Come and Join Us in Founding a new Socialist Movement as Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network Merge
Three
weeks ago Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt
voted by large majorities to merge. Both organisations have worked closely
together this year on a range of activities – the picket
of Labour’s National Executive Committee on July 20th against
Proscriptions and the Resist at the Rialto series
of events in Brighton during Labour Party Conference, including the Not
the Forde Inquiry with Ken Loach and Chris Williamson.
Ever
since the LAW All Members Meeting on November 27 a Joint Steering Committee of LAW and LIEN members has been preparing for
the merger which will formally take place this Friday evening at 6 pm.
Protest at Party Conference in September
LAW and LIEN
are joining together to advance the fight for to retain socialist politics both
inside and outside the Labour Party and to fight the witchhunt. The merged
group will provide a rallying point for all who came together under the Labour
banner of “For the Many, Not The Few,”
but now find themselves under attack.
Lobby of Labour Party HQ on July 20 - Andrew Fenstein speaking
The
meeting is for members of the two groups only, and if you’re a member you’ll
get an email invite. If you are not a member of the newly merged group go to https://membermojo.co.uk/labouragainstthewitchhunt
Inaugural
matters will cover discussing including a new name, aims and priorities and lastly the
meeting will be voting in a new Steering Committee. The deadline for committee
nominations and motions is midnight Wednesday December 14th.
To be
eligible to register to attend and vote, please join as a member
by midnight on Thursday 16 December 2021.
The
Shameful Expulsion of Anne Belworthy –a member for 63 years
Last
Saturday night Labour’s anonymous witchhunters were burning the midnight oil,
busy expelling long-standing members of the party for things like ‘anti-Semitism’. However the real reason
in all cases was speaking out
against the move to the neo-liberal right by Starmer. Free Speech has been abolished in the Labour Party - that is why it
is futile to believe that the main arena of struggle is inside the Labour Party.
Our main
unit of organisation will be Grassroots
CLPs comprising both those who were in the Labour Party, those who still
are members and those who have never been in any party.
Among
those who were expelled last Saturday was Anne Belworthy. She joined the Labour
Party 65 years ago aged just 19. It is outrageous that Starmer, who only joined
Labour recently himself, has the audacity to expel someone like Anne. This
shows the depths to which the Right have sunk and the contempt for those who
have given their life for the Labour Party. Julie Wassmer, Anne’s friend has
written:
PLEASE BEAR
WITNESS - to a NEW VICTIM OF shameful LABOUR PARTY McCarthyism: my friend and
fellow campaigner, Anne Belworthy -
thrown out of the party after 65 YEARS of active membership!
Anne has
written to me as follows :-
"On Saturday evening I received an email saying that my membership
of the Labour Party was terminated. I will hear shouts of joy from one or two
members on here but I know that my many friends recognise what I have put into
the Labour Party since the age of 19 which has resulted in 65 years of active
membership.
None of my first submission was acknowledged and I received no
acknowledgement for answering the accusations and so it goes on. I made a full
submission in July, answering the accusations of "anti semitism", and
with a potted history of my years of activism plus letters of support from the
Branch Chair and a long term member of Herne Bay Branch. I had no response.
I answered all of the 4 accusations. I then got a further email on 17th
November and replied below to G&LU: Membership A035209
I have today received a further email from the G&LU with accusations
of supporting Facebook posts of LIEN (Labour in Exile).
I received a previous letter of allegation dated 26th July (Case No.
CN-12705) to which I gave a full response to the accusations. I have never
heard anything about my response to the accusations, even though some of
today's allegations precede that date.
In response to today's email I can only say I am not a member of LIEN.
There is nothing in the posts that I have supported that states I am.
All I would ask is are we now banned from looking at sites on the
internet that your department has decided we must not look at? Is it not
worrying that this is nothing to do with the so called driving out of anti
Semitism but something entirely different. Please could my first submission be
read and responded to before you put before me these further accusations? Thank
you, from a member of 65 years length.
They appear not to have read any of the first submission but then looked
for further "wrongs" with no reference to the first. They have never
acknowledged any of my submissions.
Last evening I got an email terminating my membership only citing the
LIEN accusations. All of this happens to members if they are reported by
another member. Ironically I have "liked" on FB, posts by others in
our party whose names appeared on the photo shots of the accusations. They
posted it but were not reported, I was because someone reported me. That's how
it works. Democratic? Fair?"
Elizabeth
Anne Belworthy
Julie
wrote that ‘Anne tells me the 4 "anti-Semitism" accusations consisted
of "likes" on Facebook sites of posts in support of Palestine's
struggle against the Israeli government. Anne says,
"It hurts because I have
never uttered a racist remark in my life. The second letter I got, 3 months
after the first, ignored my previous submission and just said my membership was
suspended because I had supported Labour in Exile. A page that contains posts
from LP members who have been thrown out for similar reasons. But the party
leadership has proscribed that group so I am out for supporting it."
Anne also
tells me that the letter she received said that she must not tell anyone - or
the media. As you can see, she is defying that - and so, in my opinion, she
should. The allegations are SHAMEFUL. Anne is 84 years old and has fought
racism all her life - including anti-semitism.
There
aren’t words to describe how disgusting how Starmer and Evans and his
apparatchiks were. They talk of ‘anti-Semitism’ but if they had lived in Nazi Germany
they would have been the first to sign up to the Nazi party. Starmer and Evans
are nothing if not conformists to the existing system. There isn’t an anti-racist bone in any of
their bodies. This is another example of
racists expelling anti-racists for the crime of ‘anti-Semitism’.
As Julie
said:
‘This is NOT the Labour Party.
It's McCarthyism, pure and simple. Please share this post and please send your
solidarity to Anne,. Thank you. Jx 
’
Starmer
and Evans care nothing about racism. That is why, when Starmer addressed
Labour Friends of Israel recently he described Apartheid Israel as a ‘rumbustious democracy’. He cited as his mentor on ‘anti-Semitism’ the
racist David Baddiel who spent his formative years blacking
up and tormenting
Black footballer Jason Lee by portraying his Afro haircut as a pineapple.
Starmer
and Evans and the rest of the right-wing rubbish in the Labour Party are the
true racists. They are the ones who have
supported Priti Patel’s proposals to turn back refugees in the middle of the
Channel regardless of how many deaths it causes. They care nothing about anti-Semitism. They are like the boy who cried wolf. They
use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of intimidating those who object to the pogroms
and violence of apartheid Israel.
That is
why, as part of his promise
to protect ‘all Jews’ in the Labour Party Starmer has been busy expelling
dozens of Jews. If you are Jewish today
in the Labour Party you are 5 times more likely to be expelled or suspended
than if you are non-Jewish.
Starmer
is a liar and a crook who gave away £3/4 million pounds to Labour’s racist
senior staff, ‘whistleblowers’ they called themselves, in order to ensure that
the EHRC on Labour ‘Anti-Semitism’ was not compromised.
Starmer’s
10 Pledges, which
promised to embrace Corbynism was one long lie. As soon as he was voted in Starmer
abandoned each and every one of them.
JOIN US
AND HELP BUILD THE OPPOSITION TO STARMER AND EVANS
Why are you so loyal to a party which despises you? As for Mr Corbyn...
ReplyDelete"His few public utterances on schools, and on the pandemic generally, confirm that Corbyn’s loyalty, first, last and always, is to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. His entire period as Labour leader consisted of a concerted effort to oppose popular demands to drive the Blairite right-wing out of the party and thwart the aspiration of party members for a socialist turn.
Corbyn’s sole abiding “principle” was to preserve the unity of the Labour Party at all costs, allowing the right-wing to wage trench warfare against Labour’s members as Corbyn retreated on every major issue, including Trident nuclear weapons, NATO membership and council cuts.
“Nice” Mr Corbyn not only presided over some of his closest allies being witch-hunted out of the party as “anti-Semites”, but even boasted of speeding up the process of their exclusion. In doing so he created the conditions for his own defeat in the 2019 general election, the election of Boris Johnson, and his own removal from the parliamentary Labour Party within weeks of meekly handing leadership over to Starmer."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/03/corb-n03.html
What's wrong with Mr Corbyn? He was the first socialist leader of the Labour Party that I can remember and having unexpectedly won the leadership he tried against constant sniping from the entire corporate media and backstabbing from the vast majority of the PLP and the old guard Blairites to put his beliefs into practice. On the way he was also betrayed at times by close allies John McDonnell and Jon Lansman. Yes, Corbyn made mistakes. Yes he was weak at times. Yes there were casualties as a result of these failings - that was unfair and painful. But what do you expect? Perfection each and every single moment of his tenure? That's as bad as the Daily Mail. It's time you learned to live in the real world. Britain leaving NATO, for example, is very dear my heart too, but it had less than a snowball's chance of happening in a current parliament. Corbyn had to stick to realistic policies - socialist policies - that he could implement. The fact that he survived at all as leader is a tribute to his remarkable stamina. And what thanks does he get from you for fighting for socialism and democracy within Labour and within Britain? Sweet F.A.! Well thanks for your gratitude.
DeleteRichard Lightbown
"What's wrong with Mr Corbyn?" Well, compared to most Labour leaders he was indeed slightly further to the Left. He was not a socialist in any but the vaguest use of the word, much like AOC or Bernie Sanders in the USA self describe as socialist but also somehow manage to support capitalism and the imperialist state.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what his beliefs are that he wanted to put into practice. Mostly, he wanted the Labour party to form a government. I hear far too often from people on the Left who demand we be realistic and not aspire for anything beyond the mildest reforms. Strangely, the Right doesn't believe this is necessary for them. They are busily privatising the NHS, allowing thousands to die from Covid (compared to China, our government is a bunch of murderers), planning the destruction of the Human Rights Act and preparing for war with China while the Left timidly goes along with "constructive criticism" as if those people are amenable. That's one reason the Left continues to fail. Corbyn is not some hero deserving of anyone's gratitude; he's a lifelong professional politician whose words and actions deserve scrutiny as much as Boris Johnson's.
What's he done since he was forced out? "Corbyn and his ilk, along with the trade unions, is reaching out to the vaccine sceptics as an excuse for not waging a principled struggle against the entire mercenary agenda of big business pursued by Johnson and Starmer. He speaks of convincing rather than compulsion, while saying and doing nothing, even as the trade unions allow their members to be forced into unsafe workplaces and children into schools that are breeding grounds for COVID." Pathetic. Not socialist in the slightest.
I voted Labour for the first time in 2019 specifically because of Mr Corbyn, as he was certainly the best of a dismal bunch, including the Greens for whom I once stood as a Euro candidate. It was a tough decision given that my local Labour MP Jenny Chapman included in her manifesto her open support for the Tories' "20,000 more coppers" pledge. But I doubt Labour will attract my vote again.
Slightly further to the left huh? Generous of you to allow that he was not QUITE as right wing as Brown, Blair, Kinnock et al. Compared to which he seemed like a breath of fresh air to me.
DeleteI don’t know why you spend so much describing what the Right is up to. You surely know very well that Corbyn was opposed to everything you have mentioned in the second paragraph. Scrutinize his actions as much as you like. I know every time I went to a rally opposing the Iraq war or supporting Palestine (be it in London or Manchester) Corbyn was there speaking every time. He was on the platform at the two CND AGMs I attended. I know for certain he was at other rallies and other AGMs when I wasn’t. He was vocal against other British imperial adventures such as Libya and Syria as Michael Gove has attested to (without acknowledging with hindsight that Corbyn has always been on the right side of history). He was of course arrested for opposing apartheid. And much more: don’t you know this about the man you are slagging off? Just how well have the Greens done by comparison? Come to that just how good is your personal record? What gives you the right to cast the first stone?
What’s he done since he was forced out? Took a rest I should think (after all he is only a constituency MP now, and it’s usually considered good form for past leaders not to cramp their successor’s style). One might think he deserves it having had his every utterance scrutinised, distorted, misquoted, sneered at and vilified every day for four long years. Umunna withstood the press attacks for two days. Farage’s replacement (can’t be bothered to remember her name) put up with the British press for 17 days. Corbyn put up with more concerted hatred than the two of them put together for somewhere around 1500 days. And it hasn’t finished yet. Even that bilious piece you linked to held him in part responsible for his brother’s failings. You’ve got to be desperate!
Corbyn is that very rare thing, an honest politician. Just why do you find it so very hard to say anything more than a grudging word of compliment for a man who has worked so long and hard for his constituency and for human rights in Britain and in various parts of the world?