Why do people bother to pay the licence fee when BBC News feeds them lies?
The current editor-approved attack line against socialists is that people who – rightly – heckled Keir Starmer’s speech to the Labour conference were mocking him for talking about his mother being in intensive care.
This is a lie.
See it in action in this clip in which Laura Pidcock was asked for her reaction:
"It was long, wasn't it? I didn't think that was his moment"
Note that the false implication about Starmer’s mother isn’t fanfared – it’s just slipped into the clip to take you by surprise.
Here’s the reality of the situation:
Are the BBC really going with the line “Keir was heckled over his mother being in intensive care”. This is an appalling reframing of what happened. Starmer wanted to talk up the importance of NHS nurses so he was heckled over his refusal to commit to a proper pay rise for them!
The correct news angle would have been to ask why Starmer doesn’t support a 15 per cent pay rise for nurses if he appreciates the work they did for (among others) his own mother. Isn’t it hypocritical and insensitive of him to use his own mother in such a way?
Starmer’s speech was full of similar howlers. Top of this list is his announcement of a new organisation, Labour Friends of the Police, on the day we heard how a police officer used his powers to arrest, kidnap, rape and murder a woman, and then burned the body.
If that is the kind of friend Keir Starmer wants, then he is no friend of yours.
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Why are the UK’s news media avoiding any mention of the Metropolitan Police Service’s collusion in the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard?
Commissioner Cressida Dick was well aware of concerns about Wayne Couzens, long before he planned and executed his crimes against Ms Everard.
He had been nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ by colleagues at the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, which he joined in 2011, because he made some female colleagues feel uncomfortable, according to the Evening Standard.
The paper also reported that Kent Police took no action in 2015 after it was alleged that he had been seen driving around Dover, naked from the waist down.
And the Met – which he joined in 2018 – received further accusations of indecent exposure by Couzens on two further occasions. Neither of them were investigated properly in the days before he kidnapped, raped and murdered Ms Everard.
The BBC reported in July that the Independent Office for Police Conduct said a total of 12 gross misconduct or misconduct notices had so far been served on police officers from multiple forces in relation to the Couzens case, including about the handling of two separate claims that Couzens had indecently exposed himself.
And other recent cases show that police turning a blind eye to the crimes of fellow officers is at epidemic levels.
In this context, the Met put out a statement that its members were “sickened, angered and devastated” by Couzens’s crimes. Maybe they are – but is it only because he was caught?
“They betray everything we stand for,” the statement continues. But Met police officers betray everything they stand for on a daily basis.
Look at the Daniel Morgan case, in which the Met was found to be “institutionally corrupt” and Commissioner Dick herself was found to have obstructed access to vital information without reason.
And what punishment did she receive for this corrupt behaviour?
None. Instead she was rewarded for it with a two-year extension of her job.
Real people are disgusted…
Not sickened enough to prevent you from attacking the Sarah Everard vigil, and trampling their flowers into the ground, were you?
… but does that really matter when the media – and the politicians – are backing these corrupt cops to the hilt?
Look at Labour leader Keir Starmer. In his speech at the party conference – on the day we learned Couzens had abused his police powers to arrest Ms Everard before abducting, raping and murdering her – he used rape victims as a tool of emotional blackmail to push for more police powers.
I’ll hand you back to Another Angry Voice for an opinion more succinct than any I could add:
It was only last year that Keir Starmer forced his Labour MPs to abstain on legislation designed to allow undercover cops to get away with raping women!
Yet today he's pretending that he cares about rape victims.
The Met’s comment says staff recognise the concerns raised by Couzens’s actions and will comment further after he has been sentenced for his crimes – but I have no hope that anything useful will be said.
We’ll probably hear that new measures will be put in place to prevent such crimes in the future – that will not be enforced.
They’re likely to say that lessons have been learned – but nobody will act upon them.
The end result is that women will be left in greater fear of violence against them than ever – not because of men, as some in politics and the media are signalling, but because of the police.
You can bet the Met won’t do anything to change that.
If you want proof, all you have to do is wait for the reports of the next crimes committed by officers of the Metropolitan Police.
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Offensive gesture: when This Writer discussed Starmer’s speech with a non-political friend, the other person said this pose, struck by the Labour leader while mocking a heckler, deeply angered him.
This Writer was away at a (genuine) funeral so I missed the (metaphorical) funeral for Keir Starmer’s political career that some may call his first Labour conference speech as party leader.
I’ve been catching up on it later and my goodness, it was a stinker!
For once, the mainstream media’s vain attempts to whitewash this disaster weren’t the most astonishing part of the fiasco. And there’s a wide choice of other shockers from which to choose.
Top of my list is his referencing of a Nazi slogan – “beauty of work”. He tried to claim he was referring to words by W.H. Auden, but I’ve had a (quick, admittedly) look and can’t find that phrase connected with the great poet anywhere.
Our good friend, the Skwawkbox blog, has found a connection with Nazism, though: “‘Schönheit der Arbeit’ was the slogan of a propaganda department of the Nazi regime from 1934 to 1945… SdA aimed to keep the population in what its rulers considered their place.”
I am curious to see how his allies on the Board of Deputies of British Jews justify their support for a man who directly quotes Nazi propaganda.
Alternatively, we could discuss the part where Starmer said he spent the summer of 2010 helping to put terrorists behind bars while Boris Johnson was writing Telegraph articles defending his right not to wear a cycle helmet.
Maybe, as Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer did indeed help to keep terrorists behind bars in a supervisory way – the same supervisory way in which he had failed to put Jimmy Savile behind bars the previous year; he had not been directly involved.
After Savile died in 2013 and his offences against children became public knowledge, Starmer commissioned an investigation that criticised prosecutors and the police over their handling of allegations against the late broadcaster. Too little, too late.
The only incident in 2010 in which I can find direct involvement in anti-terrorist activity by Starmer is his ruling on the case of Binyam Mohamed, a terror suspect who had been arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and tortured under the supervision of four FBI officers. According to Novara Media,
Mohamed was kept in a 2m by 2.5m cell, beaten frequently with a leather strap and hung from the ceiling for an entire week. During this period, he was visited by MI5 agents who observed his punishment first-hand, and warned that if he did not answer their questions he would be sent to a country whose laws would permit the use of more extreme interrogation tactics. This is precisely what happened three months later. The CIA transferred him to a secret prison in Morocco, where his captors repeatedly slashed his penis and chest with razor blades, burnt him with hot liquid and forced him to stay awake for 48-hour periods while playing loud repetitive music. MI5 continued to oversee the operation from afar, providing Mohamed’s interrogators with specific questions about his contacts in the UK and discussing the timescale of his detention with them. After he was released without charge, Mohamed produced evidence of British involvement in his torture, and it fell to Starmer to decide whether the lead MI5 officer would be prosecuted. Starmer declared he would not. He later made the same ruling in relation to an MI6 officer accused of sanctioning the torture of detainees in Bagram Air Base.
Perhaps Starmer meant something else in his speech.
No wonder he was heckled to hell and back – despite having employed police to intimidate conference delegates…
The gang of officers posted themselves at the end of each of the rows of seats, and then walked through each line to stand at the side of the next block. This is intimidation. pic.twitter.com/UOtikPX1ls
— Bonnie #OrdinaryLeft #BlackLivesMatter #JoinAUnion (@BonnieCraven) September 29, 2021
… and, indeed, allegedly bussing in ‘day visitors’ to bolster his support in the hall:
There are loads of empty seats, and at least half of the people in the hall are NOT here as delegates but day visitors. They've shipped people in.
— Bonnie #OrdinaryLeft #BlackLivesMatter #JoinAUnion (@BonnieCraven) September 29, 2021
(And that hall was still riddled with empty seats, prompting comparisons with Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches – when queues to see him speak stretched around the conference venues and his words had to be broadcast to overflow rooms to meet demand – as Skwawkbox (again) reminds us.)
When Starmer said people turned to the Tories in 2019 “because they didn’t believe that our promises were credible,” someone shouted out: “It was your Brexit policy!” leaving the Labour leader rattled.
After another heckle he tried to save face by saying, “At this time on a Wednesday it’s normally the Tories who are heckling me. It doesn’t bother me then; it won’t bother me now.” But it should; these heckles were from people who would have been shouting in support of him if he had performed well in any way during the conference.
During a section of his speech on the value of work, former Big Brother contestant Carole Vincent shouted at length, starting, “They want to be paid properly!” The remainder of her oration was lost as Starmer responded “Shouting slogans or changing lives, conference!”
The trouble was, she wasn’t shouting slogans, as she explained later: “He had ignored…people who had been standing up and asking for him to guarantee the 15 per cent rise for the NHS; a £15 [per hour] minimum wage.” Fair points.
Sadly, the best video clip I could find to demonstrate these interruptions is from The Sun, so I present it with apologies for the lapse of standards. If anyone can find a more wholesome source, please get in touch so I can replace this:
The peroration – the conclusion of the speech and the part intended to inspire enthusiasm in the audience – seemed to be a demand for us all to knuckle under and obey our masters:
“This is a big moment that demands leadership. Leadership founded on the principles that have informed my life and with which I honour where I have come from.
“Work. Care. Equality. Security. I think of these values as British values. I think of them as the values that take you right to the heart of the British public. That is where this party must always be.
“And I think of these values as my heirloom. The word loom, from which that idea comes, is another word for tool.”
Funny that he should mention the word “tool” again in his speech. Previously, he had said, “”My dad was a tool maker in a factory. In a sense so was Boris Johnson’s dad.”
Well, it turns out that Starmer’s dad was a tool maker in exactly the same sense, because that’s exactly how Starmer himself came across here.
If these principles have informed Starmer’s life, why was he unable to demonstrate them to delegates at the Labour conference?
Security? He wouldn’t offer low-paid workers the security of a £15-per-hour minimum wage. His shadow minister for Employment Rights quit because of it.
Equality? He pushed through rule changes that enormously increased the power of Labour MPs while reducing that of the wider membership.
Care? He showed he couldn’t care less about the grassroots members who campaign for Labour when he ignored – completely – a campaigner for a Green New Deal.
Work? His leadership doesn’t.
And that Nazi reference is deeply worrying.
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BFAWU president Ian Hodson: the union has disaffiliated from Labour – the party it helped create – after Starmer’s rabble threatened to expel him over a connection with a proscribed organisation.
One of the trade unions that founded the Labour Party has disaffiliated from it – in disgust at Keir Starmer’s insistence on waging a “factional internal war” instead of opposing Boris Johnson’s far-right government.
The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) had said it would hold a vote on disaffiliation after Labour threatened to expel its national president, Ian Hodson, over connections with one of the organisations that Starmer’s Labour recently proscribed for no very good reason.
Hodson had dealings with Labour Against the Witchhunt – a support organisation for party members falsely accused of anti-Semitism by Keir Starmer’s auto-guilting disciplinary machine – until 2017.
It was proscribed by Starmer’s perversion of the party earlier this year, making any action against Hodson retrospective – and therefore unreasonable.
The union had planned a disaffiliation vote to coincide with Starmer’s speech at the Labour conference in Brighton this week – but the announcement was made the day before, heaping humiliation on the party’s non-leader.
He is the only Labour leader ever to drive away one of the organisations that helped found the party.
In a statement, the union made its reasoning clear [boldings mine]:
“We need footballers to campaign to ensure our schoolchildren get a hot meal. Workers in our sector, who keep the nation fed, are relying on charity and good will from family and friends to put food on their tables. They rely on help to feed their families, with 7.5% relying on food banks, according to our recent survey.
“But instead of concentrating on these issues we have a factional internal war led by the leadership. We have a real crisis in the country and instead of leadership, the party’s leader chooses to divide the trade unions and the membership by proposing changes to the way elections for his successor will take place.
“We don’t see that as a political party with any expectations of winning an election. It’s just the leader trying to secure the right wing faction’s chosen successor.
“The decision taken by our delegates doesn’t mean we are leaving the political scene; it means we will become more political and we will ensure our members’ political voice is heard as we did when we started the campaign for £10 per hour in 2014.
“Today we want to see £15 per hour for all workers, the abolition of zero hours contracts and ending discrimination of young people by dispensing with youth rates.
“The BFAWU will not be bullied by bosses or politicians. When you pick on one of us you take on all of us. That’s what solidarity means.”
In the light of this announcement, Keir Starmer should be dreading the moment when he takes the stage for his speech.
He was probably hoping for applause – but now he’ll be lucky to avoid catcalls. Personally, This Writer would pelt him with rotten vegetables.
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The only response Keir Starmer deserves: his treatment of Ken Loach is just one reason this nasty little creature and his cronies deserve our contempt.
This is one of the rare occasions when This Writer actually feels sympathy for Laura Bloody Kuenssberg.
The Bane of BBC News must have needed a disinfecting shower after Labour non-leader ‘Little Keir’ Starmer opened his mouth and ejaculated a stream of pure bullsh*t over her, as appears to have happened today (September 28).
She has faithfully transcribed the incident in a BBC report that we can analyse. Prepare to be sickened.
The headline reads: “Winning election more important than unity, says Sir Keir Starmer.” What an odd thing to say when no UK political party has ever won an election if the public perceived it to be divided.
In the text of the article he explained that he came into politics “to go into government to change millions of lives” – but that is clearly not going to happen. He has spent the whole of the Labour conference positioning himself as ‘Continuity Johnson’ – a ‘safe’ pair of hands for the Establishment (whoever that is) to hand the government, on the strict understanding that he won’t change anything at all.
He’ll never change millions of lives – unless he can find ways to make them even worse than the Tories have.
He said he didn’t come into politics to “lose and then tweet about it”.
Fair comment. After he lost at Chesham and Amersham, Starmer didn’t tweet about it, despite having tweeted regularly, up until polling day on June 17:
It’s polling day in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Best of luck to @natasapantelic5!
Natasa has run a really positive campaign and would make a brilliant MP. #VoteLabour
Afterwards – nothing. If you lose an election in Keir Starmer’s Labour, he won’t acknowledge your efforts or those of everybody who came to help you; it will be as though you never existed.
That’s the kind of leader he is: the kind whose only interest is his own image. The kind that nobody wants.
Kuenssberg’s article goes on to say that Starmer called on “every single Labour Party member and supporter” to have the same focus on the ballot box as he did.
In other words: your principles mean nothing – abandon them. All that matters is that Keir Starmer wins and takes power for himself.
I don’t think that’s a stance that Labour Party members will accept. Not those who joined to make the UK better, at least. His privileged, parachuted-in, right-wing cronies will be all for it, of course.
But most Labour members do have principles. They joined because they thought the party stood for something.
Over the 18 months of his non-leadership, Starmer has stripped away Labour’s policies until there was nothing left. He then spent the last few days at conference offering a new set of policies that were either dismissible as outright lies or unacceptable to anybody who holds the ideals for which Labour was originally formed.
Explaining his thinking, Starmer said: “Two years ago we were here in Brighton at Labour party conference and within a few short months we’d crashed to the worst general election results since 1935. I am not prepared to let that happen and if that means tough decisions to change our party, which is what I did on Sunday, I am going to take those tough decisions.”
How disingenuous. Starmer knows that Labour lost in 2019 because right-wing factionalists within the party had spent the previous two years undermining previous leader Jeremy Corbyn, in terror at how close the UK had come to having a transformative, socialist Labour government in 2017.
Starmer himself spent the early part of his term as leader protecting those people from scrutiny and presenting the most feeble excuses possible for doing so (think of the lawsuit brought by the former party officers who took part in the BBC’s Panorama non-documentary, Is Labour Antisemitic; advised that he would win, Starmer instead paid off the litigants at huge cost to party members).
This Writer is not the only person who can see what he has done. We all can. Most of us were disgusted by this failure of leadership. And here he was, defending it. Weak.
Kuenssberg wrote: “He was … asked why he did not seem to inspire Labour members in the same way his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn did.”
I have scanned the article thoroughly, but could not find any answer to the question, anywhere in it. Starmer evaded the question completely. Perhaps he knows that he will never inspire Labour members – and certainly not voters – in the way Corbyn did.
So he avoided answering. I think he knows that he will get his response at the ballot box – if he even gets that far.
Because Starmer’s continued leadership of the Labour Party is by no means a foregone conclusion. He was elected on the basis of 10 pledges – all of which he subsequently abandoned.
“The world has changed since they were made,” he pleaded. Not very much!
“I stand by the principles and the values that are behind the pledges I made.” That is only believable if we take those principles and values to be treachery and dishonesty.
“But the most important pledge I made is that I would turn our party into a party that would be fit for government.” And that is yet another pledge broken.
If Starmer became leader in the role of a doctor, come to heal the ailments that have led voters to consider Labour unfit, then his subsequent actions are equivalent to breaking the patient’s arms and legs, blinding them, injecting them with acid and unplugging their life-support machine.
This Writer feels defiled, simply reading the article and writing about it afterwards. There is something inherently unpleasant about Starmer and his approach to politics.
I remember with distaste the way he cold-shouldered a party activist who wanted to discuss how Labour would tackle climate change. Faced with the result of a conference vote that fully-endorsed the activist’s views, his lieutenant Rachel Reeves then adopted much of what had already been approved, as if it had been the party leadership’s idea.
That’s nauseating.
So.
How does he think he can win?
If he’s honest with himself, I think he’s relying on the claim – over-employed by his adherents – that there simply isn’t any other choice. “If you don’t support Starmer, you’re supporting the Tories,” they lie.
The reason is as described above: Starmer is “Continuity Johnson”. And there is no point in replacing the Tories with a party that is exactly the same – or, in Starmer’s case, very slightly worse.
After this week’s conference, Labour members across the UK will be taking a long, hard look at the party they joined, and asking themselves if it measures up to their standards.
You see, UK politics is too often characterised as tribal – join our tribe, support our tribe; you have no other choice.
That’s not acceptable now; not when the two main tribes are as close to the same as makes no real difference.
It is time for us all to compare what the UK’s political parties – all of them – have to offer us with what we actually want.
If they won’t offer it, then we need to walk away…
,,, and start a movement of our own that does.
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Yes, Jon Ashworth is the Starmerite fool who couldn’t tell us any Labour policy because “It’s confidential.” Now he’s telling us his leader hasn’t widened divisions in the party – and that claim is just as pathetic.
Here’s another right-wing Labour liar: Jonathan Ashworth.
The shadow Health Secretary sought to ingratiate himself with Little Keir by weighing in – what little weight he has – on the row over Andy McDonald’s resignation.
Mr McDonald had said that after 18 months of Starmer’s (non-) leadership, the Labour movement was “more divided than ever”.
In response, Ashworth spluttered that Labour was more divided under Jeremy Corbyn:
Yeah, of course it was. There were waves of shadow ministerial resignations.
That has nothing to do with what Mr McDonald was saying.
He was talking about the Labour movement, not the membership of the shadow cabinet. Ashworth was trying to shift the goalposts and hoping that nobody would notice, but we did.
And it is clear that the Labour movement is far more divided now than under Jeremy Corbyn, with Little Keir’s non-leadership creating deep rifts over policy on every day of the party conference so far.
He disagrees with the members on nationalisation and on wages.
He disagrees with them on party procedures.
He disagrees with them on proportional representation.
He disagrees with them on taxation.
He disagrees with them about apartheid Israel.
He thinks he can ignore the will of conference on those policies he doesn’t like because, as party leader, he writes the manifesto.
But rank and file party members campaign for it – on a voluntary basis – and if he can’t be bothered to listen to them, then they won’t be bothered to help him get elected.
And if he ignores policies Conference has supported, then there is no reason party members shouldn’t do the same to his rule changes.
One can sympathise with this comment from Twitter:
They seem to be Deliberately Losing. Members, the plot, democracy, morals and principles – although Starmer might not of had those to begin with. Don't forget or forgive the right destroying 2017 and 2019.
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Johnson and Starmer: the so-called Labour leader has shown that his policy is even more right-wing than the Tory. As for pragmatism, it is Johnson who is being pragmatic by renationalising firms when he has to, rather than following an ideological blind alley in the vain hope of pleasing business bosses.
Stunning:
BREAKING: Boris Johnson has just introduced state intervention into the energy market to ensure fuel supplies, making him more left wing than Sir Keir Starmer
It’s true – Boris Johnson is either actively nationalising or preparing to nationalise energy firms, to stop them collapsing due to surging gas prices. Here‘s The Independent:
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is holding crisis talks with firms following a meeting with regulator Ofgem… Mr Kwarteng said “well-rehearsed plans” were in place to ensure consumers were not cut off.
And he indicated that he would be prepared to appoint a “special administrator” that would see the firms taken under the government’s wing – effectively nationalising them on a temporary basis.
But at the Labour Party Conference, Keir Starmer’s shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, insisted that “this is not the moment to be looking at nationalising companies”.
This is utterly bizarre.
This is not the moment to be looking at nationalisation as energy companies go bust and bill skyrocket.
This is precisely the moment to consider nationalising companies!
Reeves made herself and her boss sound like idiots – which, of course, they are.
Their protestations – her yesterday (September 27), him on Sunday (September 26) – weren’t pragmatic, no matter how often they tried to shoehorn that word into their comments.
They were ideological – exactly what Reeves and Starmer were trying to deny.
But it’s a stupid ideology.
Starmer’s entire policy is: butter up the business bosses. He is convinced that if he sucks up to the fat cats, they’ll support him into government after the next election. He is wrong for a very obvious reason.
Business leaders really are pragmatic. They can see that Brexit has created serious issues for the energy firms, for fuel supply and in other areas due to knock-on effects, and they acknowledge that their firms would be better-off under government control for the duration of the problem.
In other words: by lurching leftwards towards privatisation, Boris Johnson has done the right thing.
And where does this leave Starmer (and Reeves)?
Absolutely nowhere. Not only are they out of touch with party members; they are out of touch with the entire United Kingdom.
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Louise Ellman: former chair of Labour Friends of Israel rejoins Labour just as the party agrees to demand sanctions against that country for its apartheid policies and mistreatment of Palestinians.
Louise Ellman, who quit the Labour Party in 2019 ahead of a deselection vote in the Liverpool Riverside constituency based on her insistence on lying about anti-Semitism, has rejoined.
The readmission of the woman who was chair of Labour Friends of Israel coincides with the party’s decision to demand sanctions against Israel for its policy of apartheid towards Palestinians. This Writer can’t wait to see what she does when she is called on to support the new policy!
Which side of this embarrassment for Starmer shall we examine first? Ellman.
On the BBC Panorama mockery-of-a-documentary Is Labour Antisemitic? Ellman attacked members of the Constituency Labour Party at Liverpool Riverside, whose Parliamentary seat she occupied at the time.
She told us that while she would come to meetings wanting to discuss domestic issues that are at the heart of Labour’s policy platform (like the NHS), she would be confronted about the Middle East, matters would become unpleasant and people would leave those meetings in tears.
She did not mention the fact that she has been a chair of the Jewish Labour Movement and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel (she took the chair later), and has been an active spokeswoman in Parliament on issues relating to the Middle East. Nor was it stated anywhere else in the documentary. It seems to me that questions about her opinions on this subject may well be justified in such a situation.
She also lied many times about then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Here’s just one example that led to the exposure of her own dishonesty:
She attacked Mr Corbyn for having attended a meeting in 2010 when Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer was a speaker. The claim was that Mr Meyer – a Holocaust survivor who was at Auschwitz, remember – was an anti-Semite because he criticised the behaviour of the current Israeli government in no uncertain terms.
Ms Ellman said she had been “appalled” to find out about the event. In fact, it was revealed, she attended it herself and was present during the whole of Mr Meyer’s speech, which was heckled shamelessly by a small but loud group of Zionists. It seems she sat quiet and unmoved throughout this incident and only spoke up about it when she saw a chance to damage Mr Corbyn’s reputation with a false claim.
The ‘trigger’ vote, on whether she would need to seek her constituency’s backing to continue as its Labour candidate, meant a vote of “no confidence” in her was taken off the table.
Ms Ellman had previously refused to tell a CLP meeting whether she would support a Corbyn government. Her resignation seemed an acceptance that her lies had caught up with her and that she would not have survived a ‘trigger’ vote and the selection procedure that would have followed.
Other false accusations by Ellman against Mr Corbyn may be found here.
The attraction to Keir Starmer of welcoming such a liar back into the Labour Party should be clear; Starmer himself has also lied about Jeremy Corbyn – most notably in his reasons for suspending Mr Corbyn after the previous Labour leader responded to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on whether Labour was “institutionally anti-Semitic” (it wasn’t).
Initially, in explaining Mr Corbyn’s suspension, Starmer had said anyone claiming anti-Semitism in Labour was “all exaggerated” was part of the problem. But Mr Corbyn had not done so. He had – rightly – said that the scale of the problem had been “dramatically overstated”, and provided accurate figures to prove it.
Starmer tried to claim that he had not been personally responsible for the decision to suspend Mr Corbyn (on the same day the EHRC had warned Labour that politicians like the party leader should not interfere with disciplinary decisions) – but former Unite union leader Len McCluskey has said this was not true: “His words were: ‘He put me in an impossible position and I had no choice.’”
The motion supported by Labour conference delegates
demands action that stops “the building of settlements, reverses any annexation, ends the occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza”.
Sanctions should also be imposed to ensure Israel “brings down the Wall [in the West Bank] and respects the right of Palestinian people, enshrined in international law, to return to their homes”, it states.
The motion notes the reports by human rights groups that “conclude unequivocally that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid as defined by the UN”.
I understand that the motion was tabled by Young Labour:
There is of course always more work to do. Young Labour will continue to organise to ensure that every corner of our movement stands in solidarity with Palestinians always ✊🏽
Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said the leadership could not support the motion – which is hardly surprising since it puts Keir Starmer, herself and all the other pondslime in a contradictory position:
Labour conference adopts 'Israel is an apartheid state' while expelling members who say it
But refusing to accept the decision is not an option, for a very important reason:
In the Labour Party, the will of conference is sovereign. It is described as “the ultimate authority in the party”.
If Starmer and the others try to act as if the vote hasn’t happened, just because they don’t like it, then they open the door for hundreds of thousands of Labour members to reject the votes they don’t like – such as the changes to leadership election rules or to disciplinary procedures. The result would be chaos.
The only real choice, if they really cannot accept the will of the party, is for Starmer and the others to resign their membership. In Ellwood’s case, that would be hugely ironic.
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Andy McDonald: more integrity than Keir Starmer. It’s not saying much, mind – Richard Nixon had more integrity than Starmer and he was so bent he needed an assistant to screw him into his trousers every morning.
What could be more embarrassing for Labour leader Keir Starmer than saying on TV that Labour would not re-nationalise key utilities, only to see the party make re-nationalising key utilities its policy on the same day?
How about his shadow Employment Secretary quitting because Starmer wanted him to speak against a plan to increase the minimum wage to a fair level?
That’s what happened at #LabourConference2021 on September 27.
In brief, Starmer ordered McDonald to argue against a £15 minimum wage and statutory sick pay at the same rate as the living wage – so McDonald quit.
In his resignation letter he made it clear that this was the last straw – implying that he had been running out of patience with Starmer for many months.
Let’s face it, the part of his letter when he said
After 18 months of your leadership, our movement is more divided than ever and the pledges that you made to the membership are not being honoured. This is just the latest of many
makes this plain.
Starmer’s own stance over minimum pay is clear. He thinks £15 is too much.
Right?
Oh, then why did he himself campaign for a £15 floor when he was trying to get Labour members to elect him as leader?
See for yourself:
Andy McDonald has resigned from the shadow front bench because Starmer's office instructed him to argue against a £15 an hour minimum wage.
Here is Keir Starmer, holding a banner that says 'fight for £15'. Footage from this picket was used for Starmer's Labour leadership bid. pic.twitter.com/x1c00gmRIe
“It will be the norm if we have a Labour government,” he said.
Liar!
It’s sickening to have this utter pondslime dragging a once-great pillar of socialism into disgrace.
Where is the “no confidence” vote?
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Rachel Reeves: she’s probably smiling to hide her resemblance to Morticia Addams, but you’ll notice the rictus ends below the eyes. Terrifying.
Here’s a Labour frontbencher who is actually more Tory than the Tories: Rachel Reeves.
Back in 2013 she vowed to be “tougher than the Tories” … on benefit claimants.
This was at a time when people with long-term illnesses and disabilities were dying because of persecution by the Tory-run Department for Work and Pensions.
Now she’s shadow Chancellor and – lo and behold! – she’s trying to out Tory the Tories again.
Her new wheeze is abolishing business rates – helping bosses, not workers.
She reckons the tax is unfair on business bosses, so she says Labour would freeze it until 2023 and make rate relief for smaller firms more generous.
Then it would scrap rates completely, to be replaced with a new, “modern” business tax which it has yet to define. Is that because business bosses haven’t yet told her what to do?
Apparently this plan would be funded by increasing digital services tax, which is paid by search engines and social media firms – from two per cent to 12 per cent next year.
Then this tax, too, would be replaced by a higher global corporation tax rate, agreed as part of an international scheme.
There’s a serious problem with all of this: Labour is not in government and cannot do any of it.
It is just another fairy story to make Keir Starmer’s rabble look more attractive to businesses.
Reeves herself is quoted by the BBC as saying her pie-in-the-sky ideas would allow businesses to “lead the pack, not watch opportunities go elsewhere” – a clear indication that Starmer’s Labour prioritises bosses over workers.
She will also promise that the party’s new business tax will allow “more frequent revaluations” and “instant reductions in bills” where property values fall – making it easier for bosses to save money. She has no plans to induce firms to distribute saved cash among the workers, though.
She will say Labour would end hundreds of tax reliefs, including the break given to privately-run schools by their charitable status – but Labour would not end the privileged status of those schools or bring them into the national system, which would end the artificial gap between private and state education. Perhaps Ms Reeves is hoping to privately-educate her own two children?
She is also planning to set up an “Office of Value for Money” – which even sounds like a daft Tory idea; “Department of Levelling-Up”, anyone? – which aides describe as a “hit squad” to scrutinise government spending and ensure tax is used wisely.
Who defines “wise”, in this context? It seem to me that this is also pandering to business bosses.
Indeed, the Federation of Small Businesses has welcomed the proposals. Small businesses are, on average, the lowest-paying employers. While Reeves is offering to ease their tax burden, she would do nothing to improve employee pay.
And it seems the Tories are happy to go along with this pose by Starmer’s neo-Conservative party.
All that Conservative co-chair Oliver Dowden could say was that Labour had threatened businesses in the past, and that only the Tories could be trusted to support them. Then he mouthed that meaningless “Build Back Better” slogan and called it a day.
By treating Reeves seriously, he validated her daft promises.
But we don’t have to.
Remember: none of the promises of StarmerLabour can be trusted. Keir Starmer has broken every promise he has made to party members and he won’t blink before breaking any promise to the wider electorate.
Labour is rejecting its electoral base by siding with bosses against workers, so Hell will freeze over before Rachel Reeves becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Her speech means absolutely nothing.
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