JEREMY CORBYN was actively undermined by senior party HQ staff who said that “death by fire [was] too kind” for him, a leaked internal report has revealed.
The sickening language used while discussing the then Labour leader, left-wing MPs and ordinary members of the party was revealed when the report on Labour’s handling of anti-semitism in the party was leaked over the weekend.
The transcripts show that Mr Corbyn’s economic adviser Ali Moussavi said of Mr Corbyn to other senior staff in 2015: “We need to finish him.”
Press officer Sarah Brown responded: “Hanging and burning does seem like overkill.”
Mr Moussavi said: “We can figuratively do that but not literally.”
After Ms Brown commented “you don’t get my joke,” Mr Moussavi responded: “I didn’t think it was a joke.”
Then head of broadcasting Jo Green said that any Labour MP “who nominates Corbyn ‘to widen the debate’ deserves to be taken out and shot.”
Then policy communications officer Dan Hogan added that a staff member who “whooped” during Corbyn’s speech “should be shot.”
And senior staff member Sarah Mulholland said she hoped that a young Labour member on the left of the party, who it was acknowledged has mental-health issues, “dies in a fire”.
Then audit director Mike Creighton responded: “That’s a very bad wish, Sarah. But if he does I wouldn’t piss on him to put him out.”
The report states that party staff are expected to act impartially regardless of who the leader is. But it shows that many of the Labour HQ staff who were “aligned to Labour’s right” had worked to directly undermine Mr Corbyn since 2015.
During the 2015 leadership election, her department and others internally described their work as “hunting out 1,000s of Trots” and a “Trot hunt”, which included excluding people for having “liked” the Green Party on Facebook.
One staff member commented: “Everyone here considers anyone left of [Gordon] Brown to be a Trot.”
Jeremy Corbyn urged Europe’s Socialists Friday to challenge the political establishment and team up with like-minded leftists to check the rise of “fake” right-wing populists.
He added that Europe must come together to fight against the rise of right-wing and neoliberal policies. Failing to do so “will smooth the path to power of the fake populists“, Corbyn said in a speech to the annual congress of the Party of European Socialists in Lisbon.
Addressing over 400 delegates in a video played at the Party of the European Left’s Congress on Sunday, the film-maker claimed that the left suffers from a muddled position when it approaches the question of the EU.
Mr Loach said that last week’s general election result, where Labour lost 59 seats in mostly Brexit-voting areas, was an example of this, and claimed that “the desire to leave” Brussels was a “big problem” for the left.
Mr Loach then urged socialists in Europe to “clarify” their analysis on Europe, and said that the international left must organise if it decides to not campaign against EU membership.
He said: “If we decide that we should remain and transform the [EU] then we have to have a plan that is clear, that we can all unite behind and which the left in every country can proclaim.
‘Remain and transform’ in itself sounds like an attractive slogan. However, the problem is that often, there is vagueness about how to transform. And about transforming to where.
A bit comparable to the Scottish independence referendum. The then Blairite right-wing leader of the Labour party in Scotland, Jim Murphy, decided to campaign against Scottish independence, jointly with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, instead of waging a clearly separate campaign. That drove many Labour voters into the arms of the Scottish nationalists. That way, Jim Murphy, with a little help from Tony Blair and other Blairites, managed to destroy Scotland as a bulwark of Labour party voters. Labour in Scotland has still not recovered from that Murphy-Blair blow.
LEN McCLUSKEY has said that it is “wilful blindness” to deny that Labour lost the election because of Brexit. The Unite general secretary stated that it is “pretty obvious” that the reason for Labour losing 59 seats — including in traditionally Labour-voting areas — was because of its Remain-leaning stance on Brexit: here.
The dog whistle message from hardcore Remainers was heard loud and clear – Leavers were ‘thick and racist,’ writes RHEIAN DAVIES (herself a Labour member who had voted Remain).
TRADE union figures in the north-east have mocked Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pledge that he will “repay the trust” placed in him by working-class voters in the region who switched their support from Labour to the Tories in the general election. Alan Mardghum, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, told the Morning Star today: “When he made statements about the lazy unemployed, single mothers and the feckless working class, that is what he believes. That is the contempt he has for working people: here.
“Our Future Our Choice” is seen as a spontaneous “youth” movement against Brexit. But latest figures from the Electoral Commission show that, as the “second-referendum” campaign fell apart, it gave £20k to a group run by former New Labour hatchet man Alastair Campbell (62 years old) and Tory Peer Patience Wheatcroft (68 years old). Wheatcroft is a former Sunday Telegraph editor, one-time Barclays director and lifelong Tory activist: here.
This 19 June 2019 video from the British parliament says about itself:
Boris Johnson has been labelled ‘racist’ in the House of Commons by the Scottish National party’s Westminster leader, who said the Conservative leadership frontrunner was ‘unfit’ to be prime minister. Ian Blackford asked [then still Conservative Prime Minister] Theresa May if she agreed with Johnson that the Scottish people were a verminous race who should be ‘exterminated’, referring to a poem published in the Spectator when Johnson was the magazine’s editor.
From daily The Morning Star in Britain, 13 December 2019, when there were still only exit polls about the British election:
Brexit backlash hits Labour hard, exit poll suggests
EXIT polls have suggested a Tory landslide, with Leave-voting areas switching away from Labour according to predictions.
A visibly shocked [Labour party] John McDonnell told the BBC that “Brexit has dominated” the election.
Meanwhile, results have confirmed the predictions.
How did Boris Johnson’s Conservatives win more seats, giving them an absolute majority of MPs?
Not by increasing their number of votes. That was 43,6%, only 1,2% more than the 2017 election. And voter turnout was lower than in 2017. Maybe because of voters not turning up out of disgust about politicians talking for or against Brexit, Brexit, Brexit and very little else. Instead of about peace; of Conservative attacks on disabled and other poor people; about stopping racism and homophobia; etc.
The Conservatives won seats because Labour, after their biggest progress, with their new leader Jeremy Corbyn, in votes since 1945 in the 2017 election, lost. They fell back to 32.2%. Still more than their share at the 2015 election: 30,5%, under their then leader Ed Miliband, less leftist than Corbyn.
“We thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider debate, from this evidence there clearly wasn’t,” the shadow chancellor [John McDonnell] said.
Sadly, true.
Labour’s bad result was
following its decision to campaign for a second referendum on EU membership. …
The Brexit issue is more complex than it seems. Both European Union Brexiteers and European Union Remainers really have two contradictory tendencies. Among Remainers, there are Thatcherite Conservatives, right-wing Labour Blairites and other champions of austerity, anti-refugee xenophobia and neocolonial wars all over the world. On the other hand, there is the ‘Remain and transform’ tendency. It says that, by staying inside the European Union, British socialists can transform the European Union pro-austerity capitalism to socialism (a task maybe only slightly less enormous than transforming NATO from a nuclear-armed warmongering organisation into a pacifist and socialist organisation. But that is another issue).
Then, Brexiteers. Boris Johnson won this election by saying little else than Get Brexit done. That seems to have appealed not only to hard-core Brexiteers, but also maybe to some people who are not strongly against European Union membership, but who are tired of politicians endlessly talking about up with Brexit, down with Brexit and very little else.
Johnson cleverly hid during the campaign WHAT kind of Brexit should be ‘done’ by the electorate. He and other right-wingers want a Brexit making Britain a hard-line Thatcherite country, slave to Donald Trump’s USA. When Trump visited Britain recently, Johnson, as a clever but hypocritical election campaign tactic, avoided Trump.
Unfortunately, the Remain and transform tendency was powerless against their ‘Remain and make the European Union even more capitalist and militarist’ ‘allies’. As unfortunately, in this election people who want to leave the European Union to make Britain more socialist, lost out to Boris Johnson’s Brexiteers who want to leave to make Britain more Trumpist capitalist.
Many working-class voters, it seems, especially in northern England, were so repelled by Blairite pro-European Union Labour MPs, millstones around Corbyn’s neck, that they stayed at home. Or, in some cases, even voted Conservative ‘to get Brexit done’. Unfortunately, not realizing that Johnson’s Brexit is not their Brexit.
Many are in the north-east of England, [traditionally Labour] constituencies which voted predominantly for Leave, such as historical mining constituency Blyth Valley.
The Labour party were not the only losers in this election. The most pro-European Union party, the Liberal Democrats, lost. Their leader Jo Swinson lost her seat.
Not all was gloom and doom for Remainers. In Scotland, there was a big victory for the Scottish National Party. An argument for Scotland becoming independent and thus remaining in the European Union.
In Northern Ireland, for the first time ever, pro-union with Britain parties like the DUP, lost their majority of MPs. Parties supporting a united Ireland, remaining in the European Union, won.
Mr McDonnell added that he had doubts “Brexit will be done as a result of this.”
“I think what will happen… people, I think, almost in despair, wanted to get Brexit over and done with because they’ve had enough of what’s been going on.”
Shadow justice secretary Richard Burgeon also suggested that Brexit dictated the vote.
He Tweeted: “If, as it seems, this was a Brexit election then the next one won’t be given Johnson’s Thatcherite agenda.”
But he vowed to continue the fight against the Tories.
Mr McDonnell warned that the result would put “the most right-wing extreme cabinet that we’ve seen in our history” in power who would have the mandate to introduce “reactionary policies.”
Meanwhile, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has announced that he won’t be the leader at the next election. One should hope that his successor won’t be some Blairite. That would make Labour even smaller than the Liberal Democrats. Corbyn’s successor should be at least as left-wing as he.
I WAS lucky. In the Midlands town where I grew up, a touring theatre company played for three days every three weeks. It was a varied programme from farce and West End comedies to Shaw and Shakespeare.
With enthusiasm bordering on an obsession, I went to every play, soaking up the atmosphere and staying late to get a glimpse of the actors, exotic beings from another world whose names I can still recall.
The regions, so neglected by the Tories and Labour when led by Blair and Brown, should have these new industries, with secure jobs and rights won by generations of trade unionists.
But you know all this. What has barely been mentioned is Labour’s Charter for the Arts. These bold proposals could transform lives. There will be an arts premium for all primary school pupils. This will allow teachers to develop children’s creativity and give every child the chance to shine.
Theatre, music, dance, the visual arts — these can bring self-confidence and just plain enjoyment. Sport does the same, but not everyone can be good at sport.
The Charter says: “Every child in every corner of the country will have the right to learn a musical instrument.”
While working in Newcastle, we met an inspirational headteacher, Judy Cowgill, at Hawthorn Primary School in Elswick.
She and the staff had created a school orchestra on the Venezuelan model. It was a huge success, featured on TV and the children played at the Sage Concert Hall. When they talked about this achievement you could see them bursting with pride.
Youth services are also vital. So much has been cut and so many young people are left with nowhere to gather. Restoring a sense of purpose and showing how young lives are valued is essential — that’s how we defeat alienation, cynicism and hopelessness.
Of course, it is tied to good, secure jobs that pay a fair wage but Labour has plans for these, too.
There will be £1 billion to transform libraries, museums and galleries. And arts funding should also go to develop regional theatres, concert halls and music venues, and – one day – cinemas that care for film more than fast food!
Labour’s Charter for the Arts reaffirms the promise made in the 1945 Manifesto: “We desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation.” As a boy, fulfilling that promise changed my life.
How many millions of young people will benefit from a similar commitment today?
Electing a Labour government this week would turn the tables on four decades of privatisation and deregulation and start the process of building a stronger, fairer and sustainable future for all of us: here.
Lamiat Sabin profiles EMMA DENT COAD who has a majority of just 20 in Kensington — Labour’s most marginal seat
KENSINGTON will be under the spotlight on election night in under a week’s time when millions of people will see if the once-Tory stronghold and one of the most diverse constituencies in the country will remain red.
Emma Dent Coad was just days into her new job when the 2017 Grenfell tragedy struck, and the pain of the catastrophe that killed 72 people is still very raw in the local collective consciousness.
I met her in Kensington where she was born and has lived for decades – on the same road where I have lived most of my life.
Dent Coad has reported Sam Gyimah, her Liberal Democrat challenger and a former Tory MP, to the police for alleging that she had a role, as a local councillor at the time, in discussing the use of the cladding in the tower’s renovation.
She has stated that as a backbench opposition councillor she had not been on committees that would have made those decisions.
“Gyimah put me in danger actually, I had hundreds of death threats,” she said.
She also recalled that at a monthly Grenfell silent march, Gyimah “got it completely wrong” by placing himself at the front with survivors and the bereaved. She said Labour MPs always march at the back: “it’s not a gig.”
Dent Coad also described him as “entitled and disrespectful” for having repeatedly told residents that he gave up his East Surrey seat and a ministerial job in order to stand in Kensington.
Also out to unseat Dent Coad is Tory candidate and local resident Felicity Buchan. Rather than local issues, her campaign literature focuses on her pledge to the pro-EU constituency to “move on” from Brexit by embracing PM Boris Johnson’s deal, and promises to campaign to cut business rates and stamp duty.
For Labour, dozens of people have come from across London to canvass for Dent Coad, a hard-working, committed socialist who describes the volunteers as “absolutely amazing”.
On a cold, drizzly evening I bumped into a cluster of the canvassers who were accompanied by a reporter from Japan’s only communist newspaper, who said the constitiency is the subject of international focus owing to Kensington’s diversity and Labour’s slim majority.
Labour’s bedrock support is in the north of Kensington, where there is a higher concentration of social housing, which is home to Notting Hill Carnival and used to be the stomping ground of notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman.
The south of Kensington covers Kensington Palace and the “billionaire’s row” of mansions and embassies stretching up to Chelsea.
The choice for Kensington residents, when it comes down to it, is between Labour and a blue or yellow Conservative.
In the words of a canvasser, when I asked about what they thought of Gyimah: “He’s a Tory, that’s all you need to know.”
Election 2019: Why I’m Voting Labour: Dave Brown, political cartoonist of the year, 2019
ON THURSDAY December 12, I’ll be voting Labour. God knows why, it’s very much against my best interests.
As a satirical political cartoonist, I make my living by lampooning those in power and those who seek to govern us. My daily bread depends on being able to strip away the carefully spun and tailored image the politician presents to us to reveal their true corrupt, venal, mendacious, nakedness.
Like the little boy in the fairy tale I point and say: “Look the emperor has no clothes…” though, for effect, I tend to add “…and he has a particularly tiny willy!”
Similarly, why would I want our trains brought back under public control when a top-hatted, blond Fat Controller and his billionaire chums running them off the rails is so much more fun to draw?
Over the last three years I’ve become really good at drawing cliff edges, do you really want to take that away from me just because working people’s jobs might be dashed on the rocks of a Tory hard Brexit?
Do you realise how tough my life will be trying to find a visual metaphor for Corbyn’s pragmatism when, with a few strokes of my pen, I can give you Johnson flogging a dead unicorn?
Why I’m Voting Labour: Maxine Peake, actor and writer
The arts are at the centre of a civilised society and Jeremy Corbyn knows this more than any other party leader
“IN ANY civilised community the arts and associated amenities, serious or comic, light or demanding, must occupy a central place. Their enjoyment should not be regarded as remote from everyday life.”
When Arts Minister Jenny Lee made this pledge in 1960, who knew that in 2019 this strategy would still be as important as it was at its initiation and, more shockingly, that it is still being fought for.
On reading Labour’s charter for the arts, I have to confess I shed a tear to see in black and white a future for the arts that I have longed dreamed of writ large.
The arts are at the centre of a civilised society and Jeremy Corbyn knows this more than any other party leader, he knows that creativity and expression are basic human needs. The human race is a race of story-tellers and performers. Since our arrival on the planet we have used song, dance and art as a way to communicate and express ourselves. It is essential not only as entertainment but also for our survival.
Art as an outlet is linked intrinsically to our health and wellbeing and the main problem we face today is inclusion. It’s common knowledge that many arts venues can have hefty ticket prices and lowering these prices is a start.
But the real issue we have to tackle is getting young people engaged in the first place, not perpetuating the idea that the arts are only for a privileged few. If we start at junior-school age encouraging youngsters to participate in an art form — Labour’s promise that every child will have the opportunity to play an instrument at school is one way to start to break down these barriers — outreach work is essential.
Arts and creativity need to become the norm within the more disadvantaged areas of society. We cannot go round enforcing this, it has to come from the people and what many of our towns are missing is encouragement and empowerment.
The Towns of Culture is a fantastic way of raising people’s confidence and giving them the facilities and finance to show off their creative prowess. The Cities of Culture have been huge successes, giving the arts and culture in cities like Hull the chance to flourish and show the nation what they are made of. This investment has a continuing legacy, with benefits for all.
Funding the Arts Council properly is another huge step. It does extraordinary work but more money is needed if it is to change more lives and support grassroots organisations that can capture talent and interest in the young and old and nurture it.
Labour promises an arts charter for all that will ensure nobody is overlooked or ignored, whatever their background. No talent will be missed and no-one will be excluded from the mental health benefits that the arts bring.
This is a mini-documentary to celebrate my 35 years earning my living as Attila the Stockbroker. It was directed by the very talented Farouq Suleiman and I think it sums me up pretty well. Recorded in some of my favourite places: at home in Southwick, West Sussex, in Shoreham Port, 800 yards from our front door, at Brighton & Hove Albion FC’s Falmer Stadium (that’s what we fought for all those years, that’s what I’ll always call it!) in Harlow, Essex where I started out as Attila, and live at a gig at the lovely The Greys Pub in Brighton. With some vintage footage of me with HAIR and background music by my medieval punk band Barnstormer. Well done, Farouq. Thanks. And, folks, if you like it, and know someone else who might, please share away! We are DIY 🙂
And not just that, but to end the feelings of helplessness and unease I encounter in those who are themselves doing OK but loathe the inequality they see all around them.
I’m voting Labour to give people a third of my age the opportunities I had when I was 20, long destroyed by years of Tory policies.
But I’m not just voting. I’m getting out on the road doing 13 gigs between now and the election to raise funds for Labour and the spirits of those fighting for change.
From November 24 to December 12 I’ll be touring Havant, Norwich, Wakefield, Doncaster, Coventry, Hastings, Brighton, Aberystwyth, Pembroke, Hartlepool, Newcastle, Long Eaton and Shoreham.
US President Donald Trump intervened at the start of Britain’s snap general election campaign Thursday to publicly attack Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, warning that a Corbyn premiership would take the UK into “bad places”.
Trump’s statements were issued during an extended live interview with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage on LBC radio, where Farage has hosted since January 2017.
“Corbyn would be so bad for your country, he’d be so bad, he’d take you on such a bad way, he’d take you into such bad places,” he told Farage.
Most media coverage of Trump’s phone call has focused on his pro-Brexit message in calling for an alliance between Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Farage. … Johnson’s withdrawal agreement meant that “we can’t make a trade deal”, he declared—blowing a hole in the [British] government’s post-Brexit strategy.
Pompeo’s threats, made … on June 3, were “leaked” by the Washington Post and coincided with a three-day state visit by Trump to the UK. Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best … It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
The first was Johnson’s visit to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. Leaving the hospital after a staged photo opportunity, Johnson was booed and jeered by dozens of patients and National Health Service staff.
By mid-afternoon #Billionaires was the top-trending item on social media. Video footage of Barnett’s incensed defence of the financial oligarchy became the subject of popular derision: “An average NHS worker would need to work 100m hrs to earn £1bn. Working daily, 24 hrs a day, for 11,400 YEARS. i.e. since the end of the last Ice Age and the dawn of urban civilisation and the domestication of cattle,” one Twitter user responded, concluding, “Billionaires haven’t ‘earned’ their wealth. They stole it.”
Corbyn’s election campaign seeks to politically channel the mass opposition of workers and young people to endless austerity and social inequality behind the … programme of the Labour Party. His election videos promise a “once in a generation opportunity” to “put wealth and power in the hands of the many not the few.” By Thursday, a surge in voter registrations—316,264 in just 48 hours—pointed to the hunger for political change among young people. Nearly one third of registrations were from those aged 18-24.
Pent-up opposition in the working class to decades of free-market policies is now breaking to the surface. Last month’s 97 percent strike vote by 110,000 Royal Mail workers has been followed by two ballots—recording 79 percent and 74 percent votes in favour of strikes—by academics against changes to pensions, pay and conditions across nearly 100 universities and colleges.
The media has responded to Corbyn’s anti-austerity promises with hysteria. The Daily Telegraph accused him of advancing a “vision of a society founded on theft of private property” and the Sun [of Rupert Murdoch] warned of his plans to “sneak into power on a wave of hatred and envy.”
Corbyn’s response to Trump’s LBC interview … consisted of a single tweet, “Donald Trump is trying to interfere in Britain’s election to get his friend Boris Johnson elected.” This theme was echoed by … Labour MP Chris Williamson, a key Corbyn ally, who tweeted, “Don’t let Boris Johnson’s Tories turn Britain into Donald Trump’s poodle.”
Corbyn and Williamson’s … response conceals the class interests expressed in Trump’s threats. Pompeo and Trump’s open declarations against the democratic rights of the working class are part of a political conspiracy at the highest levels of the British state.
Corbyn has often described Chilean President Salvador Allende as his political hero. Allende’s parliamentary road to socialism ended … in a US-orchestrated military coup in September 1973. This was followed less than two years later by a CIA-backed political coup in Australia, removing a democratically elected Labour government from office, with the military on stand-by.
…
Last November, Corbyn was asked explicitly by the Latin America Bureau, “Do you worry about the forces that brought down Allende doing the same thing to you? Corbyn replied, “Well, I understand a lot of the media are very unkind towards me here; extremely unkind. I think what we showed in the general election and since then is that our ability to communicate with people was critical … we can bring about political change, we can be a government of social justice and we’ll have foreign policy based on human rights and justice.”
Trump’s attack on Corbyn comes just one day after he praised the Pinera government’s savage repression in Chile as an attempt to “restore order” against “foreign efforts” at destabilisation. Mass protests and strikes—the largest since the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship—have rocked the country for nearly two weeks. …
Trump’s interview shows that Pompeo’s threatened “push back” is far advanced. If Trump is willing to make such anti-democratic public pronouncements against the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition, what are they discussing—and preparing—behind the scenes?
This 30 July 2019 parody mu=sic video from Britain, about Tony Blair‘s spin doctor Alastair Campbell, recently expelled from the Labour party for voting for the Liberal Democrats, which is against Labour rules, says about itself:
Alastair Campbell, one of the key figures in Tony Blair’s 1997 Labour government, announced this week he no longer wants to be a member of the party. The sentiment among most Labour Party members was “Good riddance to bad rubbish”: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 