Murray goes, but who instead?

Submitted by AWL on 26 February, 2020 - 12:00 Author: Gerry Bates
Andrew Murray and Jeremy Corbyn

Andrew Murray, former Communist Party leader and prominent Stalinist, has resigned from his job in the Labour Party Leader’s Office.

His associate Karie Murphy has already been lined up to go to the House of Lords. What will happen to their associate Seamus Milne we don’t yet know.

Good riddance. The 3Ms axis played a big part in:

• Labour’s fumbling and evasive policy on Brexit. Murray and Milne were keen Brexiters well before 2016, and retreated only step-by-step before the overwhelming rank-and-file Labour push against Brexit.
• Labour’s antisemitism fiasco: Murray and Milne are long-time hate-Israel campaigners.
• The bureaucratic and manipulative mode of Labour politics between 2017 and 2019.

The 2017 manifesto’s anti-cuts policies were shelved, for practical purposes, for over two years. Labour abandoned street campaigning. Instead we had a platform of opposing police cuts and claiming to offer defter Brexit-negotiation than the Tories. Numerous left-wing policies were agreed by conference were ignored and the party continued to be run undemocratically. Then suddenly a shower of leftish policies were “announced” from on high just days or weeks before the 2019 election.

But even if all three Ms go, it doesn’t follow their replacements will be good.

Keir Starmer has, as his “deputy head of field”, Matt Pound, the national organiser of right-wing faction Labour First, who is as bureaucratic, manipulative and hostile to anti-Stalinist socialist politics (in his own way) as Milne and Murray ever were.

We need a Labour Party where decision-making power is in the hands of the members and the conference, not the apparatchiks.

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