Jeremy Corbyn

The Labour Party Can’t Abandon Working People – Jeremy Corbyn

Spread the love

https://labouroutlook.org/2023/03/01/the-labour-party-cant-abandon-working-people-jeremy-corbyn/

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

…

At a time when the Tories are accelerating their assault on democracy, the Labour leadership should be fortifying its defense. However, it will not be able to defend democracy if it isn’t prepared to respect it within its own movement. Across the country, left-wing members are being barred from applying to be a candidate, denying local parties the chance to vote for popular, working-class, talented people in a fair and democratic selection process. As Keir Starmer himself promised in 2020, “Local Party members should select their candidates for every election.” Reneging on this pledge sends an alarming signal to those whose trust you now seek to garner.

It also displays a lack of respect for those to whom we owe our very place in Parliament. Labour members are the ones who give up their time to knock on doors in the pouring rain. Labour members are the ones who campaign for local change in their communities. Labour members are the ones who keep the party afloat. The Labour membership is the soul of the Labour Party — you cannot crush one without the other.

Only a democratic party can provide the space that is needed to empower those with the creative ideas and transformative solutions this country desperately needs. Today, the division between rich and poor and the threat of ecological collapse are greater than ever before. Our aim should be to unite disenfranchised communities around a more hopeful alternative.

…

https://labouroutlook.org/2023/03/01/the-labour-party-cant-abandon-working-people-jeremy-corbyn/

Continue ReadingThe Labour Party Can’t Abandon Working People – Jeremy Corbyn

Starmer claims Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at next election

Spread the love

Jeremy Corbyn, Islington North Labour MP

For the Many, Not the Few

Uproar as Starmer bans Corbyn from standing as Labour candidate at next election

LABOUR “does not belong to one man but to its members,” campaigners declared today after Sir Keir Starmer vowed Jeremy Corbyn would never again be a Labour MP and told critics of his leadership to quit the party.

The increasingly right-wing Labour leader, who expelled his predecessor from the parliamentary party in 2020, claimed the party he took over nearly three years ago is “unrecognisable and we are not going back.”

In a speech in east London, Sir Keir hailed a decision by watchdog the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to lift Labour out of two years of special measures over its “past failings” on anti-semitism.

But Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) slammed the “alarming news,” stressing: “Jews like us do not feel safe in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.”

The socialist group said its research shows that Jews have been “at least 37 times more likely to be investigated for anti-semitism than an average Labour Party member” since the former shadow Brexit secretary took the reins in April 2020.

…

Uproar as Starmer bans Corbyn from standing as Labour candidate at next election

When will we react to Starmer’s war on the whole labour movement?

KEIR STARMER’S Times interview exposes a Labour leader as arrogant as he is dishonest.

Few would disagree with his claim that Labour is “unrecognisable” compared with 2019 — but an honest media would ask this would-be prime minister some searching questions about that.

How does he defend standing to lead the party on a platform of continuing the socialist policies of Jeremy Corbyn, and why, if he was lying then, should we trust him in government?

When he tells anyone unhappy with the way he has changed the party that they are welcome to leave, what gives him the right?

Why should an MP only elected in 2015 tell activists and campaigners of decades’ standing to take a hike? More importantly, why should affiliated unions — which have already seen one of their number, the BFAWU, disaffiliate in disgust — allow a leader to abuse a position he obtained under false pretences to fundamentally change the character of the party they founded?

…

When will we react to Starmer’s war on the whole labour movement?

Continue ReadingStarmer claims Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at next election

Jeremy Corbyn: On Human Rights Day, the UK government must reflect on its own inaction and complicity

Spread the love
Jeremy Corbyn MP, former leader of the Labour Party

JEREMY CORBYN warns that on Human Rights Day Britain is trying to jettison its obligations under international treaties and turning its back on the most vulnerable

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/human-rights-day-government-must-reflect-its-own-inaction-and-complicity

…

If we walk away from the European Convention and human rights legislation, we will leave a terrible legacy for future generations.

There has been a resurgent pushback against human rights around the world. Let us not be part of it; let us go in the opposite direction.

Human rights have to be universal. They do not mean going to war with somebody. They do not mean abandoning or demonising the most vulnerable.

They mean engagement to try to achieve a more peaceful, caring and compassionate world for us all.

Continue ReadingJeremy Corbyn: On Human Rights Day, the UK government must reflect on its own inaction and complicity

We all just want to stop oil

Spread the love

Bought my coach ticket X

Cost of Living Crisis and Climate Crisis: The Same Crisis

Enough is enough. When did we decide to just sit there and be OK with people in the fifth richest country in the world having to choose between food and heating? When did that happen? When did we decide that we are just going to sit there and let civilisation as we know it to collapse because the government is refusing to cut carbon emissions in line with the cries of the world’s most renowned climate scientists. When did that happen?

People have woken up to the fact that there is only one crisis – the crisis of an elite which cares no more about old people dying of the cold than it does about young people dying of hunger before they get to middle age. This elite refuses to see the misery it is already inflicting on the Global South. The global majority already faces looting, exploitation and climate breakdown. Know one thing for sure – this is murder, plain and simple. Today’s fossil capitalism profits from yesterday’s barbarous imperialism. And they will carry on unless we stop them. No one is coming to save us – not the politicians, not the NGOs, not the entrepreneurs – the only way things will change now is through People Power. It has been the case throughout our history, and so it is today.

We All Want to Just Stop Oil is bringing together the wider environmental and progressive labour movements, faith communities, charities, people from social institutions and famous people – along with thousands of ordinary people who have never before been involved in anything like this – to create mass civil resistance. This is how we will overcome entrenched power – ongoing organised peaceful civil disobedience – slow marches, sit downs, blockades, etc., week after week. They may arrest people but we will not be afraid. We will be courageous, and our contagious courage will spread. They may imprison people but that will make us even more determined to show our solidarity. Their time is up. Our time is now.

On 23 July we are gathering to connect and build. Then, thousands of us will mobilise around the country to prepare for an Autumn of popular mass action – like Extinction Rebellion did in April 2019, forcing the government to respond by occupying central London. But this time involving many more people from a wide coalition of groups, building a deeper, more powerful movement.

…

Continue ReadingWe all just want to stop oil

State of the UK Labour Party

Spread the love

Two articles about the UK Labour Party, Craig Murray discusses the pointless Keir Starmer:

…

Starmer’s role has been simply to emasculate the Labour Party, and to purge it of any elements that might seek to pose a threat to rampant neo-liberalism and wealth inequality. His efforts to ban Labour MPs from supporting striking railway workers must be anathema to anybody who has the slightest feel for the history and traditions of that party and indeed the most basic understanding of its very raison d’etre.

This Tony Benn quote from the 1980’s has come into vogue because it is prophetic, and the process appears now complete:

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

Starmer is in one sense the apotheosis of this process. Not only has he acted to purge the Labour Party of socialism, he also offers so very little of a meaningful alternative to the Tories that there is very little danger of the Tories being voted out of office. Not only is he a safe right-wing backstop, he is a self-redundant safe right-wing backstop.

…

Jeremy Corbyn Sophie Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

and Jeremy Corbyn openly discusses the many parties that obstructed him. The article also discusses Julian Assange.

…

The Guardian has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought. 

The paper was a key part of the “anti-semitism crisis” that engulfed Corbyn’s leadership. From 2016-19, the Guardian published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. 

In the same period, the Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister. 

The Guardian’s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.

The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber commented after the 2019 election: “As for the Guardian, we will never forget that during the ‘Labour antisemitism controversy’, they beat even the Daily Mail to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour’s disadvantage”.

…

Keir Starmer says he is scrapping Labour’s manifesto and ‘starting from scratch’ on policy

Continue ReadingState of the UK Labour Party