The Lies of Warren Morgan & Kyle Rebound on
Them
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| Corbyn needs to start fighting against bans on members voting, surcharges on democracy, the suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party and the expulsion of activists like Ruth Cashman - he has surrendered too much |
The rotten and useless old right-wing Executive was decisively defeated
as members wanted a change from a Labour Party which was seen as a life support
service for Councillor Warren Morgan and his fellow cutters and slashers. Services in Brighton have been cut to the
bone. Hove library was only saved
because the Greens and Tories united together to prevent Labour’s plan to close
it.
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| Peter Kyle - the right-wing Progress MP for Hove who some see as more right-wing than the Tory he defeated |
We even had the absurdity of the 'Campaigns' Officer Nicky Easton opposing a motion supporting the doctors' strike and asking Labour Party members to go on to the picket lines. Unsurprisingly Easton was defeated by the heaviest majority of any candidate.
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| The slash and burn leader of the Council and signed up member of Progress - ex Lib Dem - he has been the author of false allegations of intimidation whilst presiding over the racial attack by friends of his last Saturday |
Disabled and Old Aged Peoples Centres such as Belgrave Centre and Tower Hill have been closed in Brighton and Hove at the same time as Warren Morgan sacked the previous Chief Executive, because he couldn't get on with her, at the cost of £1/4 million. Brighton & Hove Independent today carried a story from UNISON showing that the Council had wasted £15m on expensive agency labour because they had cut so many jobs they didn't have enough social workers and other vital staff when needed.
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| The only intimidation was off a Black woman and her friend by a New Labour thug |
The Labour Group has cooperated, without a whimper, in the Sustainability
and Transformation Plan (STP) which is part and parcel of the Tory’s programme
of privatisation of the NHS. Their cooperation in the stealth privatisation of the NHS is disgraceful but is part of the corrupt Progress politics.
We have a local Labour MP, Progress’s Peter Kyle, who refused to go on the doctors' picket lines or even support their strikes or opposition to Jeremy Hunt's proposed contract. Kyle refused to support Caroline Lucas’s
excellent NHS Reinstatement Bill because he supports the involvement of the
private sector in the NHS. Caroline
Lucas’s Bill would have overturned the provision in the 2012 Social Care bill
which removed government responsibility for maintaining the NHS. Legally today there is no obligation on the government
to run a national health service.
When Kyle defeated the Tory candidate for Hove, some wags said that the most right-wing candidate had won!
The reaction of the Labour Right to their defeat was simple – false allegations
made against unnamed individuals.
Apparently someone spat at Peter Kyle, but when the alleged offender
made a complaint against Warren Morgan, the instigator of the complaint, for
making a false allegation, Brighton & Hove Labour Party was suspended an
hour later.
Instead of accepting their defeat and their unpopularity, Warren Morgan
resorted to a mixture of the normal McCarthyist red baiting plus the usual
generalised mixture of allegations of intimidation.
People will recall the brick that was thrown through the office Wallasey Labour
Party window, Angela Eagle’s constituency.
It became the most famous broken window in history as the BBC made it
the news story of the day. No mention of
the consistent intimidation of left activists, the witch hunting, the false
allegations of anti-Semitism. These
people, who brought us Iraq and extraordinary rendition (kidnapping of people
in the West and illegal deportations to undergo torture in third world
countries) are now complaining of ‘intimidation’ because they know they have
nothing to offer except the same Tory lite and austerity programmes.
Both Owen Smith and Eagle portray themselves as ‘left wing’
candidates despite their record of supporting the Iraq war and all manner of
cuts to benefits and services.
The suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party is therefore on a part
with their removal of the right of 130,000 new Labour Party members to vote in
the leadership elections and the raising to £25 the cost of registering as a
supporter. The Right in the Labour Party
are fundamentally undemocratic and in particular they are hostile to
participatory democracy.
The suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party and the ban on other Labour
Party meetings is not a sign of strength though but fundamental weakness. It is because they cannot command a majority
any longer that they have to ban the electorate or part thereof from
voting. They hope to frighten existing Labour
Party members into voting for the Right-wing candidates at the same time as
they conduct a massive purge of members.
There are already reports of a massive search of activists social media
posts as a means of suspending them. We
can expect the suspension of thousands in the weeks ahead as they try to fix
the leadership elections.
People are in danger
of uncritical hero worship of Jeremy Corbyn.
We support Corbyn despite the fact that he is essentially a weak
leader. Corbyn has said nothing about
the ban on 130,000 members voting. He
has said nothing about the ban on Labour Party meetings or the raising to £25
of the right of registered supporters to vote.
He has said nothing about the witch hunt of activists and now the
suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party.
Today I have learnt
of the expulsion of an excellent working-class anti-cuts activist in Lambeth,
Ruth Cashman. Again Corbyn has kept
silent.
People need to face
the fact that Corbyn’s ‘new and softer’ politics are useless against a ruthless
right. We also have to become ruthless
and start removing the Right and deselecting their MPs.
WE EXPECT CORBYN AND
THE LEFT ON THE NEC TO REVERSE THE BAN ON NEW MEMBERS OF THE LABOUR PARTY
VOTING AND THE OTHER RESTRICTIONS WHEN THEY MEET THIS TUESDAY.
Tony Greenstein
In
one of the most shocking revelations during a week which has seen the Labour
party lurch from one crisis to another – the operations of a whole district
Labour party (DLP) were suspended late on Thursday evening by the National
Executive Committee (NEC).
Brighton
and Hove (B&H) DLP has been officially banned from holding any meetings for
the foreseeable future, in a situation which is a microcosm of the chaos
engulfing the Labour party nationwide.
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| Greg Hadfield - the new BHLP Secretary whom the NEC have tried to depose |
The news was broken via the DLP’s secretary, Greg
Hadfield, on Twitter:
However,
the full background to this decision by the NEC is more complex than the tweets
appear – and would indicate an organised campaign by factions within the Labour
party to undermine the 6,000 member B&H DLP’s elected officials.
On
Saturday 9 July the local party held its AGM and elections for the executive
committee. Over 600
people took part, and a new block of officials were
appointed on a pro-Corbyn platform with the support of the grassroots
organisation Momentum. Hadfield, the new secretary, was installed with 65% of
the vote and the new chair, Mark Sandell, with 62%. B&H DLP issued a full
breakdown of the way the result had been reached,
as the methods used were admittedly complex.
However,
there has been tangible disharmony between the pro-Corbyn bloc of the DLP and
those who appear to have been aligned with Progress for some time. As an email
from councillor Warren Morgan (a Progress member) released by Hadfield shows, there has been a concerted
effort to undermine the left of the organisation.
In one, Morgan describes the socialist bloc as trying
to instigate:
As
Hadfield told The Canary, to imply that the B&H DLP is somehow being
overrun by entryists is absurd. Hadfield himself has been a Labour member for
over a decade, and has always stood on a socialist platform.
There
have been numerous smears in the local press against the socialist element in
B&H DLP. In a report in The Argus on 11 July, claims were made
against the new DLP chair Sandell – citing that he was suspected of being a
former member of the AWL. This suspicion was based on the fact he signed a
petition launched by them. And nothing else.
On 12 July, Morgan went on record via the Brighton and
Hove News website, saying that the new chair had previously belonged to
“smaller, fringe left-wing organisations”, and that him and his bloc of
councillors had been:
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| Add caption |
The
undertones of Morgan’s statement are obvious – the implication being that the
pro-Corbyn group who now run the DLP are not “credible,
responsible”, nor a “mainstream political administration”.
But the most crucial element of his piece was in
reference to the AGM on the 9 July. He said that:
It
is this alleged spitting incident which would appear to have been the catalyst
for the suspension of the DLP.
Hadfield
explained to me that the individual accused, who did not wish to be named, had
been publicly accused by numerous members associated with the Progress bloc.
This individual has denied the accusations, and has also gone to the police to
report the false statements, and asked the venue at which the AGM was held for
CCTV footage.
On
Thursday at around 5.30pm, they also submitted a formal complaint to the Labour
party about councillor Morgan, on the basis that he was “bringing the party
into disrepute” by making uncorroborated accusations and statements.
Within
hours, the former secretary of the DLP had been sent a notification from
Labour’s NEC that the organisation had been suspended from operations. Hadfield
only found out when a member of the press contacted him for comment.
This is the statement from the NEC in full:
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| Email sent to Greg Hadfield, Secretary of BHLP |
There
has so far been no evidence presented of the “spitting incident”, nor has there
been any of the alleged abuse thrown at Peter Kyle MP.
However, Kyle is a prominent critic of Corbyn. He
poured scorn on the Labour leader in May 2016, saying, after a speech from
Corbyn, that:
There
is no hard evidence to suggest that this is an organised plot against a group
of Labour party members who are overtly pro-Corbyn. But it certainly appears to
indicate that somewhere within the Labour party hierarchy strings have been
pulled to try and get the result of the B&H DLP elections overturned.
The
situation in Brighton is not a one-off incident, either. The same thing has happened to Manchester Gorton CLP, with the same reasons
cited as have been for B&H DLP.
Amid
the suspending of all CLP meetings nationally, the perpetual moving of the
goalposts surrounding who can vote in the leadership election, and the legal
action being taken against Corbyn’s right to be on the ballot automatically –
this is the icing on a very authoritarian cake.
In
layman’s terms, the NEC are suspending whole branches of the party on the basis
of a few, unverified claims of abuse (without giving the local organisations
involved a chance to investigate themselves) and because they appear not to
like the result of the way grassroots members are voting.
As
Hadfield commented: “This is turning into a battle for the soul of the Labour
party”.
If
this is democracy at work in Labour, then its soul is one that may well need
exorcising.
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