How can you justify these people deciding, in the end, that ousting Corbyn was more important than beating the Tories. 

That's what they decided.

That's what YOU decided."

When did I ever say this? You really should not engage in this repeated mendacity.

What Corbyn and his crew did decide was that it was better for them to preside over a monumental defeat and maintain control over Labour or step aside for a leader who could win the election.

There wasn't anyone who fit that bill.  Starmer was all-out Remain, which guaranteed he'd have done worse.  Nobody else you'd preferred had any personal popularity nor any capacity to develop it.

Boris got his majority by chanting "Get Brexit Done" over and over again, while Labour MPs kept trying to force out their leader after the election had been called, even though they knew a leadership change was impossible once the election campaign was underway.  They knew all they could do was hurt Labour's chances by continuing to try and force Corbyn out, yet they kept doing it anyway, even though they had no one at all who'd have been better.

What nonsense Ken:

“There wasn't anyone who fit that bill.  Starmer was all-out Remain, which guaranteed he'd have done worse.  Nobody else you'd preferred had any personal popularity nor any capacity to develop it.”

Almost anyone off the street would have done better than Corbyn. He was spectacularly unpopular. Polling showed that any other unnamed leader would have added 10% to Labour’s vote.

As Aristotle points out, and as you applaud, there are more important things going on in the world.

Yet  you continue to wallow in your incessant cheerleading for Corbyn. 

In any case, Corbyn clearly would have stood down far earlier if only the PLP hadn't made it clear they would erase his policies and his supporters from the party.  No good would have come of the PLP erasing all of that and resetting to a pointless obsession with a "center ground" that no longer exists in UK politics.

I accept that Starmer probably will win the leadership-he does have an obligation to not be as ugly about things as you want him to be.   MOST of the rank-and-file doesn't want Corbyn's policies abandoned, and since there are no policies to the right of Corbyn's that are anything but Tory, moving to the right would be moving to make the party's existence meaningless.

Nobody wants Labour to reduce it's policy offer to anything close to "we can do it better", "we're going to punish people on benefits, too", or "let's invade MORE Arab/Muslim countries and btw, we revoke the party's apology for the Iraq War".

It doesn't matter whether he made that point himself.  Corbyn clearly wasn't in this for ego or glory-this was a lacerating experience for him and my point is that, if the PLP had taken any attitude towards him other than "not only Corbyn himself, but everyone who supports him and everything they stand for are alien to and unwelcome in the party.  They simply all have to be erased and we have to go all the way back to where we were in 2015", it is my conviction that he would have gone.

Can you not see how the arrogance and instransigence the PLP showed, in not only opposing Corbyn but acting as though it was perfectly legitimate for them to seek total erasure of everything the Corbyn phenomenon as about-was at least partly to blame for Corbyn's conviction that he had to stand on?

You'd have to concede that it wasn't a legitimate explanation for Corbyn to not only stand down but leave his supporters totally unprotected.

Why couldn't they have given at least some indication that they didn't want to just go straight back to the Blair-Brown policies, that they were willing to accept that the party had to change after 2015, that it had to make a clean break with support for austerity and a foreign policy based on nothing but military intervention in non-European countries?

Why couldn't the PLP have made it clear that there'd be no Kinnock-style mass purges and no erasure of socialism?  Why couldn't they have accepted that they were simply one part of the party and should not be above the paid membership in influence within the party?

It's not as though the PLP, especially the Blairite loyalists, had any better policies to offer.

Really Ken? “It doesn't matter whether he made that point himself.”

it mattered enough for you to have claimed this innumerable times as you cut and pasted your standard excuses for Corbyn’s leadership.

It now “doesn’t matter” because you know it is false. Corbyn NEVER made an offer to step aside if his faction was “protected”.  You know you cannot document this. It is at best a fantasy of yours, if not a deception. SO STOP SAYING IT.

If anything, the Corbynites were prepared to wage an ongoing purge of the moderates as Corbyn admitted to Lisa Nandy.

https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-leadership-race-erupts-after-lisa-nandy-accuses-corbyn-team-of-factional-war

And Aristotle, I have refrained from linking the Guardian’s report on this since you have pointed out to us how right-wing the Guardian is.

Perhaps you can recommend another publication that you think is objective and authoritative on British politics.

[quote=nicky]

Really Ken? “It doesn't matter whether he made that point himself.”

it mattered enough for you to have claimed this innumerable times as you cut and pasted your standard excuses for Corbyn’s leadership.

It now “doesn’t matter” because you know it is false. Corbyn NEVER made an offer to step aside if his faction was “protected”.  You know you cannot document this. It is at best a fantasy of yours, if not a deception. SO STOP SAYING IT.

If anything, the Corbynites were prepared to wage an ongoing purge of the moderates as Corbyn admitted to Lisa Nandy.

https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-leadership-race-erupts-after-lisa-nandy-accuses-corbyn-team-of-factional-war

I read that article.  Corbyn made no such admission, Nandy herself didn't CLAIM that Corbyn had made any such admission, and you left out the part where another Labour figure called Nandy's allegations of a planned purge of moderates "bullshit".  Corbyn and the majority he stood with never wanted the moderates gone-they just wanted the moderates to give the sabotage a rest, to stop acting as though they, the "moderates", were simply ENTITLED to be treated as the Labour's internal aristocracy.

You mentioned the 1930s-if you were going to mention how badly Labour did in that decade, you might have mentioned those who were to blame for Labour's electoral troubles then-the right wing of the party, the ones who deserted, along with Ramsay MacDonald-a man who forever lost the right to be considered a Labour prime minister for doing this-and joined a Tory-controlled "National Government", in which "Ramsay Mac" spent every moment betraying the working classes that had put him into power in 1924 and 1929.  In the 1980s, the equivalents in treachery were those members of the Labour Right who splintered off-mainly over Europe; btw, it's valid to ask why the Labour Right cares more about being "part of Europe"-something that never required setting up institutions that exist solely to impose perpetual Continental austerity and the privatization of all assets owned by the people, something that could have been egalitarian and democratic but was never allowed to be and can never be made to be within the EU-than it does about defending the social welfare state and solidarity with the working and kept-from-working-by-the-system poor.  Don't YOU wonder why the Labour Right places "Europe" before solidarity and the common good?

All there was in those allegations was was a desperation ploy by the no hope third-place candidate in the leadership contest to pull out a victory the vast majority of the party doesn't want her to win.  In making these claims-and thereby making it clear that she would expel all socialists from the party if she was elected-Nandy is demonstrating her unsuitability for the job.

And btw Corbyn didn't lead "a faction"-you can't win the Labour leadership if you represent no one but a splinter-he was elected by the vast majority of the Labour rank-and-file, and his victory in the leadership contests were as legitimate as any other leadership candidate's victory would have been.

Whatever you think about Corbyn himself-and I have made criticisms of him myself in the exchanges we've had-wouldn't you HAVE to agree that the 2015 and 2016 leadership results means that the Labour base wanted a clear break from centrism, austerity, and perpetual war?

Wouldn't you agree that the PLP has an obligation to respect the views of the majority expressed in those elections and accept that the party NEEDED to re-embrace socialist principles, needs to be significantly less militarist than the Tories-it should be more than enough to pledge to defend the UK itself from external attack, and there is clearly nothing else that can be done with Western military force in the Arab/Muslim world or any other part of the planet outside of Europe-and needs to move away from the Blair model in which the leader has exclusive say over how the party is governed and what it stands for?

Can you justify the PLP's refusal to accept all of that and its bloodyminded seeming insistence on erasing not only Corbyn but everything the majority of the party he stood with on the issues wanted?

It would be one thing if Labour had won EVERY election before Corbyn sought the leadership-that, in theory, could justify your attitude about the policies he brought in-but it had lost solidly in both 2010 and 2015, when the party was being run exactly as you want it to be run again.   Why should we treat the people who lost those contests as though they know any more at all about how to win an election than anyone else?  All the anti-Corbyn had to offer was "go back to what WE used to do", and 2010 and 2015 prove that what THEY used to do was never going to be effective again.

That's what I've been trying to say to you-not that Corbyn was an infallible saint; that would be a ludicrous thing for anyone to think-but that the 2015 and 2016 leadership results(the second of which made the "no-confidence motion" a moot point, just as Trudeau's 1974 election victory made the no-confidence motion passed by the Canadian HoC against HIS government a moot point) weren't just about him; they were about a massive change in what the rank-and-file wanted.

You have never acknowleged that those leadership results were valid on that level.

And the plain and simple fact is, it's not going to improve Labour's response to the coronavirus to have a had a new leader come in earlier and lead with the message "we're not socialist anymore and we've kicked out all the socialists".  Nobody out there in the wider electorate would have been impressed by that, nor would it have made any meaningful difference in how Boris' "government" responded.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Please indulge my crossposting of this comment in the Covid-19 page. I am doing it not to get my comment seen in another place but to have it read in the context of the Labour party's struggles in the UK. Corbyn had flaws and we should not be litigating whether he should be leader now that he is gone. However, I firmly believe that he understood the principles behing my comment I am crossposting below with apologies. My fear for the UK is if they revert back to a person who will place the party, the system, ahead of the very reason they are there.

In this Canada has missed the point with all parties onside. It has recognized people as workers but not recognized them as people. In that sense Canada is only somewhat better than the US. Countries have to stop  seeing people as actors in the economy and start to see the economy as an actor among people. Until they do so responses to emergencies will always have the wrong emphasis and will always miss the mark. 

We do not need to be kind to people as we manage the economy as centre left parties tend to do (rather than Conservative parties who do not bother). Instead we have to manage the economy to service the people and maintain the economy to that end.

This crisis is exposing the tendency of systems (economies and governments) to protect the systems more than people they serve.

The charity and kindness of the religious to the needy rather than a recognition of the entitlement and obligation to and of other humans, is something the political left speaks of. The problem is that this vision is the foundation of politics and comes through even the most social democratic of parties in a crisis.

This should be the lesson of Covid-19.

Excellent.  Thanks for posting that, Sean.

All I have been saying here, really, is that the time for demonizing Corbyn should be done.  He wasn't evil and his policies weren't wrong.

All I have been saying here, really, is that the time for demonizing Corbyn should be done.  He wasn't evil and his policies weren't wrong.

You've wasted much of the past four years on your obsession with the idea that nothing mattered more than removing Corbyn from the leadership.  

Owen Smith-the man who literally had no one turn up at all at his leadership rallies, would not have been an improvement.  It's not possible to go from getting no crowds when you stand for the leadership to leading your party to victory in an election.

In truth, there probably wasn't anybody who could have led Labour to victory in 2017 or 2019.  It's time to admit that and it's time to stop obsessing about a former leader.

Just move on.

I never SAID Corbyn actually MADE that offer.   I said it was a reasonable surmise that he would have agreed to those terms.  Since there is no way anyone would agreed to go through the misery Corbyn was subjected to relentlessly for four years, he was clearly acting to protect his supporters and their values from being erased from the party.

Why is it so important to you, even now, even with the man's tenure as leader done, to continue to vilify the man?  To continue to treat him as though he acted out of ego and selfishness?  

And why are you still obsessed with having everything he stood for erased from the party?  The big thing voters in the UK are going to be looking for now is whether Labour can do a more effective job at communicating a program for change.  They aren't insisting that the first words of the next leader be "we renounce Corbyn and all his works".   You are the one obsessed with vengeance against the Labour Left, not the voters there.

Nobody else who led the party after him, even Long-Bailey, would lead it in exactly the same way, would make the same mistakes without learning.  It's just that the next Labour leader can't unite the party and can't stand for anything significantly different than the Tories if that leader takes punishing the Left the organizing principle of their tenure as leader.   Punishment is a waste of time and energy.  

But the voters aren't demanding that Labour move massively to the right, that it go back to being just as militarist as it was under Blair and just as miserly as it was under Brown.  

And Labour can't win if the hundreds of thousands of people who joined in the Corbyn years to fight for a socialist future are driven away, or if Labour goes back to fetishizing the reactionary, imperialist Union flag and loudly, pompously singing that ridiculous hymn of adulation to an irrelevant German monarchy-a monarchy whose allowance kept increasing even as the remnants of the welfare state were being cut to nothing.

Labour can't go back to being "moderate" and still have any reason to exist.  Nobody wants the differences to be blurred, OR for the next Labour leader to go back to the 2010-2015 era, when the party endorsed the Tory narrative about the alleged immorality of the poor.

No.  I never actually did.  I said I thought he'd have agreed to that.

The PLP never ever tried to negotiate a real compromise with him-they just kept demanding that he leave and offered the majority of the party whose ideals he supported anything at all, other than offering him a powerless, pathetic and irrelevant position as "party president".

If the issue was simply getting him out of the leadership, why couldn't the PLP offer the majority of the party he represented some REAL guarantees that they wouldn't be purged and the policies they supported-policies that were almost always popular with the voters, btw-wouldn't be erased and replaced with the bland centrist dead zone policies people like Tom Watson wanted to drag the party back through?

Now that Corbyn is out of the leadership, would you not have to concede that he has been vindicated in his argument that there would have to be major, sometimes massive increases in public investment in solving those problems?  And that none of the issues the UK currently faces can be dealt with under a balance budget and while continuing military intervention in non-European countries?

I have not spent much time responding in this thread but I think there is a point that needs to be made.

I certainly agree that the left is not soemthign that should be purged from the point of view of the ideals of the party. But I would add a second reason. 

The idea that you could purge the left to win is ridiculous. If Labour purged the party of the left what do you think that purged group would do? Form a new party and then compete with them is what they woudl do. They might fight for maybe a decade until one side destroyed the other. In the meantime the Conservatives would have no chance at a loss. 

If the point of having a leader from the moderate side is to unite the party any purge would destroy it.

Thank you for FINALLY saying there shouldn't be a general purge of the left.  

As to the specific people you have an issue with in the party bureaucracy...I think we can asusme they would stand down on their own if Starmer won, to give him a chance to pick others.  

BTW, as to the leadership ballots, it is much more likely, from what I've seen, that it's Labour members associated with the Left who have had trouble getting their ballots.

There's no way you can seriously argue that Starmer or Formby are being cheated out of anything here.

I'm a member of several Labour Left Facebook pages, and there are continual comments on those pages in which people say they haven't received ballots.  And given the obsession of the party bureaucracy with making sure Starmer becomes leader, it's more likely that it would be people known to be on the left of the party who would have trouble getting ballots.

Not sure why anybody would be making any insinuations that it's moderates being stymied here-your candidate is way ahead in most of the polls, so it's kind of absurd to imply that Starmer's supporters are being victimized.

And Nandy, the candidate of the extreme antisocialist wing of the party, is stuck in third place because all she brings to the discussion is an obsession with punishing the Left-she's in trouble because she offers no positive or unifying message and speaks only in the language of retribution.   Her showing reflects the fact that most Labour members and supporters do not think that the most important task of the party is inflicting vengeance on anyone.   There's no way she can fairly claim that her supporters are being singled out for being impeded in getting ballots.

Evening Standard Endorses Keir Starmer

https://twitter.com/afshinrattansi/status/1245725386480197633

"London's main local newspaper endorses #darkmoneystarmer (whose agency conspired to prolong the persecution of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange) as Jeremy Corbyn's replacement..."

Won't hurt him a bit. Bourgeois social democrats here and there continue silent support for official malevolence towards Assange.

"On Corbyn's last day, a reminder of how The Guardian helped the establishment ensure his defeat. It specialized in the anti-semitism smear, with dozens of articles, relentlessly. These 4 were all in the week leading up to the 12 December 2019 election..."

https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/1245747227789852674

That's pretty much in line with what the polls predicted.

We've all known this was how the contest would end, and we've all known that this was the highest possible vote share he could get.

Starmer is elected and now he has to act in a purely positive manner.

Starmer needs to pledge to no drive for mass expulsions of socialists and to not agree to the BoD's insistence on equating antizionism with antisemitism.  

He should also agree never to adopt any policies to the right of the 2017 manifesto, since there are no policies to the right of that that could ever be considered anything but Toryism.

Unity can only be built on positive steps...it can never be built harshly or punitively.

If he really wants to be decent and unifying,  Starmer should

1)Issue an apology to Corbyn on behalf of the PLP for all the years of unjustified nastiness they subjected him to, and   2)Admit that he had no justification for pushing Corbyn to reverse the 2017 manifesto position on the EU and then, once Corbyn had compromised with him on that and agreed to a second referendum, which he knew was as far as Corbyn could go on the issue, push Corbyn to go allout Remain when he knew Corbyn couldn't do that without guaranteeing Labour would lose even more seats in the heartlands.  Starmer shares a significant amount of responsibility for Boris' majority by virtue of having done that-if Labour had stayed with the 2017 position, Boris would never have had the phrase "Get Brexit Done" t0 use over and over and over again.

Here is the most telling thing:  Lisa Nandy, whose campaign was nothing but a call for a purge of all socialists and the embrace of xenophobia, reaction, austerity and poorbashing, who offered no positive vision of the future and who would, if elected, have stripped Labour of all meaningful differences, took a pathetic 16% of the vote.  This means there is no significant support in the party for going back to the pathetic dead zone policies of 2010 and 2015, and no mandate for punishing the rank-and-file left.  This is great news, because Labour can't win if it punishes the left and drives it away.