Seven trade unions have jointly demanded the reinstatement of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party.
Unite, CWU, FBU, TSSA, BFAWU, ASLEF and the NUM have all signed up to the demand after the party’s new general secretary, David Evans, suspended his membership over comments on the EHRC report into anti-Semitism – that Corbyn was fully entitled to make.
It seems Corbyn has been subjected to the usual treatment faced by party members accused of anti-Semitism under a right-wing general secretary: he still does not know what rule he has broken.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party’s approval ratings are plummetting, according to an opinion poll.
A snap poll by the admittedly Tory-run firm YouGov found that Starmer’s ‘favourability’ rating had dropped by seven points over the two days of the report and suspension, with Labour’s falling even further, by twelve.
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This is par for the course with Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit, that leaks like a sieve.
I found out about my own suspension from a Western Mail reporter, the day before the Labour Party’s email arrived.
Jackie Walker can tell you herself how she found out:
I was informed I was suspended by the BBC and that I was expelled by the Jewish Chronicle. Traditions of a deeply corrupt Party https://t.co/ACHEWhiULm
And as you can see from the clip, Jeremy Corbyn found out from a photographer.
If the correct process is followed, then he will have received by now – by email and/or by snail mail – notification of his suspension, and this should explain exactly who complained about him, what he did that caused the complaint, and which Labour Party rules he broke by this action.
If it doesn’t, then Labour is breaking its own (current rules).
While these matters are usually confidential, I think Mr Corbyn has an obligation to publicise the contents of the letter. His suspension has caused an outcry among many thousands – if not millions – of people across the UK because it seems clear to us that he did nothing wrong.
We need to see Labour’s – in fact party general secretary David Evans’s – reasons for the decision.
The letter should also include a series of questions for Corbyn to answer, in order to provide a defence against the accusation(s), along with a timescale in which to do so and an explanation of the next steps.
None of these elements were in my own letter of suspension in 2017, so I would point out that Corbyn benefits from improvements that he, in fact, imposed.
But I hope that does not lull him into a false sense of security. His best bet, if he wants to challenge his suspension, is to take the matter to court.
I found that an internal Labour Party investigation is always going to be subject to corruption – the hard way.
So I took the matter to court and the verdict is due on November 24. After Labour accepted everything in the EHRC report, I’m quietly confident about the outcome.
Corbyn should do the same, and I am glad to see he is being encouraged to do so:
They’re banking on Jeremy doing his usual party unity first thing and not going ahead with a fight. I hope they’re wrong and Jeremy does choose to fight. He’s a cert to win any legal challenge. https://t.co/TadAhbUDiU
The problem is that, as Devutopia states, Corbyn tries to resolve matters amicably and that won’t work. He isn’t dealing with reasonable people; he is dealing with thugs in suits.
He spent five years trying to deal with these thugs in a reasonable way and the result was that he lost two general elections. We have heard that he would have won in 2017 if not for sabotage by right-wing factionalists within the Labour Party machine.
He needs to learn from that mistake. These people won’t act reasonably. They want his blood (but they’ll settle for his humiliation).
It’s time he grew the backbone that he has needed since 2015. If he had acted with strength back then, I would still be in the Labour Party, along with many other good socialists, and the UK would be (in) a much better state than it is now.
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This is from that much-maligned organisation, Momentum – who at least seem to be doing something to protect Labour Party democracy:
“This is a pivotal moment for the Labour Party and the future of our movement. The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn yesterday was a factional attack that has undermined the fight against antisemitism.
“Join leading socialists from across our movement in an online rally at 7pm tonight and hear how we defend Corbyn, and build a socialist, anti-racist movement.
“There are no quick fixes, but there are many things we can do to build a movement and shape the future of our party.
“That’s what Jeremy will be doing and that’s what we must do.”
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Out in the dark: Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party membership has been suspended – illegally and undemocratically. Labour members are quitting in their thousands.
It doesn’t matter which way you cut it, Keir Starmer has sabotaged the Labour Party.
Overreacting after Jeremy Corbyn responded to the EHRC report on allegations of “institutional anti-Semitism” in the party, he has acted undemocratically and illegally – and seriously jeopardised Labour’s electability.
The report itself was entirely reasonable. It didn’t find the “institutional anti-Semitism” that was claimed, said it could only show two occasions when “agents” for whom the party was responsible displayed anti-Semitism, 23 cases when the leader’s office showed “political interference” in anti-Semitism complaints – often prejudiced against the accused, rather than against Jews, and 42 cases when the complaints process discriminated against the accused, rather than against Jews (out of 70 in both sets of cases).
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader at the time, responded by saying the report’s recommendations should be implemented immediately. He would; he had been trying to improve the system since he first became aware that it was a shambles, back in 2016 – with some success from 2018 when he was able to replace an unsympathetic general secretary with one who supported his leadership.
He also said the scale of the problem was dramatically overstated for political reasons by opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media.
And Keir Starmer, the current party leader, flipped his lid.
In his own response he said anybody who claimed complaints of anti-Semitism against Labour were “exaggerated” has “no place in the party”. Shortly afterwards, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party membership was suspended.
Starmer backed away from this act, leaving his new general secretary, David Evans, to justify it.
He could not. He provided no evidence that Corbyn had broken any Labour Party rules and could not show that Corbyn had said anything that was not – in fact – accurate.
The EHRC report corroborates Corbyn’s claims – and also shows that his right to make them is enshrined in law – in his human right to free speech.
And the decision is hypocritical. The report condemned political intervention in complaint cases – even to speed them up – but the decision to suspend Corbyn’s membership is a clear intervention by the office of the Leader Of The Opposition (LOTO).
I noted that Starmer has today tried to justify Corbyn’s suspension, telling the BBC’s Today programme ,”I made it clear the Labour Party I lead will not tolerate anti-Semitism, neither will it tolerate the argument that denies or minimises anti-Semitism in the Labour Party on the basis that it’s exaggerated or a factional row.”
This is only going to make it worse because it is a lie. Corbyn didn’t deny or minimise anti-Semitism on that basis. His claim that is was exaggerated is true, as shown by the EHRC report. And he didn’t say it was a factional row – just that “opponents” used to to cause problems – and again this is accurate.
I am not the only person clever enough to see this.
But you are unlikely to hear much in complaint from Labour Party members – because the party leadership has gagged them. Communications from Labour HQ have made it clear that anybody taking to the social media – or any other media – to criticise Starmer’s behaviour will face punishment themselves.
Starmer’s people even set up a dedicated fast-track complaints system to ensure that his supporters could report offenders quickly – again in contradiction of the EHRC report’s findings, which demanded a single, simple process for everyone.
I thought he said he accepted the report in its entirety and would implement its recommendations fully? It seems this was a lie.
The result? Labour Party members up and down the country have been cancelling their Direct Debits and quitting – despite the efforts of many more level heads to encourage them to stay and exert influence within the organisation, for sanity.
My own view was that, as Corbyn has not been expelled yet, and has himself appealed for people to sit tight until the situation can be resolved “amicably”, people who still enjoy the privilege of party membership – rather than having been thrown out under false pretences like myself – should stay and fight his corner for him.
It seems likely that Starmer will expel him eventually. Any other choice now will make him look weak.
But this will split the Labour Party.
People are leaving because Starmer has shown he is unfit to lead the party, let alone the country.
His decision to suspend Corbyn was undemocratic and illegal. He overrode party rules and the rule of law to do it. And he is a lawyer, remember.
How can any responsible voter allow such a man a chance to run a government and disregard the law there as well?
I can see us entering a period when Labour will be hindered either by a plethora of left-wing candidates standing in elections against it – splitting the Left vote and allowing the Conservatives in to more constituencies, or by a new left-wing party standing against it.
The latter would be This Writer’s preferred choice as it may drag Labour back towards its proper place in politics – in the same way that the existence of UKIP pulled the Conservative Party towards fascism and illegality.
Whatever the future holds, it seems clear that Starmer has sabotaged Labour’s electoral chances for the next few years, no matter what.
Was this what he wanted?
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After a relatively quiet summer when we all had other things on our mind, it seems the controversy over alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is about to well up all over again.
Hostilities have resumed ahead of publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on alleged institutional anti-Semitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
According to The Guardian,
Senior Labour figures are braced for the equalities watchdog to rule that the party acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members.
Sources close to the inquiry said an earlier draft report found evidence of indirect discrimination in the operation of the party’s processes, which would be a breach of equalities law.
A draft report is known to have been shared with the Labour party in July, as well as with a small number of key figures from the Corbyn administration.
There are understood to have been multiple challenges to the draft report and the EHRC’s final conclusions have been kept under wraps.
[Current Labour leader Keir] Starmer is likely to accept all of the report’s recommendations, though a legal challenge to the EHRC’s findings is planned by Jewish supporters of Corbyn if they disagree with its conclusions.
But we should all bear in mind that the anti-Corbyn Graun is widely considered to have played a large part in stirring up the scandal in a bid to see him forced out of the Labour leadership.
As an example of the hostilities that are breaking out, consider the last paragraph quoted above, saying that Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn will launch a legal challenge to the EHRC’s findings if they disagree, and then consider this (with apologies for subjecting you to some vile language):
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Loser: Ed Balls wrote a book about the failure that was his time in the Labour Party leadership, but now it seems he thinks he’s qualified to talk down Jeremy Corbyn.
What is the point of all these creaky old right-wingers from the sordid past of New Labour, coming out of the woodwork to talk about anti-Semitism accusations against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as though it didn’t happen to them too?
Yes, I’m referring to Ed Balls.
Labour was accused of institutional anti-Semitism back when he was shadow chancellor and Ed Miliband – who is indeed of Jewish descent – was the leader. I seem to recall that Maureen Lipman announced her first resignation from the party back then, with many more to follow, as we all know.
And now here he is, the day before the Equality and Human Rights Commission publishes its long-awaited report on a year-long investigation into the allegations of institutional anti-Semitism in Labour, giving the accusers some ammunition to use.
Example:
If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and looks like a duck, despite what Ed Balls thinks, chances are it is a duck. https://t.co/nDnUcEEnak
Sussex Friends of Israel is an organisation that is well-known to those of us who have had to defend against false accusations. My opinion is that this is a group that has not covered itself in glory. Look it up with your favourite search engine and see if you agree.
And here it is again, leaping to use Balls’s words to attack Corbyn.
Perhaps these people should have thought about that.
Not only was Ed Balls the sidekick to Miliband when their version of Labour was attacked for anti-Semitism, but what’s all this about?
did anybody watch that weird show ed balls did a year or so back where he toured europe meeting nazis for a cuppa and going 'you know I actually like them, they're nice' might still be on iplayer https://t.co/Tn5pJxsc8o
A Nazi uniform in his closet (either actually or metaphorically) and a TV show in which he met Nazis and said he liked them, and this is the man wheeled out to accuse Jeremy Corbyn?
Don’t insult our intelligence.
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Hypocrite: Jeremy Hunt presided over the long-term dismantling of NHS services which were auctioned off to private companies, who then turned those services into postcode lotteries, provided only where they thought they could make a profit. And now he is complaining about an NHS service becoming a postcode lottery.
Jeremy Hunt seems to be revelling in the fact that he Matt Hancock has replaced him as “Worst-ever Health Secretary”.
After being removed from the government by Boris Johnson, he’s now a backbencher, albeit one who chairs the Commons Health and Social Care committee.
One would have expected him to toe the Johnson line, having been responsible for much of the harm done to NHS healthcare in the last 10 years.
Instead, he seems to be trying to carve out a new careers as a ‘voice of reason’ in the Conservative Party – hence his article in today’s (September 20) Fail on Sunday.
In it, he attacks the current Covid-19-related restrictions on people’s movements. Here’s the line that has created all the reaction, referring to the fact that mothers are being told they must give birth alone:
For families, it simply feels crushingly unfair and illogical that six people can meet in a pub and 30 people can go shooting, yet mothers have to go through one of life’s most harrowing and precious milestones alone.
Apparently he is supporting a Fail campaign to “end lone births”, saying that the rules are being imposed arbitrarily:
A postcode lottery is unacceptable on a matter of this importance.
Wasn’t he the health secretary who turned much of NHS care into a postcode lottery, across England (and in other UK countries whose NHS use English facilities)?
Yes he was.
It seems hypocritical for him to complain, because it is. And the public have seen it:
Totally. It’s also crushingly unfair that parents are threatened with prosecution for wanting to keep our children safe and school staff are forced to work in full schools & infections rising. @b
Crushingly unfair … it’s down right criminal.. add to this the cancer diagnoses missed and all the heart attacks that could have been prevented, the increases in mental health cases. It’s a virus; keep calm, take care and carry on.
The public have also noted some “crushingly unfair” aspects of Mr Hunt’s own behaviour:
Jeremy Hunt has somehow managed to carve out a position of the public’s friend & honest broker during Covid. We should not forget his stewardship of the NHS & how his policies effected the people working in it. #r4today
Last word must be the following. At a time when Labour has just unveiled its new slogan, Mr Ball points out that the Tories could roll out a new, accurate slogan of their own:
'crushingly unfair' would make a great, and very accurate, Conservative party slogan.
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Jeremy Corbyn: it’s nice that a Twitter poll has rated him the best prime minister the UK never had, but the PM that we’ve got is turning the UK into a major disaster and this stuff is nothing more than an attempt to distract you. Did it work?
We all know bank holiday Mondays are where the news goes to die but August 2020 was particularly bad.
Judging by Twitter, the event that caught everybody’s imagination was a poll by right-wing Times Radio that resulted in a nobody presenter – This Writer has never heard of him – having to declare that Jeremy Corbyn is the best prime minister the UK never had.
WINNER: Jeremy Corbyn is officially the Times Radio’s best Prime Minister we ever had 🎉 pic.twitter.com/JJfd71ONAq
(It means he would have been a better choice, not only than Boris Johnson or Theresa May, but better than many others as well – according to those who took part in the poll.)
Certain right-whingers immediately took it upon themselves to alleged – without any factual basis – that Corbynista Twitter users had ganged up to rig the poll.
Who cares?
It doesn’t matter. We didn’t get Corbyn. We got Theresa May in 2017 and Boris Johnson now – partly because Labour apparatchiks conspired to bugger up Corbyn’s campaigns on one or both occasions, if you believe a certain report (I do).
And it diverts attention from the failures of the government we have – especially at a time when Parliament is about to resume sitting after the summer recess.
The Guardian‘s editorial has identified a few of the political crises from which the poll has diverted our attention. For example:
Rishi Sunak is determined to end his Job Retention Scheme – the furlough to you and me – at the end of October, triggering a huge wave of unemployment. That’s right, even more people are about to learn what Universal Credit is all about – and they’re not going to like it.
He’s facing an annual national deficit that will have grown to twice the amount faced by Gordon Brown’s Labour government during the so-called “great recession” of 2008 or thereabouts. His party made a lot of mileage out of criticising Labour’s handling of that recession, slithering back into office by claiming it would end deficit spending and cut the national debt as well (instead the Tories more than doubled the debt to £2 trillion).
And in November Sunak has to produce a budget that will boost the economy and return the national finances to some semblance of balance (fat chance! He’s already facing a backbench rebellion on his mooted plans for tax rises).
Nobody’s going back to work because they don’t trust the government’s proclamations that it is safe from Covid-19. Nobody is likely to go back to universities for the same reason. The only people likely to want to go back to school are the kids – and that’s because they’re probably a bit bored by now and want to see their buddies again.
The Johnson government’s determination to push through Brexit as planned by December 31 means the party that pledged to end the scourge of “red tape” is more likely to throttle us with it, as businesses have to deal with an avalanche of pointless bureaucracy.
These are all problems that the Tories have created for the rest of us, either by incompetence or by design, since they first came back into power in 2010 – and most particularly since Boris Johnson became prime minister last year.
You need to be thinking about that, but instead you’re being seduced into thinking about a dopey Twitter poll that doesn’t mean anything at all.
You’re watching the right-wingers fiddling around while your country burns around you.
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Apparently the claim is that Seumas Milne, aide to Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader, passed Covid-19 on to Boris Johnson – according to the Mail on Sunday:
So Number 10 invited Jeremy Corbyn, then 70, to a meeting in a "compact and airless" office that "offers the ideal conditions for the virus", at a time when members of the government were testing positive for Covid, and yet Seumas is the villain? pic.twitter.com/pwAS6SZbWG
Of course the real reason Johnson caught the virus is the one we’ve known all along: in the days before he imposed social distancing, he had been going around shaking hands with Covid-19 sufferers – getting right into the area where they could infect him.
But those medical experts at MoS thought it couldn’t be that, and concocted this Milne story instead.
Clearly they had some column inches to fill.
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Alastair Campbell: act in hate, repent at leisure?
Alastair Campbell deserved this – as may many others in the same position.
After he campaigned – vigorously – to stop Jeremy Corbyn from winning the general election last year, he is now complaining about the activities of the government he helped put into power.
In this case it’s about the downgrading of hundreds of thousands of ‘A’ level grades.
Not only that, but he is also attacking the new Labour leader that – again – by his actions he helped install (if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour had won the general election, he would be prime minister now and the results issue would have been handled more fairly).
So the reaction when he did so was entirely appropriate:
Yet here you are campaigning AGAINST stopping this government from getting into No10. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/utXt7angLj
Have you witnessed any similar hypocrisy, online, by people who helped Boris Johnson into power and are now moaning about him?
If so, send in your examples. Let us all see these people for what they are.
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