The London
Labour Bureaucrat Who Threatened Stephen With Expulsion Didn’t Even Have the
Courage to Give His Name
Stephen
Kapos speaking at the Socialist Labour Network Holocaust Memorial Day meeting
on 27 January 2023
On Friday January 27 the Socialist Labour Network organised a meeting for Holocaust
Memorial Day under the title Reclaiming
the Memory of All Those Who Died In The Nazi Holocaust.
Unlike the official HMD commemorations, we remembered not just the Jews who
died but the Disabled and the Roma Gypsies. We reject the Zionist exploitation of the holocaust to justify the ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinians.
When the Starmeroids got to hear of it, probably from the Skwawkbox article,
an anonymous pen pusher from London Labour wrote threatening Stephen with
expulsion.
The cowardice of this party hack, who wasn’t even brave enough to put their
name to the letter, thought nothing of threatening a holocaust survivor with
expulsion. This is what Starmer’s pledge
to ‘tear out the poison’ of
anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has amounted to.
Starmer, the self-declared‘Zionist without qualification’, who
has said not a word about the Judeo-Nazis who are part of Israel’s government, has
ended up threatening to expel a holocaust survivor from Labour. This shows what an utter hypocrite the man is.
Walter Wolfgang reenters the Labour Conference in 2005 having been expelled the day before
At least when the Blairites had holocaust survivor, Walter Wolfgang, removed
from the Labour Party conference in 2005 they had the good grace to apologise
and readmit him to the Labour Party conference.
Socialist
Labour Network Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting – Stephen Kapos is the third
speaker
Starmer, Evans and the fake victims of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ – the Lady
Smeeths, Hodges and Ellmans – have all the manners of a skunk on heat without
the charm.
Not only is Starmer a liar, who made 10 Pledges to get elected
leader which he immediately junked, but he is a corrupt liar who hid
the sources of his campaign funding, from rich Zionists, hedge fund owners and other
parasites until the result was in.
Starmer and Evans are McCarthyites who have outlawed free speech in the Labour
Party. Even Blair didn’t proscribe organisations he disagreed with but Starmer,
a personality free zone, has nothing to offer except lies, more lies and
Torylite policies.
Stephen made the obvious point that has eluded these
witchhunters, that speaking on the platform of another organisation, in this case
the SLN, does not mean you are a member or supporter of that organisation. This
technique of guilt-by-association was first patented by Joe McCarthy.
Starmer’s Labour Party is politically (and financially) bankrupt. Our task
is to create a new socialist and working class party.
Below is the letter from a London Labour Party hack and below that is
Stephen’s reply.
Email from
the Witchunters of the London Labour Party
Date: 24 January 2023 at 20:09:05 GMT To:stephenkapos@gmail.com Subject:FAO: Stephen Kapos
Dear Stephen,
It has
been brought to the attention of the Labour Party that you have been advertised
as a speaker for an event entitled ‘Zionism During the Holocaust - Reclaiming
the Memory of All Those Who Died’, hosted by Socialist Labour Network on
Friday 27th January 2023.
In line
with Labour Party rules, Socialist Labour Network is a group which the NEC of
the party has determined is incompatible with Labour Party values. Any support
for the organisation would likely be deemed in breach of Party rules and may
lead to expulsion.
Yours
sincerely,
London Labour
Stephen Kapos’s Reply to Labour’s Witchhunters
To: London General
Labour Party
26th
January 2023
Dear London General,
Thank you
for your emailed letter of the 24th of January giving me advance
warning that I am likely to be expelled from the Party if I were to speak from
the panel as a Holocaust survivor at the SLN (Socialist Labour Network) Webinar
on the 27th January — on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The
Holocaust is the most important single example of genocide, which at its worst descended
into an industrial process of mass murder of millions.
As a child
survivor and one of the fewer and fewer still living direct witnesses to the Holocaust
I feel a compelling duty to bear witness and speak out about it at any platform
that would invite me and to any audience ready to listen.
I am an
activist for Palestinian human rights and an active member of the Palestine
Solidarity Campaign in its Camden Branch. The defence of Palestinians living
under a brutal occupation is very important to me, particularly as a Holocaust survivor.
Palestinians live under a system of apartheid as recognised
by Amnesty International and other major human-rights organisations. Those are
my political beliefs which I claim are protected characteristics under the
Equalities Act 2010.
I am not a
member of SLN nor have I been following its activities, but via the book
to be discussed on the 27th I have a general understanding of SLN’s
views on present-day Zionism (as a political movement ) and on some of the
actions of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust and WWII. I am in
sympathy with some of those views on the grounds of my political beliefs
mentioned above. I have personal experience of the Kastner
project in Hungary which was driven by Zionist ideology.
Rudolf Kasztner - leader of Hungarian Zionism and Nazi Collaborator
My father
was a victim of Kastner’s scheme and ended up stranded in the Belsen and
Theresienstadt concentration camps. I was myself briefly interned in a Kastner-run
detention camp in Budapest.
You make
mention of Labour Party values.
I learnt
about Labour values during my party activism in the period when Frank Dobson
was our MP and I worked in a warm and friendly atmosphere prominently on
various election campaigns.
Those values
were very different to that of the present leadership whose values permit intimidation,
banning of discussion of some of the most vital political topics, disregard for
the Party’s own rules, and for natural justice, the drastic reduction of inner
party democracy, extreme factionalism, lack of support for striking workers.
I do not
share these values.
Please
accept my immediate resignation from the Labour Party effective from tomorrow,
i.e. from the 27th of January 2023. Your attempt to effectively bar
me from speaking about the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day was the last
straw for me.
In the short
term the Tories are self-destructing which may well bring the Labour Party into
government soon.
In the long
term this period of the Party’s history will be remembered with shame: this was
when MacCarthyism was revived and imported into the Labour Party — and into the
political life of the UK itself.
Chris Williamson describes
how the Labour Right, with the complicity of Momentum, allowed the fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ narrative to destroy
the Left
Ten Year’s Hard Labour – Chris Williamson,
Lola Books, 2022, pp.
394
There is a tendency
amongst many on the left to engage in an uncritical adulation of Jeremy Corbyn now
that we see how awful is his successor, the serial liar and empty suit, Sir Stürmer. That would be a mistake.
Stürmer did not emerge from nowhere. Despite being part of the Chicken
Coup, Corbyn embraced this latter day Brutus without once questioning his role
as Director of Public Prosecutions in the cases of Julian Assange, IanTomlinson and other similar cases.
Without an analysis and understanding of where Corbyn and his entourage
went wrong and why their policy of appeasement could only lead to disaster, the Left is destined to repeat the same errors.
Corbyn ended up throwing his friends to the Zionist wolves in a vain attempt to appease them
For those who wish to
understand how the Corbyn Project went from the dizzy heights of near election
victory in 2017 to catastrophic defeat two years later, Chris Williamson’s
account is compulsory reading. Unlike books such as those by Owen
Jones and Gabriel
Pogrund/Patrick Wintour, it isn’t concerned with the gossip and tittle
tattle of who did what in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. [LOTO]
This is a book about
the sustained attack that was mounted by Britain’s political establishment, in
conjunction with the Zionist lobby and the secret state, on Corbyn and his allies.
All with the connivance of Labour’s senior staff and the Labour Right. An
attack which was fought in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Today we can see where
this fight has ended up. Starmer became leader of the Labour Party pledging
to ‘root out anti-Semitism from the
Labour Party’. Yet today Jews are five
times more likely to be expelled for anti-Semitism than non-Jews. People
like Jewish Voices for Labour members like Mike Howard, 72, for 40-years a Labour member and former
Hastings councillor and Riva Joffe, a South African-born anti-apartheid activist in
her 80s. Both died with the slur of ‘anti-Semitism’ hanging over them.
Not surprisingly Williamson’s
book has been ignored by the mainstream press and those who were responsible
for the fake anti-Semitism attacks on socialists and anti-racists in the Labour
Party. Stürmer and General
Secretary David Evans have ridden roughshod over all notions of natural justice
and due process as they have launched a witchhunt, the likes of which has never
been seen before in the Labour Party.
Those in the media who
would have cried to the heavens if Corbyn had expelled Margaret Hodge or Ruth
Smeeth, keep silent as thousands have been excluded by Stürmer.
I was the first Jewish
person to be expelled in February 2018. When allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’
were first raised in the Labour Party we were told that we were paranoid to
suggest that it was all about Israel and Zionism. Yet today Stürmer, who defines
himself as a Zionist ‘without
qualification’ makes no pretence about the fact that he considers anti-Zionism
to be anti-Semitism.
What Williamson calls
the ‘optics left’, such as Novara Media, Richard
Seymour, Dave Renton and Owen Jones, played a major part in the defeat of the
Corbyn project. This book raises the question as to whether the Left can ever win
control of the Labour Party since the Right will stop at nothing, including
open collaboration with the Tories and the prostitute press, to destroy anyone
who isn’t committed to neo-liberalism and NATO.
This book isn’t an autobiography
and, as it name suggests, covers the years when Williamson was MP for Derby
North, from 2010-15 and 2017-19, ending in his defeat in 2019.
Bereft of ideas, Starmer's only concern is to turn Labour into a safe party of capitalism
Williamson ignores the
period in the early to mid-2000s when he was Labour’s pragmatic leader
of Derby Council making arrangements with the Tories in order that Labour could
retain control of the Council and even using the Private Finance Initiative in
order to buy up housing.
Chris Williamson
followed in the footsteps of his hero, Tony Benn, in moving from right to left.
Perhaps this was part of the reason why he was so hated by the right. Although
Williamson came from a working class background unlike the aristocratic Benn,
he defied the tradition in the Labour Party of Labour MPs moving in the
opposite direction.
Williamson held on to Derby
North, a red wall seat, in 2010 with a majority of just 613. In 2015 he lost
the seat by the smallest majority in England, 41. In 2017, the first
election under Corbyn, Williamson regained it with a majority of 2,015.
In 2015 right-wing Labour
MPs, believing their own rhetoric that Corbyn would lose disastrously, asked
voters to support them despite Corbyn’s
leadership. Their campaigns, as we now know, were covertly
funded by the rogue Ergon House operation run by Labour’s senior staff.
Nick Cohen summed
up their mentality just one month before Theresa May announced the 2017 election.
Cohen described the election disaster that was around the corner:
On current
polling, Labour will
get around a quarter of the vote... Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by
the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’
When the results were
announced Labour had achieved a 40% share of the vote and an increase of 30 in
the number of seats. It was the largest swing since 1945 and 9.6% more than Ed
Miliband’s miserable
performance in 2015.
Williamson took a
principled stance and far from distancing himself from Corbyn issued a press
release announcing himself as ‘the most
Corbyn-friendly candidate standing anywhere in Britain.’[93]
The Miliband Years
Williamson devotes
relatively little time to his period in parliament from2010-2015 when he was a Shadow Fire Minister
under Ed Miliband before being sacked after standing on an FBU picket line. Williamson
was not a firebrand or anti-imperialist when he was first elected. In March
2011 he supported a resolution approving the imposition of a no-fly zone in
Libya, the precursor to NATO’s bombing of Libya. A decision he was to later regret.
Williamson describes
how Miliband, having been elected as the left-wing candidate, proved a bitter
disappointment. Williamson savages the decision to abstain as the Tories took
the axe to social security benefits. Under Miliband the approach to austerity was
that the Coalition, in the words of Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson, was ‘cutting too far and too fast.’ [5]
Chuka Ummuna, who was
later to defect to the Lib Dems, was put in charge of opposing the
privatisation of the Post Office. When Williamson urged Ummuna to commit Labour
to renationalising the Post Office, the answer was revealing as to who really
wields power in Britain: ‘We can’t do
that.The City wouldn’t wear it.’[26]
Williamson recalls
Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, remarking that ‘One of the first acts of the Coalition government was to turbo-charge
Lord Adonis’s academy programme.’ [28] The privatisation of local authority
schools had been inherited from New Labour.
As Williamson observed
‘The Shadow of New Labourism continued to
linger on in the Miliband years.’ The book however is most revealing for
its description of the Corbyn years and how Corbyn and the Labour Left snatched
defeat from the jaws of victory in 2017.
The Corbyn Years
From the very
beginning of his leadership Corbyn faced the unremitting opposition of Labour’s
senior staff who, it was revealed in Labour’s
Leaked Report, had openly wanted a Tory victory. When the polls began to
turn in Corbyn’s favour they openly expressed their disappointment.
Corbyn’s election had been
a fluke. The Labour Right had convinced itself that one-person one-vote would
ensure that the Left would be forever marginalised. Right-wing MPs like Sadiq
Khan had persuaded themselves that Corbyn could never win and therefore nominated
him in order to make the process seem democratic. As Margaret Beckett ruefully remarked
later, she was a ‘moron’ for having done so.
After having attacked
Corbyn on a variety of grounds without success, the Right settled on
‘anti-Semitism’ as their chosen weapon. There were many reasons for this, not
least that it gave them the moral high ground to be seen to be attacking Corbyn
as a racist.
Lansman ended up working with arch-Zionist and witchhunter, Luke Akehurst
This should have been
called out for what it was from the beginning. This was the most catastrophic
mistake of Corbyn and the Labour Left, especially Momentum under Jon Lansman’s baleful
influence.
It wasn’t as if it was
difficult to point out the hypocrisy of the Labour Right adopting the mantle of
anti-racism. The British National Party even sent
Margaret Hodge a bunch of flowers in appreciation of her proposal for a Whites
only housing policy.
Tom Watson, who declared
that he wouldn’t rest easy until every last anti-Semite had been expelled from Labour,
had a long record of playing the race card stretching back to the Birmingham Hodshrove
by-election in 2004 when he told
the electorate that Labour was ‘on your
side’ unlike the Lib Dems who ‘were
on the side of asylum seekers’.
When Phil Woolas, who
had run
a racist campaign in 2010 designed to ‘make
the white folks angry’, was removed by an Election Court from Parliament
for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, Watson wrote
about how he had lost sleep thinking about ‘poor
Phil’
Others who led the
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign included John Mann, who had previously issued
the Bassetlaw Anti-Social Behaviour Handbook which labelled a whole ethnic
group, Gypsies, as anti-social. Mann ended up being interviewed
by the Police under caution.
The worst New Labour
racists had suddenly become concerned about anti-Semitism. Of course the Labour
Party, with nearly 600,000 members harboured a handful of anti-Semites. It
would be surprising if they didn’t. Statistically the Labour Party no doubt harboured
a few paedophiles but no one suggested that Labour was overrun by them.
The Labour Right was
full to the brim with Islamaphobes but nobody mentioned that. Yet Corbyn,
McDonnell and Lansman, alongside the openly Zionist AWL adopted the anti-Semitism
narrative wholesale.
The
‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were clearly about Israel. Today every human rights
organisation accepts that Israel is an apartheid
state. The only defence Zionist supporters have is to cry ‘anti-Semitism’.
Unfortunately Williamson was the only Labour MP to get it.
When Black anti-racist
activist Marc Wadsworth was suspended and then expelled
for having criticised Ruth Smeeth MP at the Chakrabarti Inquiry press
conference, only Williamson stood
up for him. When Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish member was suspended it was
Williamson who stood
by her. Williamson supportedLabour Against the Witchhunt and
spoke on its platforms alongside expelled and suspended members.
At Wadsworth’s hearing
a ‘lynch
mob’ of all-White MPs accompanied Smeeth to the hearing. Yet instead of
Corbyn coming out in support of his old friend, Marc was told by LOTO that ‘it won’t help Jeremy if there is a
demonstration.’[86] When Marc told the press that Corbyn had phoned him
personally to give support LOTO went out of their way to deny
it.
When Williamson
appeared on a platform with Jackie Walker, Ben Folley of LOTO told Williamson to
heed the Zionists’ ‘advice’ not to do so. [111] As Williamson recounted:
The febrile
atmosphere bludgeoned every MP but me into accepting the false narrative. I
was, literally, the only MP prepared to challenge it publicly.
To this day I wonder
why it never occurred to Corbyn’s advisors such as Seamus Milne that retreating
only encourages your enemies. In Milne’s case he knew from personal experience
how Israel’s supporters deploy accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. The question must arise as to who Milne was working for.
If Jeremy had stood up
to the weaponisation of anti-Semitism he could have turned the tables on his
detractors. He could have pointed to New Labour’s racist record and mobilised
the 70% of Labour Party members who consistently
refused to accept that Labour was an anti-Semitic party.
The Zionist lobby in
the Labour Party led by the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM] had its knives out for
Williamson who they outrageously called a ‘Jew-baiter’.
Williamson who had fought National Front influence on building sites, often
with his fists, was now called a racist by those who had never fought either
racism or anti-Semitism.
In March 2018 the
Board of Deputies called a demonstration to protest at
Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Among the ‘anti-racists’ who attended were Norman
Tebbit MP of the ‘cricket
test’ and Ian Paisley Jnr, of the anti-Catholic DUP. Tebbit had previously said
that those who supported the Indian or Pakistani cricket teams were not really British
was now an anti-racist!
This was the first
‘anti-racist’ demonstration that the Board had ever called. When Oswald
Moseley’s British Union of Fascists tried to march through the East End in
October 1936 they were repulsed at the Battle
of Cable Street despite the Board advising
Jews to stay indoors and keep their heads down. The Jewish Chronicle wrote:
Jews are
urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from
their meetings. Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible
disorders will be actively helping antisemitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you
want to help the Jew-baiters, keep away.”
When
the National Front was mobilising on the streets in the 1970s the Board repeated
the same message.
The Zionist movement
has never fought anti-Semitism. The
Zionistmovement, when it first arose at
the end of the 19th century, was greeted by most Jews as a form of
Jewish anti-Semitism. Zionism believed that anti-Semitism was a virus that all
non-Jews carried around with them and therefore it was futile to fight against
it.
Williamson is suspended by Jennie Formby
Corbyn and his
advisors, rather than standing up to their detractors, appeased and apologised,
throwing first Ken Livingstone and then Williamson to the wolves.
Williamson was
suspended in 2019. It was a classic example of what George Orwell called Doublethink. In the eyes of Jennie
Formby and the witchhuntersBlack was
White. At a meeting of Sheffield Momentum in February 2019 Williamson gave a
speech in which he stated ‘We’ve been too
apologetic. What have we to apologise for? For being an anti-racist party?’
[150]
This was twisted
by the Yorkshire Post into ‘Chris
Williamson tells a Sheffield Momentum meeting that Labour has been “too
apologetic” aboutanti-Semitism”
A good example of how
the McCarthyist ‘guilt-by-association’ technique had been adopted and accepted
by Corbyn and Formby was the comment in the right-wing Labour magazine Prospect
on hearing of Williamson’s suspension.
This week
matters came to a head. In the space of 48 hours we have seen Williamson
attempt to host an event in Parliament with a woman who has been
suspended from the Labour Party under investigation for antisemitism before
telling an event in Sheffield that the Party has been “too apologetic”
about the same topic.
These two
things in one week alone should have been enough to warrant disciplinary action
even if they had come from nowhere. But Williamson has a well-established
history of upsetting the Jewish community
Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian was prominent amongst who prostituted themselves for the Israeli state
The weasel words of these press whores, because journalists they are not, are a wonder to behold. They build their case resting one lie on
top of another. Who in the ‘Jewish Community’ (is there one?) was upset? We are not told. Apparently it is
unacceptable to host an ‘event’ (a film called, appropriately enough The Witchhunt)
because it is with a woman accused of, anti-Semitism. In other words you are guilty until proven innocent (although Jackie Walker was at no time accused of antisemitism).
Yet what was the
response of LOTO?To defend Williamson?
To call out the harlots of the press and the Labour Right? No their advice was to
apologise. Not only did the Socialist Campaign Group not defend Williamson but
Laura Pidcock told him not to attend any more meetings! [159]
Solidarity was never
the SCG’s strong point. McDonnell’s advice was to ‘apologise again and again’. [198] The only members to offer any
support were Richard Burgon and the MP for Crewe, Laura Smith.
Like Dave Renton, another SWP exile, Richard Seymour ended up justifying the witchhunt
All the
soft-Corbynites from Guardian journalist Owen Jones to Jon Lansman and Novara Media joined the calls for
Williamson’s expulsion. Even Richard Seymour, the ex-SWP writer repeated the lie that Williamson had said Labour was too apologetic about anti-Semitism.
[173] Yet what Williamson said was easily
available.
In June 2019 a
National Executive panel voted 2-1 to reinstate Williamson. Almost immediately
a hue and cry was raised and Tom Watson launched a petition amongst right-wing peers
and MPs. What Corbyn should have done was to issue a statement welcoming the
decision and reaffirming his earlier statement of 31 January 2019 to the Derby Telegraph that ‘He is not an anti-Semitic in anyway.’ [192]
Yet Corbyn not only
didn’t defend Williamson he issued a statement implying that he was
anti-Semitic. Once again Corbyn had done the work of the Right. Williamson was
duly resuspended 48 hours later.
Williamson went to
court and applied for a Declaration that the suspension was unlawful. In
September 2019 Justice Popperwell ruled that it was indeed unlawful. In
anticipation Labour General Secretary Jennie Formby had issued a third
suspension on a flimsy pretext but this was enough to carry the day and
Williamson remained suspended.
Formby was appointed
General Secretary in the wake of Iain McNicoll’s resignation. She was a
supporter of Corbyn yet she had engineered a situation where the demands of the
Right for Williamson’s head were met. Not for nothing does Williamson label her
‘Judas Jennie’ though perhaps this is unfair. Judas was paid
30 pieces of silver whereas Jennie betrayed Williamson for nothing!
After the high hopes
of September 2015 and his success in defeating the challenge of Owen Smith MP
in 2016 Corbyn, instead of fighting Labour’s pro-capitalist MPs had succumbed
to them. As Williamson said of LOTO ‘they
were one-trick ponies, whose only strategy was to appease and capitulate to
hostile forces.’
Did this appeasement
of the JLM achieve anything? Did Formby not understand that when she boasted of
the expulsion of hundreds of Labour Party members for ‘anti-Semitism’ that all
she was doing was confirming the Right’s false anti-Semitism narrative?
Labour’s Leaked Report
(p.306) sums up the policy that Corbyn and his advisors had adopted of
appeasing the Zionist lobby:
Jeremy Corbyn
himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular
antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on
high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker
and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish
stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between
the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.
Well we were all
expelled or forced out of the party. Was trust rebuilt? Of course not. It
simply whetted the appetite of Corbyn’s accusers who went on to demand more and
more heads until there was no one left to expel but Corbyn himself.
Not content with
preventing Williamson stand at the 2019 election, Corbyn and Formby introduced
‘fast track’ expulsions for the most ‘egregious’ of cases, which were
subsequently used against hundreds of people including Corbyn himself.
Corbyn, who in a different era had been Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt, opposed the
very things he had always fought for such as Open Selection of MPs at the 2018
conference. In doing so he sealed his own fate.
Possibly the main
fault of Williamson’s book is his tendency to seek revenge against detractors
like Edward Isaacs of Bristol University when they are simply unimportant.
Williamson also does not really deal with whether what happened is inevitable
in a reformist social democratic party which seeks to manage capitalism rather
than change it.
However this book will
be ignored by the Left at its peril.It
is not about personalities or the weakness of Corbyn and Formby but about
socialist strategy and whether Labour is doomed to remain a
pro-capitalist party.
At the end of November All Members Meetings of Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhuntt voted to merge into a single organisation.
LIEN members voted by 4-1 and Labour Against the
Witchhunt members voted, despite vociferous opposition from Labour Party
Marxism/CommunistParty of Great Britain
members 47-27 to do likewise.
Ian Hodson, Guest Speaker and President of the Bakers Union
The founding meeting of the new organisation was to
have been on December 17. Unfortunately too many people tried to get in! Our
Zoom facility only catered for 100. We have ensured that this time around up to
500 people will be accommodated so, just to make sure you get in, please sign
in early!
Name
The Steering Committee has proposed that the name of
the new organisation should be Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN). There
are however 7 other proposals and you can find them all here
The Witchhunt
It is or should be obvious that it is impossible
to fight against the witchhunt inside the Labour Party. The
reason is very simple. As Ken Loach put it ‘democracy
is dead inside the Labour Party.’ If you put your head above the parapet it
is chopped off by some anonymous bureaucrat. An insidious culture of informing
has been cultivated that is modelled on the Stasi and Gestapo.
Anonymous nerds, incapable of constructing a single coherent
sentence or having an original thought don't have to face the task of explaining
their reactionary politics. All they have to do is send an emailto Labour’s Disputes Team fingering someone
and the suspension letter will go out the next day.
You might not thing that Starmer and his clones have
a sense of humour but you would be wrong. Virtually every candidate for
suspension/expulsion accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ was also accused of ‘undermining
Labour’s campaign against racism.’ You may indeed wonder what this fight
consists of given the number of Jewish and Black/Muslim members expelled.
However in the Orwellian world of Starmer and Evans fulsome support for Israeli
Apartheid is compatible with fighting racism!
Sonali at the Labour Grassroots meeting on January 2nd
Momentum, CLPD and the Socialist Campaign Group have been
cowed into silence
If anyone has any doubts about the fear and
cowardice of what’s left of the Left in the Labour Party about fighting Starmer and
the Witchhunt then all you need to do is to watch Sonali Bhattacharyya, co-Chair of Momentum. Sonali who appeared on Labour
Grassroots on 2nd January. Sonali reacted with a mixture of arrogance and
affront to peoples' criticism.
Crispin got off to a bad start when he asked Sonali
about Momentum’s strategy to fight what is happening in the Labour Party and to
make it more attractive. So badly did she take the criticism that she has told
Crispin Flint, the genial compare of the show, that she will have nothing to do
with him or Labour Grassroots ever again.
Sonali Bhattacharyya
When asked why Momentum has failed to campaign
against the witchhunt or support expelled members, which Jackie Walker
challenged her on, she simply refused to answer parroting the statement that
Momentum has supported hundreds of members legally. Even if this is true, and
it is open to doubt since no one will admit to having been helped, this is insufficient.
Legal help on an individual basis is not the same as
campaigning to end the expulsions, the witchhunt and Starmer himself. Momentum
have failed to make it clear that Starmer, Evans and his neo-Blairite strategy is the
enemy. They have been cowed into silence. Nearly 2 years ago Sonali and Forward
Momentum ousted Lansman’s cronies in the elections. Since then they have
maintained a Trappist Silence. They have neither been seen, heard or said
anything of note.
Labour Against the Witchhunt
I was the only 1 of 6 members of the LAW Steering
Committee to support the merger. Subsequently 4 of them penned a statement Why we resigned.
To his credit Steve Price, although part of the majority that opposed the merger refused to sign that statement. Steve is now standing for the new Committee. I hope that he is elected. Those
who decided not merely to throw their toys out of the pram but to junk the pram
altogether justified their decision by writing:
We cannot
support the view that the struggle against the Labour witch-hunt is over, or
that “LAW has outlived its usefulness”, as Tony Greenstein, the proposer of the
motion to merge, put it.
The problem is I never said anything of the sort! What I did say was that LAW had outlived its
usefulness, but they are not one and the same thing. The fight against Labour’s
witchhunt will be carried out largely outside
the Labour Party and in the unions. Organising within the Labour Party is not
possible and that is why nearly 2/3 of LAW members supported my motion.
There has been a considerable debate in the pages of
Weekly Worker despite their annoying habit of using headlines and subheadlines,
not to describe my articles but to attack them! Innovative journalism. See at
the bottom for details of the various articles and statements.
The Agenda
The meeting will be
opened by Ian Hodson, the expelled
President of the Bakers' Union. In addition to adopting a new name we will be electing
a new Steering Committee. The joint Steering Committee of LAW/LIEN is proposing
that the Committee should be 10 strong. There will be 17 candidates for the
positions.
To participate in the
meeting, you have to be a paid-up member of either group. To join, you can
sign up via this link: https://membermojo.co.uk/lien.
We intend to build and network shadow socialist CLPs as part of our local campaigning work.
Agenda
RECONVENED FIRST ALL MEMBERS’ MEETING OF LAW WITH LIEN
14th January 2022
By ZOOM
1
18:00
Meeting
begins/final entry checks
2
18:05
Welcome from Chair of Meeting (Esther)
3
18:10
Speaker
to be confirmed
4
18:20
Debate to inform formulation of Aims and
Priorities
Aims and priorities
of the consolidated organisation here(Norman to introduce)
Member discussion
(contributions no more than 3 minutes)
Draft Priorities to inform debate and based on interim
discussion with members and joint steering committee
Further
proposed names to be included in poll- to be returned to SC by cop 12th Jan.
Updated list here
Proposers
to have one minute to speak.
Members
to vote for their preferred name (1 vote)
6
19:30
Election of Steering Committee. Nomination
statements here. Data protection role to be assigned by
the new steering committee. Each nominee is allocated 1 minute to speak. Zoom
poll.
7
19:50
Next Steps
8
20:00
Meeting Close
Proposed standing Orders
Voting
1.. Please
click ‘Raise Hand’ if you want to speak (either in ‘Participants’ on the right
hand side or ‘Reactions’ on the bottom of your screen). Alternatively write ‘I
want to speak’ in the Chat.
3. For items
4, 5 and 6, we intend to use ZOOM polls. If you want to vote, we recommend that
you have access to a device of your own. If this is not possible (and you are
sharing a device), we will count manually raised hands.
Points of Order
1. Attendees
are urged to raise points of order only when necessary and reasonable.
Attendees can raise points of order regarding conduct or procedures by pressing
the blue thumbs down button (under
‘More’ at the bottom of the ‘Participants’ panel). Alternatively, describe your
point of order in the Chat window.
2. The Chair’s
ruling on any point arising from the rules or standing orders is final unless
challenged by not less than two members; such a challenge shall be put to the
meeting and be carried with a simple majority of those voting at the meeting.
Emergency motions
1. Emergency
motions may be accepted at the discretion of the chair (decisions on admitting
emergency motions can be overturned by a simple majority of conference).
2. We will
accept new amendments to emergency motions only. Please write them down and
present them in the ‘Chat’ window, with a clear indication of where it should
go.
