Labour Party

Background: • Behind Labour's purge of Leicester councillors • Hindu nationalism, communalism and the left • How the Tories won huge swing in Leicester amidst Truss debacle Over most of the country the recent local elections saw big net gains for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, and disastrous losses for the Tories. The picture in Leicester was very different, however. In 2019 Peter Soulsby, Labour’s candidate for City Mayor, won with just over 60% of the vote and Labour took 53 out of 54 seats on the council, with the sole remaining seat going to the Lib Dems. This time Peter Soulsby was...

The Guardian ( 5 May ) has highlighted a message from Labour officials to local Labour Parties that they must not affiliate to a slew of campaigns, including mild and respectable ones like the anti-monarchist group Republic. The instructions derive from a 2021 rule change which said that no local Labour Party could affiliate to campaigns not already endorsed by Labour's National Executive Committee. Effectively, it rules out local Labour Parties being more left-wing (or more right-wing, for that matter) in their formal campaigning affiliations than the Labour Party leadership. The cited...

1. Many leftists have quit the LP since December 2019: many who remain have become less active; the unreconstructed-Blairite Streeting-Reeves axis is setting the pace in the LP leadership and feels confident to manipulate selections heavily; the left Labour MPs are usually timid and fearful; meeting routines in some CLPs have atrophied. 2. The ban on Workers’ Liberty has limited socialist activity in the Labour Party, and it has been uphill work getting vocal opposition to it (though so far the motion against the ban has been passed in every CLP which has debated it). We can and should...

Left-wing MP Diane Abbott has apologised unreservedly for what she wrote about “Irish, Jewish and Traveller” people not suffering racism. Even ultra-Blairite John McTernan commented: “Swift and appropriate apology from Diane Abbott. She has been subjected to vile racist abuse throughout her career, and her apology should be accepted in the spirit it is offered”. The Labour leadership, which has largely declined to defend Abbott against racist and misogynist abuse, is opportunist and hypocritical on bigotry and oppression, and will show that again if it doesn’t lift her suspension from the...

The Labour Right has won big in the West Midlands mayoral selection race, with 60% of the vote going to Richard Parker, a former corporate accountant and partner at PwC.

Since the 28 March decision by Labour’s National Executive (NEC) to formalise Keir Starmer’s ban on Jeremy Corbyn standing as Labour candidate in Islington North at the next election, Islington North Labour Party has protested and “Islington Friends of Jeremy Corbyn” has started a petition to back Corbyn. More important than a petition is what can be done in the unions. At the NEC GMB, Usdaw and MU voted for the ban, and Unison abstained; Unite, CWU, Aslef, TSSA, and FBU voted against (with the disability rep and five CLP reps). The ban motion recognised Corbyn as a Labour member in good...

28 March: The NEC voted 22 to 12 to ban Corbyn.

Early in the new year the national Labour Party announced that it was going to take selection of Labour candidates for May’s city council elections in Leicester out of the hands of local members and pass it to an NEC sub-committee. Being disenfranchised in this way understandably provoked a lot of anger amongst members and the move also left many sitting councillors concerned about its implications for them personally. There was a lot of speculation about the agenda behind this intervention, with many on the left concerned that it was a further step in the leadership’s campaign to purge...

In Solidarity 661 I described the journalist Peter Oborne’s largely uncritical attitude to Islamic regimes and Islamist movements; in issue 663 I showed that his claim that the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair was a “hoax” is incorrect. I will now go on to examine his attitude towards claims of antisemitism within Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and, in particular, his role in making and promoting the Al Jazeera series The Labour Files . It is important to note that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari state and in 2019 produced a video claiming that the holocaust had been “exaggerated” by the “Zionist...

On 23 February, Keir Starmer set out his dream of leading a migrant-bashing, law-and-order government whose first aim is to have “the fastest growing economy in the G7”. In place of detail there is wonkish drivel. “Cross cutting-mission boards” “working across silos” with “flexible budget horizons” will “end sticking plaster politics”. But mission number 1, as with Truss, Sunak and every other bourgeois politician, is to deliver growth. Yet undifferentiated GDP growth can only deepen the ecological crisis. GDP growth involves increased production, which in turn means increased material...