Lavery demands working-class Labour MPs – but what do we get?
Telling it like it is: Ian Lavery.
Here’s another split between Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership and senior party MPs.
Ian Lavery was party chairman under Jeremy Corbyn and is a member of the Socialist Group of Labour MPs. I’m sure that, once upon a time, every Labour MP was a socialist but now there’s only a rump of around 30.
He was replaced as chair by deputy leader Angela Rayner so you can tell which way the wind is blowing.
Lavery is putting forward a viewpoint that will be particularly unpopular with the Starmer faction that currently has control: he thinks the Party of the Workers should have working-class representatives.
We have seen from the treatment of Anna Rothery in Liverpool that Starmer doesn’t like any hint of socialism in his Labour Party and will take extraordinary steps to stamp on it (his behaviour towards her also suggests he doesn’t like anybody who isn’t white and male, but that’s another story).
Lavery says:
Labour representatives cannot focus group their way to a better society. We need people with the heart and instincts that can only come from the bitter sting of personal experience. Parliament is desperately short of people who have claimed benefits, gone through life with disabilities or struggled day in day out in bad employment. This past year we have seen key workers carry the country on their backs, yet the green benches are sadly lacking in them too. We desperately need people with this experience to rebuild our country.
Labour has a history of promoting positive discrimination and it has an even longer history of championing the cause of working people. It is time that we remember our roots and embrace protected places for working class candidates throughout of our movement. If we do not trust in the power of people from our heartlands, why should they ever again put their trust in us?
Excellent points – although I fear the ideal of protected places for working-class candidates may not weather the reality of Starmer’s leadership, as Anna Rothery was standing for election to be Liverpool’s executive mayor as part of a protected all-female list and Starmer scrapped that when he realised she was black, a socialist, and female.
And I fear that Lavery only gets to make these point because he has held a senior post in the Labour Party.
I recently heard about an MP in Bristol who has given up positions as a junior shadow minister and as Starmer’s PPS “to concentrate on constituency work”. Maybe that’s true. But generally they only take a reduction in pay grade if they have serious disagreements with the leader.
It occurs to me that this MP cannot say as much, though, due to a lack of seniority. At junior grade they can’t speak their mind because the leaders will eat them for breakfast.
That’s how it seems to me, anyway.
It is no way for the Labour Party to behave.
But that’s Keir Starmer and all his minions for you.
Source: Ian Lavery on the Need for Working Class Labour MPs | Beastrabban\’s Weblog
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Stammer the spammer isn’t for the peasants but
His lot won’t let power go we doomed
Too little way too late. All these speeches are too late to change the cult of new Labour for far too many years the so-called socialists in Labour have sat back and let the right-wing take over the party until we only have a cult of new Labour 2.0.
It’s, not a party just a cult and if you’re not right-wing they want you gone! Heck just look what BS they did with JC and other MP’s before him. If they are serious these socialists need to be thinking about setting up as a socialist party.
Sorry Labour is dead it’s a right-wing zombie party with a nametag of Labour and nothing else remains. ..
Demanding more of the same sort of MP’s will do nothing about the culture or change the party back! Only starting again and getting it right with NO right-wing allowed. Then you will have a truly socialist party this endless fighting the right-wing cult of new Labour and all there BS is just wasting time and effort that should be taken up with attacking the Torys.
Zombie Labour! It has a certain ring to it.