This cynical move shows Keir Starmer is turning Labour into a members-only club
For the many? It seems “the many” are being pushed out of the Labour Party – unless they are friends of Keir Starmer.
Pretty soon, the only people allowed to be members of the Labour Party will be those in Keir Starmer’s inner circle.
That’s why the party leadership is tailoring its conditions for proscribing members – automatically excluding them in retrospect for activities with outside or formerly-affiliated organisations – to ensure the current leader’s friends don’t suffer the effects meant for others.
The latest groups to be proscribed are Labour Left Alliance (LLA), Socialist Labour Network and the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) – but there is a singular exception:
Regarding AWL, members are excluded for participating in events including the annual conference except for debating with members of the organisation.
This is because Luke Akehurst, secretary of the far-right Labour First, has taken part in such an event and Starmer doesn’t want to lose him.
Luke’s a member of the club, you see. He gets a free pass. You don’t.
Steve Walker of the Skwawkbox blog is right: “The shameless hypocrisy of the Labour right knows no bounds. Just as Starmer’s ‘zero tolerance of antisemitism’ turned out to mean ‘a lot of tolerance for antisemitism as long as it’s a right-winger’, it was always clear that expulsion rules were only being applied to left-wingers.
“But now those rules are being specifically written to ensure that favoured henchmen are explicitly exempt – and only those favoured henchmen.”
And Labour MP Clive Lewis admitted that the move shows his own party sliding into authoritarianism and a “crisis of democracy”:
Proscription lists; mass expulsions; the centralisation of power. It’s naive to think the ‘crisis of democracy’ and the slide to authoritarianism afflicting western polities won’t affect our own political institutions. https://t.co/v5EV3TiCYJ
— Clive Lewis MP (@labourlewis) March 29, 2022
Simply put, the Labour Party is turning into a members-only club for friends of Keir Starmer.
They get all the perks.
If you’re a socialist and you’re still a member of that party, then get used to dreaming about democracy – because you’re never going to have it again.
Source: Labour tailors new expulsion rules to protect right-winger Akehurst – SKWAWKBOX
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