Tag Archives: Spen

Amazing: StarmerLabour has won a by-election

Taking the limelight: Starmer spouts about Labour’s ‘fantastic’ win while new MP Kim Leadbeater is shunted to the side. Earlier this week he was tweeting about football rather than discussing the election, and wouldn’t go near Batley & Spen.

Congratulations are due to Kim Leadbeater after she achieved the impossible: winning a by-election for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

The circumstances in which she managed her feat were extraordinary, and are reflected in the result.

Labour threw away a majority of more than 8,000, won when Jeremy Corbyn was party leader in 2017. Batley & Spen is no longer a safe Labour seat and must be considered a Labour-Tory marginal as Ms Leadbeater won with a majority of just 323 votes.

The party – and its candidate – failed to put forward any policies at all. Ms Leadbeater merely said she would listen to voters after winning the election, and parroted Tory attack lines about there being “no magic money tree” to give nurses the pay rise they deserve.

At least one Labour representative apparently smeared the constituency’s Muslim population as violent and anti-Semitic, while authors of election literature were accused of “dog-whistle racism” over a leaflet showing Boris Johnson with Indian premier Narendra Modi.

Ms Leadbeater’s election literature suggested that she was ashamed of representing Labour. Party logos were stripped from leaflets and party colours were not used. The candidate herself wasn’t even a party member four months ago; Starmer broke Labour rules to make her a candidate in a cynical bid to win votes from the fact that she is murdered former MP Jo Cox’s sister.

And, of course, a surging Conservative Party was held back at the last minute as public opinions were swayed against the Tories because of the Matt Hancock affair scandal.

The result: a skin-of-the-teeth win due to “tribal” Labour voters who, as This Site mentioned yesterday, would have voted for a shaved monkey if it had a Labour rose next to its name on the ballot paper.

And now we have to listen to the chinless cuckoos who’ve invaded the once-great socialist party and turned it into Tory-lite, crowing about what a “fantastic result” it is.

I suppose it is a fantastic result for people who thought they were going to lose.

“What a fantastic victory… of hope over division,” said Keir Starmer, neglecting to say that the hope was that of those who must now wait in vain for Ms Leadbeater – and him – to come up with a policy programme that remotely resembles traditional Labour thinking – or that he is responsible for the division with his relentless onslaught against traditional party members and supporters.

He said nothing at all about what Labour will do in the constituency, or for it. This is because his party will do nothing. The win means he can continue as party leader for a while longer, while he searches for a soundbite that will attract voters.

He is not a principled politician. He does not have political views. His interest is only to put himself in power and to use it for his own purposes. He is, to all intents and purposes, a Conservative.

And not even a Tory in Labour clothing. Starmer despises the trappings of the working classes and has discarded them in favour of the sub-fascist iconography of Boris Johnson: a suit and a Union Flag. Only the haircut is an improvement.

And while the tribalists have helped him hold Batley & Spen, those of us with any political nous at all are abandoning Labour at the polls.

In other local elections, Labour vote shares have been plummeting while the Tories’ have been skyrocketing.

And this is after two years of Boris Johnson’s incompetence over Brexit and Covid-19, and his government’s corruption generally.

Starmer will try to spin this narrow win as a huge victory for him and for the direction he has taken Labour but nobody should be fooled – he is taking Labour down the drain.

Source: Batley and Spen: Labour narrowly hold seat in by-election – BBC News

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Polls open for by-election Labour should win – but will probably lose. Here’s the reason

Keir Starmer: the name on the ballot paper may be Kim Leadbeater but the Batley & Spen by-election is a referendum on his leadership of the Labour Party – and he’s going to find that a suit, a haircut and a flag are no substitute for genuine socialist policies. That means he’s in trouble because he HATES socialism.

Voters are filing into polling booths in Batley and Spen to choose their latest MP, after Labour’s Tracy Brabin quit to become a metropolitan mayor.

Will Labour retain the seat with new candidate Kim Leadbeater, sister of murdered former MP Jo Cox? Probably not.

Why not? Here’s one reason:

She doesn’t have any policies and won’t even think about them until after she is elected – if she is.

This means Labour voters don’t know what they’re getting.

It’s Keir Starmer’s malaise, over again. If he was a serious – Labour – politician then he would have come out with serious Labour policies, and stuck with them, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the party’s leadership. He didn’t.

He pretended to support policies put forward by former leader Jeremy Corbyn and then ditched them immediately after his new position was secured. Now, more than a year later, he still stands for nothing other than power for his own sake.

We should hope that Ms Leadbeater’s experience today will show him exactly where that policy – because having no policies is a policy – leads.

Oh, there will be tribal Labour voters who’ll support a shaved monkey if it has a party logo with a red rose next to its name on the ballot paper, sure.

But the right-whingers who have been in charge since the mid-1990s (they are the reason Corbyn failed) haven’t realised they can no longer rely on this vote being large enough to carry their shaved monkey through.

Starmer’s lack of any alternatives to Tory policy makes a very clear message: he supports Tory policy.

Leadbeater’s own words put her in the same position: she says there’s “no magic money tree” – a Tory phrase, and a Tory lie, because they’ve been raiding it like bandits throughout the Covid crisis.

(For those coming late to this party: all the money used to get the UK through the pandemic was created – not borrowed – by the Conservative government, specifically for that purpose. As such, we should all bear in mind that there is no debt to be repaid.)

So traditional Labour voters are faced with a choice between the Conservative, Tory-lite Leadbeater, George Galloway, or one of 13 also-rans.

My bet is that most of them will stay at home and the Tory will romp to victory. Starmer will then blame Jeremy Corbyn – but we’ll all know the truth.

And the Labour leader’s days in power will be numbered.

He may well claim he’s in a four-year project to install a Labour government but he will never achieve that goal.

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Labour is lining up its excuses – and hasn’t even lost Batley & Spen yet

Return of the excuses man: Keir Starmer.

He’s gone through the book of excuses – several times – but Keir Starmer still won’t take the hint and clear off if Labour loses the Batley & Spen by-election on Thursday.

That’s the message coming from Starmer’s supporters – nowhere more clearly than in a Huffington Post article that not only tries to excuse a loss that hasn’t happened yet, but tells us that Starmer will only go after the Labour Right have rigged leadership elections to ensure that party members can never elect a leader who is capable of winning a national poll.

I’d go through the article for you – but I don’t have to. Alex Nunns has done it for me:

The messages are clear:

  • If the wider electorate has abandoned Labour, it’s because the party’s own members don’t understand that the party doesn’t represent them any more – and should be disenfranchised before they can take power away from those it now represents: suits and haircuts devoid of any policy or direction who are simply holding place to ensure the UK remains in the hands of fascists.
  • Centrists and right-wingers in the Labour Party are backstabbers who will ditch Starmer as soon as they think they can without turning over the leadership to a popular left-winger like Jeremy Corbyn who could win an election if current party officers were replaced by members who support what Labour originally represented.
  • Starmer’s supporters think that attacking left-wingers – including with mental health slurs about “loonies” and false accusations of anti-Semitism, for crying out loud – appeals to the wider electorate, even though the evidence of the last 15 months demonstrates the exact opposite. Left-wing voters aren’t stupid. They recognise a gang of shifty, treacherous liars when they see one.
  • The Labour Right are determined that Starmer is a prime minister-in-waiting and if the electorate disagree, then the electorate are wrong. The problem is, at a general election, it is the electorate who have the final say – not swivel-eyed right-wingers squatting in a party where they don’t belong.
  • Starmer’s people reckon he’ll be able to demonstrate that he’s a man of the people once lockdown ends – even though he has already proved, categorically, that he isn’t.

The reason?

  • Starmer’s people also reckon that his best quality is the fact that nobody knows who he is or what he stands for.

Taken as a whole, these people are so contradictory that they are committing political suicide in front of us all. And they call the Left “loonies”!

And what do we think of their excuses? Well, here’s one take:

Following on from that, though, here’s another:

I reckon that’s accurate – for reasons identified by Alex Nunns:

The aim of the Labour Party under right-wingers like Starmer is not to win elections; it is to keep control away from socialists who would derail their gravy train in favour of running the UK in a competent way that is fair for everyone.

So, after Starmer loses Batley & Spen, he will concentrate on rigging internal party elections to ensure that no socialist can possibly win – and on stuffing the party machine with right-wingers who will cripple the efforts of any left-winger who, by some miracle, actually succeeds anyway.

But here’s a big question:

How does he expect to convince party members to support any changes when his constant demand that he is right and they are wrong has been shown to be false all the way down the line?

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Labour Islamophobia: is this the reason Starmer will lose Batley & Spen?

Institutionally Islamophobic? Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer were information of serious concerns about Islamophobia in the Labour Party last November and have done nothing about it. Now we are told Labour sources are attacking Muslims (under the false flag of anti-Semitism) to justify the party’s impending loss of Batley & Spen.

This information is from Dan Hodges of the Mail, so I advise you to take it with a pinch of salt.

He says Labour Party representatives are already trying to justify their loss of the Batley & Spen by-election, even though it hasn’t happened yet.

And they’re doing it with rampant Islamophobia:

‘We’re haemorrhaging votes among Muslim voters,’ one senior Labour official tells me, ‘and the reason for that is what Keir has been doing on antisemitism. Nobody really wants to talk about it, but that’s the main factor. He challenged Corbyn on it, and there’s been a backlash among certain sections of the community.’

Remember the old saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”? By that token, Hodges is saying that his Labour official told him Muslims (or at least those who live in Batley & Spen) are all anti-Semites.

That is a viciously Islamophobic attitude.

Hodges goes further by saying he received a WhatsApp message (he doesn’t name the source) circulating among Muslim groups, listing five reasons not to support Labour’s candidate, Kim Leadbeater. One of them is this:

‘Her party leader Keir Starmer is pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. He needs to get a clear message in Batley and Spen.’

If this is being used as justification for the claim that all Muslims in the constituency are anti-Semites, then it is thin gruel.

Starmer is pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. Neither of those statements are anti-Semitic, for obvious reasons (not all Jews are Israelis; not all Jews are Zionists; and obviously a person can be pro-Israel and pro-Zionist without being Jewish). And just because a message is distributed around some Muslims, that doesn’t mean all Muslims agree with it.

It doesn’t even mean all Muslims who received the message agree with it.

In fact, Muslims in the constituency have many problems with current Labour policies but it seems the party doesn’t want to engage with those. Why should it, when it can simply tar all local Muslims as anti-Semites?

In doing so, of course, Labour would be taking a leaf out of the Israeli government’s handbook – where every criticism is attacked as anti-Semitic, no matter what it is.

Labour’s own institutional Islamophobia is discussed in a useful Skwawkbox article that states:

Labour’s contempt for Muslim voters and the Islamophobia deeply ingrained in the party’s right have long been obvious – and were condemned last year by a Labour Muslim Network (LMN) report.

Long before that, the party reacted to a recording of vile Islamophobic abuse against a left-wing Muslim member – by protecting the perpetrator and suspending the victim. For more than three years, with the process of expelling him ongoing.

And just after the publication of the LMN report, the party suspended a member of its National Executive Committee (NEC) of Moroccan Muslim heritage – for a statement of solidarity with Palestinians.

Acting general secretary David Evans claimed the party would implement the report’s recommendations in full – but … that has been exposed as nothing but lip service.

The LMN report was damning. As This Site reported last November, it found a whopping one-third of people of their ethnicity have witnessed Islamophobia within the party.

Worse, 44 per cent said they do not believe the party takes Islamophobia seriously and 48 per cent have lost confidence in the party’s complaints structures, according to the Labour Muslim Network investigation.

And worst of all, 59 per cent of Muslims surveyed said they did not feel well represented by the party.

In response, I wrote, “the party leadership that ignores the persecution of Palestine has made a perfunctory comment, promising to implement the report’s recommendations in a not-very-sincere way.

“The wording is cut-and-pasted from press releases about anti-Semitism and both Starmer and his deputy Angela Rayner come across as not having thought about this as a serious issue at all.”

Their promise to implement the report’s recommendations appears to have been nothing but hot air.

There is a very clear conclusion to draw from all this.

While the words of Dan Hodges may be questionable, his article has highlighted institutional Islamophobia in the Labour Party.

Both Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner were made aware of it and rather than take action they have sat on their thumbs.

If Labour loses Batley & Spen because the Muslim vote moves elsewhere, they will only have themselves to blame.

Source: DAN HODGES: Who’s spreading the poison that could put the final nail in Keir Starmer’s coffin? | Daily Mail Online

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Starmer’s dilemma: where does Labour go after Chesham and Amersham?

The problem, not the solution: Keir Starmer – and all his supporters – are a betrayal of the Labour Party and of Labour voters. We all know it. Labour is unelectable until they have all left the party – and they won’t go. They are the worst of all Boris Johnson’s Tory enablers.

No points to anybody who responds to the headline with “Batley and Spen”.

It would be fair to say that Keir Starmer did not expect to win the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

But the scale of his loss there – and I think it should be understood that it was a failure that Starmer owns – should make it clear to him that he has taken Labour in the wrong direction.

His party’s 622 votes – just 1.6 per cent of turnout and one-sixteenth of the number Jeremy Corbyn managed to raise in 2017 – is fewer than the number of people in that constituency’s Labour Party.

Either party members abstained or they voted for someone else, which is an offence for which they could be expelled.

(Or there could be far fewer members remaining in that constituency than Starmer is willing to admit, after the – alleged – mass exodus of members following his election as leader. If so, even if remaining members did vote for somebody else, he’ll be in a quandary over whether to carry out disciplinary procedures.)

Encouragingly, it seems almost nobody aged less than 70 voted for the Conservatives:

I’m not sure Richard Murphy is right about that, as the number of pensioners in the UK will remain very high, some way into the future (even after the ravages of Covid-19), and the Tories have a knack of duping the gullible into supporting them (or perhaps that should be bribing the gullible). Still, it suggests that the Tories’ time is running out.

That said, the simple fact is that people aged under 70 simply didn’t go for Labour, despite Starmer’s attempts to woo them by changing Labour’s direction sharply to the political right. They voted Liberal Democrat.

I draw two conclusions from that:

Firstly, Starmer’s claim that Boris Johnson’s party has enjoyed a “vaccine bounce” – resurgent popularity because of the perceived success of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout – is bunkum. Or at least, any such bounce has now petered out.

Secondly, that people prefer to put their trust in political organisations that have some consistency about them, rather than wandering around all over the political spectrum searching for votes – or very obviously trying to fool people into voting for them – like Labour under Starmer (and Miliband, Brown and Blair before him).

Some commentators are now suggesting that Labour should at least discuss the idea of a “progressive alliance” with other opposition parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, to field just one candidate against the Tories in Tory strongholds, thereby making it easier to force them out. But there are problems with that…

Yes indeed; the Liberal Democrats won because they are the most similar to the Conservatives in Chesham and Amersham, not because they are a radical alternative.

So a “progressive alliance” isn’t going to happen. And dreams of getting the Tories out by using proportional representation will continue to be dreams for the foreseeable future because the Tories are in power and they aren’t going to bring it in because they know it would harm them.

What’s left? Tactical voting?

But that will just result in another hung Parliament that the Tories will probably dominate – with Liberal Democrats joining them for the sake of power if they get enough seats. We’ve already had that from 2010 to 2015.

And all of this theorising neglects one simple fact:

In order to beat the Tories, whichever party you support will need to deserve to win.

And Labour, under Keir Starmer, doesn’t.

How can left-wing voters support a party that deserts them in the way Starmer has? How can they support a party whose Parliamentary representatives no longer come from the working class but represent exactly the kind of middle-class privilege that Labour was originally created to oppose?

How can right-wing voters support a party they know only courts them in order to gain power for its own purposes? They know the Tories are untrustworthy – but only in their promises to people earning less than £100,000 a year; as long as Tory priorities are aligned with their own, they’ll carry on with Johnson’s bandits, even if it means imposing fascist-style dictatorship on the rest of us.

Starmer has been criticised because he hasn’t brought forward a single policy to replace the 10 pledges he scrapped as soon as they had won him the Labour leadership under false pretences. There is a reason for this failure: Starmer is trying to find a magic promise that will fool a majority of voters, just long enough to get himself into Downing Street.

His problem is that we all know that this is what he’s doing. He is probably the most classic example of Tony Benn’s “weathercock” ever to come forward – a career politician who doesn’t have any principles of his own but goes any way the wind blows, chasing votes according to what his focus groups tell him is popular.

And Starmer’s focus groups are disastrously out-of-touch. This means Starmer is continuously trying to tell us what we want, and getting it wrong.

So he drapes himself in the Union Flag because he has seen the Tories do it and he thinks it appeals to our patriotism – but under Boris Johnson’s fascism, we have no reason to feel patriotic at all.

So he blames Jeremy Corbyn for his failures and tries to remind us that Corbyn was accused of letting anti-Semitism into the Labour Party – when we all know that the accusations were (mostly) false (there are always a few racists in any large organisation but the leader cannot be blamed for them). Labour has just been in court defending itself against a group of former members who have brought a hugely damaging case against the party.

In all this squirming, he presents himself as entirely untrustworthy.

So we don’t trust him, and that means we don’t trust Labour:

It won’t change until Starmer is gone. I don’t mean that he should step down as leader of the Labour Party; I mean he should leave the party altogether, along with all the other cuckoos who got in under Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Miliband. You know who they are. Including party staff members who support them rather than traditional (pre-Kinnock) Labour values.

One more note: I could happily tap out a list of policies that Labour should adopt in order to win public support – it isn’t hard to do.

But there is no point while Starmer and his cronies are in charge. They would see such policies as a marketing strategy to win votes – and if it worked, they would then ditch those policies in favour of the right-wing agenda they’ve had all along.

They have to go.

The problem is, they won’t. They know they are unacceptable; unelectable. But they absolutely won’t allow anybody to lead Labour who could possibly break the deadlock.

And in the meantime, Boris Johnson gets worse and worse. Enabled by Starmer.