Monthly Archives: May 2023

Morning Star: Why the 70,000 voicing solidarity with Corbyn should matter to all of us

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The crowd hold up banners at the Pyramid stage as they wait for Jeremy Corbyn to appear on stage at Glastonbury Festival, at Worthy Farm in Somerset, June 2017

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/why-70000-voicing-solidarity-corbyn-should-matter-all-us

LABOUR’S answer to a petition to restore the whip to Jeremy Corbyn reaching 70,000 signatures will echo that to his constituency party’s near-unanimous vote this week to give it the right to select its own parliamentary candidate — that it carries “no weight at all.”

The leadership’s indifference to the views of the entire local party membership at least underlines one thing — the completely anti-democratic character of Keir Starmer’s party.

There is no attempt to engage with, refute or even explain to curious journalists why Starmer’s excommunicated predecessor gets such a resounding vote of confidence from those who know him best. Simply a reassertion that their opinions don’t matter.

Labour’s leadership has repeatedly demonstrated this view. Starmer’s adoption and later betrayal of 10 now infamous pledges to win the leadership shows that he is both aware of members’ opinions and determined to suppress them.

It is precisely because the Labour machine already knows how members feel that it has used such dirty tricks to get its way — from Starmer’s refusal to restore the whip to Corbyn after his party membership was confirmed by the national executive in 2020, through trawling social media records to find years-old “offences” to expel people for, to the rigging of selection processes and suspension of entire constituency parties.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/why-70000-voicing-solidarity-corbyn-should-matter-all-us

Continue ReadingMorning Star: Why the 70,000 voicing solidarity with Corbyn should matter to all of us

Corbyn: ‘I love my job and I want to carry on’

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https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/corbyn-i-love-my-job-and-i-want-to-carry-on

MP wins backing of local Labour Party in Islington North ahead of the next general election

Image of Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party

JEREMY Corbyn has told the local Labour Party in Islington North that he wants to “carry on” with his job as the area’s MP.

With the party blocking him from standing again, members of the constituency Labour ­Party almost unanimously passed a motion calling for them to have the democratic right to select their own candidate for the next general election.

Ninety-eight per cent voted in favour of the motion, with 60 voting in support and one member abstaining. No one spoke against the motion.

Mr Corbyn himself attended the meeting, which he is allowed to despite having the party’s parliamentary whip removed by leader Sir Keir Starmer. The party’s National Executive Committee in March approved its own motion, brought by Mr Starmer, barring Mr Corbyn from standing for Labour again.

Mr Corbyn, however, thanked members for their support and told them: “I love my job and I want to carry on doing it.”

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https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/corbyn-i-love-my-job-and-i-want-to-carry-on

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Climate experts call for urgent action as 1.5°C global rise predicted over the next five years

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Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/climate-experts-call-urgent-action-15c-global-rise-predicted-over-next-five-years-0

ENVIRONMENT experts called for urgent action from Westminster today after scientists predicted a 66 per cent chance that a global average temperature of more than 1.5°C will be recorded over the next five years.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) also said there is a 98 per cent chance of the hottest year on record being broken during that time.

Report co-leader Dr Leon Hermanson said that the 1.5°C mark above pre-industrial levels has never been crossed before, with the current record being 1.28°C.

He said that the record will likely come from a combination of greenhouse gases and a naturally occurring El Nino event, a heating of the eastern Pacific which affects rainfall and temperature globally.

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Green Party co–leader Carla Denyer urged Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to “do the right thing” and end the plans to open the new coal mine in Cumbria and oil field in Rosebank as well as dropping “all new climate-wrecking oil and gas licences immediately.”

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/climate-experts-call-urgent-action-15c-global-rise-predicted-over-next-five-years-0

Continue ReadingClimate experts call for urgent action as 1.5°C global rise predicted over the next five years

No landslide in sight for ‘Blairism on steroids’

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/no-landslide-sight-blairism-steroids

The local election results show no political vision is emerging to capture hearts and minds – Labour is simply waiting for the other parties to become even less appealing, writes ANDREW MURRAY

Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos
Image of Keir Starmer sucking up to the rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum, Davos

WEAK and boring. Correct — it’s Keir Starmer we’re discussing.

Thus the choices of a representative cross-section of voters asked by a polling company to sum up the Labour leader in a word.

Untrustworthy leaps out of the word cloud too.

It can all be rendered in a number as well. The one that counts is 35. That is the percentage of the electorate intending to vote Labour at the next general election, according to extrapolations from the local election results.

It is an astonishing figure. It is just 7 per cent ahead of the Tories, dramatically less than the score recorded in various opinion polls over the last year, which gave Labour leads of up to 30 per cent.

It is also, note carefully, just 3 per cent up on Labour’s score in the 2019 election, and 5 per cent less than a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour secured in 2017.

On these projections, there will be no Labour landslide at the next election, and perhaps not even an overall majority in the House of Commons.

All this after 13 years of austerity, authoritarianism, a cruelly bungled pandemic, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and the dystopian prospect of “national conservatism” a la Braverman next on the menu.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/no-landslide-sight-blairism-steroids

Continue ReadingNo landslide in sight for ‘Blairism on steroids’