FIGURES from the labour movement have called for the creation of a new party “Transform,” warning that Sir Keir Starmer is “planning to follow the same brutal policies as the Tories.”
The call comes after the Labour Party leader refuses to oppose the two-child benefit cap.
Organisations from across the left already involved with the call include the Breakthrough Party, Left Unity and the People’s Alliance of the Left, with more groups reportedly set to join in the coming weeks.
Plans are already under way to build local Transform groups and organise in-person events across the country, culminating with the launch of the party later this year.
David Williams left blind in one eye and suffering trauma and anxiety after a vicious 2021 attack in his home. Contemptible Labour is trying to pin its disastrous loss in Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election on him
Labour’s appalling conduct under the authoritarian and blame-shifting Keir Starmer regime has continued with a series of apparently-briefed attempts to pin the blame for its woeful defeat in Thursday’s Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election on former constituency party chair David Williams.
Williams resigned from his position and the party last week in disgust at the way Labour had behaved during the election campaign – and he responded to the subsequent attempts to scapegoat him with a link to an article, posted on Twitter:
Some people have been criticising me for not going on the doorsteps in the byelection campaign. I met with Danny Beales at the beginning of the campaign to explain why.https://t.co/NhWHrD0OJW
The article revealed that Williams was the victim of a horrific attack in 2021 by his mentally ill former son-in-law – an attack that left him permanently blind in one eye after the attacker tried to gouge out his eyes and then strangle him with a skipping rope. In his victim impact statement to the court, Williams explained that the attack ad the ‘life-changing’ injuries had left him suffering anxiety and nightmares – and that despite being ‘politically active’,
My days of door knocking and meeting people on the doorsteps are now behind me.
Now Labour is trying to deflect blame from the abysmal and spineless Keir Starmer and the lacklustre right-wing candidate Starmer’s party rigged into the selection by claiming a man disabled in a vicious attack did not do enough door-knocking. Only one word springs to mind for the people who would do such a thing, but Skwawkbox will allow readers to fill in the blank for themselves.
At least 1.5 million children are living in poverty because of the Tories’ two-child benefit cap – many of them going hungry – damaging their health, their education and their chances throughout their entire life and leaving them stigmatised and traumatised.
Keir Starmer has previously caused outrage by refusing to commit to ending the cap if Labour gets into government. But this morning on the BBC he went a step further and confirmed that he will not end the cap:
On everything else the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg asked him, Starmer refused to answer one way or the other, using the excuse that he’s ‘not going to write our manifesto here’.
But lifting at least 250,000 kids out of poverty and giving another 1.25 million a massive leg-up to being out of poverty that they are suffering through no fault of their own?
No – on that, Starmer was more than happy to ‘write the manifesto here’, confirming that Labour has no interest in those children or their 400,000 families, most of them working, let alone their relatives who will be equally horrified. Presumably, he thinks poor people don’t vote – or that he doesn’t need them if he can suck up to enough Tories and big business.
A Starmer win means another five years of Tory government, just as much as would a win for the blue version.
KEIR STARMER says that “if we simply patch up and keep going, then we won’t fix the fundamentals and that’s why reform is so important.”
It’s ironic that this line is deployed not to propose far-reaching change, but to reject it.
Starmer has broken so many pledges he must be running out, but he managed to sacrifice another commitment as an offering to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, saying Labour will not end the two-child benefit cap.
Anger at Labour’s abstention when the Tories introduced this revolting policy, which punishes innocent children for being born into large families, was a watershed in Jeremy Corbyn’s run for the Labour leadership in 2015.
Seen as a sign that Labour had lost its soul, it infuriated activists and helped mobilise the campaign for a leader who actually cared about ending child poverty and standing up for the vulnerable. Starmer’s latest betrayal should motivate the left to fight again today: campaigns for the policy changes we need must be built from the grassroots, since nobody at Westminster is putting them forward.
Anti-environmentalist Starmer finds climate-change protesters on his doorstep
Green New Deal Rising protest Keir Starmer’s office 14 July 2023.
‘Tree-hugger hater’ Starmer – who posed as climate-friendly as part of his con to get Labour members to vote him in as party leader then u-turned to enable the government to pass laws that will criminalise climate and other protesters and even said he hates ‘tree-huggers’ – had a little surprise on his constituency office doorstep yesterday.
Dozens of young ‘Green New Deal’ activists pitched up outside his office to demand that he stop breaking promises – Starmer has shown that his aren’t worth the air he emits to pronounce them – and decorated his office window to remind him they were there, as they explained on their Twitter feed:
Last week, Keir offered to meet with us but afterwards said he was too busy. So we decided to come to him.
Sadly, Keir wasn't in his office. But we left some messages on the windows and will come back at the same time next week. We're happy to speak whenever and wherever! pic.twitter.com/2Ej0tQCtLk
But while the protest was good-natured, there is nothing remotely funny about Starmer’s contempt for protest, democratic and civil rights – and the environment. Unfit to run a tombola, let alone a political party or, worse still, a country.
