“Another One Bites The Dust”
JVL Introduction
The Labour Party continues to expel longstanding and experienced members.
Anne Belworthy from Herne Bay in Kent has been thrown out – after 65 years of active membership.
Inspired by Hugh Gaitskell she joined the Party in 1956, becoming a social secretary running bazaars and raising funds, a branch secretary, a trade-union activist, secretary and joint convenor, CLP secretary and chair, conference delegate, a Labour-nominated local magistrate, anti-apartheid activist and chair of the local pensioners’ forum.
She was an executive member of North Thanet CLP when she received her “Christmas Present from Labour” – expulsion.
Her crime, like many others, was association with what was at the time a perfectly legitimate organisation (Labour In Exile Network), but subsequently proscribed.
We publish this story as yet another example of Labour’s gadarene rush to purge its socialist base, wantonly shredding support, skills, experience, commitment and dedication.
Here Anne outlines her history and her treatment.
This article was originally published by Whitstable Views on Fri 24 Dec 2021. Read the original here.
MY CHRISTMAS PRESENT FROM LABOUR
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Neither Democratic or fair. You must be very hurt indeed.The Party as it is currently formed does not want or need left wing members. Under Blair, the Party thought most members were a nuisance if they wanted to contribute anything on policy. They just want money from members.
Jesus wept! – like I care anymore – but seriously, chucking out people who have been members since 1956!!!??? They are completely out to lunch, and several sandwiches short of a picnic
Dear Anne, I am so sorry to read your story – as I am of all those members who for decades have worked their socks off for the Labour Party, and are now being kicked out by ‘leaders’ and managers who have no wish to promote and protect socialism, human rights and democracy. Shame.
Ridiculous state of affairs!
Anne is one of those stalwart members who have kept our Party going through all the various vicissitudes and in a difficult area. She has never been a member of the small Trot groups or any group standing candidates against Labour. I have said this before but we should be organising a Merit Award for her, not a campaign to save her party membership
Not democratic or fair but the good news is they have not got around to worse atrocities, yet. Starmer must be stopped.
This is just so sad.
It is a sad story of a sick Labour Party run by evil zombies, twisters and liars.
Anne is one of the best of a Labour Party ideal now going down in shame.
“Is this democratic or fair?”
NO! NO! NO!
I am sorry you have been treated so appallingly, Anne.
You deserve a Special Award for your services to the LP not expulsion.
In solidarity and wishing you all the very best.
Dear Anne, Just want to send you support and sympathy but also to say how fascinating it was to read your story within the Labour Party. You can be proud of what you have achieved and done. The present gang in charge of the LP are, as someone above says, quite mad. I also was suspended temporarily here in Nottingham. It all came to nothing. I diligently answered all their stupid questions and got NO REPLIES . Thank you for your article.
What in the world is happening? This is just bizarre. You were denounced and then expelled for “liking” a post from a group that was subsequently proscribed? Retrospective legislation is against Natural Justice. has Keir Starmer conveniently forgotten one of the basic tenets of English Law? Either that or he’s been abducted by aliens and been replaced by an avatar. I’m not sad; I’m absolutely furious. Whose turn next? Probably mine.
We need to get a book published with expanded biographical stories of expelled members like Anne. It would make for compelling reading. We need to publicly identify the lost souls who are worming their lives away in the bowels of Party H.Q. relishing the next victim that they can toss into the widlerness. People like this are genuinely ill – in a moral sense – no compassion, no understanding, no care, no sense of history and tradition. This is all leading in one direction – towards a coalition deal with the Lib. Dems. Kicking out socialists is a sort of clearing the way for sordid little local deals where Labour is forced to back local Lib. Dems in exchange for them standing aside for centrally selected ‘centrists’ who stand for the leader STARMER and very little else.
Anne, you are an inspiration.
Shocking. Yet another instance of the extreme right in Labour who are hell-bent on driving the Labour Party out of existence.
The cruelty of this really shocks me. As does the signal it sends to the members
‘You’re all disposable on a whim All your efforts, your loyalty, your hard work… mean nothing to us’.
Anne’s been in the party since before Starmer was born and he shows her no respect. Shameful.
He and Evans are monsters
Anne’s account is part of the tragic story that is today’s Labour Party under Starmer and his thought-police.
What has happened to Anne and so many other good comrades is neither democratic nor fair.
It is part of the political spite that now poisons our party.
We must find a way of getting these stories of betrayal to ordinary citizens.
Some in our de-politicised society may not be interested.
However, I have faith that there are many who seek truth and justice in the world, and that they will be outraged, as I am, to learn what is taking place in the Labour Party.
An apocryphal tale, to start with.
Harold Wilson, giving his Leader’s Speech, at Conference(Blackpool?), is heckled, from The Floor. The Stewards(security, in today’s terms) moved in to ‘deal’ with the heckler.
Wilson stopped, mid-speech, and said,
‘Leave that man alone! In this country, we have Free Speech. He is entitled to his opinion, and to his point of view!’
The Stewards retreated, the heckler was silent, and Wilson continued with his Speech.
Moving on to Conference 2005. We all know about the disgraceful treatment of Walter Wolfgang.
Manhandled out of the auditorium while a shifty-eyed, Jack Straw continued with his speech, saying nothing about what was happening to an 80-year-old, long time Labour Party Member and supporter.
Of course, fulsome apologies were offered the following day, but too late. The incident has entered Labour folklore, and will remain part of Labour’s folklore, for a long time to come.
Moving on from those two incidents, we arrive at Conference 2021.
Just, before the ‘Leader’s Speech’, uniformed police officers appear and position themselves in the aisles, throughout the auditorium. I was dumbfounded – speechless – as I watched on YouTube. Whose ‘bright’ idea was that?
Someone who does not have the first idea what democracy, in the Democratic Socialist Labour Party, means.
You are in stellar company, Anne. Please, don’t be down-hearted about your expulsion. Saddened – yes! Saddened for the people who have done this to you. They don’t know it, yet, but they are the losers.
Their reputations shredded. Their intellect called into question – integrity in tatters. They have no idea.
I am starting to think that there is some collective madness that has descended on Starmer and the LGU. It appears that if you are truly socialist you are not wanted in this iteration of the Labour Party. I know of several long standing party members who have been treated like this. The LGU is bringing the Labour party into disrepute.
How does a member of such value and worth to a “comradely”organisation get treated with such callous contempt, not just in the expulsion itself but the manner of it- How does it serve the party? Unless I’m being too precious or naive, I can’t understand true Labourites behaving like this.
When the whole anti semitism thing blew up there were teams of volunteers trawling through social media posts. We know this from Jo Glasman’s YouTube tribute to them. An NEC member local to me tells me she doesn’t believe the party machine is doing this now because it lacks the money and the manpower. So that leaves those kinds of volunteers with the motivation to spend their time searching through thousands of posts and threads, such as in Glasman’s army of keyboard warriors in the endeavour to “slaughter” Jeremy.
But now, with Jeremy exiled on the back benches, who gains from this “witch-hunt”? Anne says all she knows is someone has anonymously complained about her. The thread running through all this is support for Palestinian rights. I can’t think other than that it is unconditional supporters of Israel, who claim, like Luke Akehurst, that Palestinian solidarity through BDS is a “prelude to Israel’s destruction”, who are driving this. Protecting Israel from any kind of censure appears to outweigh any sentiment of Labour comradeliness or party service that might stay the hand when it comes to hounding an octogenarian Labour stalwart.
Anne, why not send your testament to the Guardian, the i, Metro, any and all outlets with a wider readership. The public ought to know your story.
To John Noble above – I honestly can’t see how it can get any worse! Anne is the latest of a long line of fine honourable people who have spent countless hours of their long lives working for the Labour Party, doing nothing but good, and now to be treated like this. Utterly, utterly shameful and despicable.
Meanwhile, we have David Lammy in a stomach churning article in The Guardian this morning, to paraphrase – “If I knew then what I know now I would not have nominated Jeremy Corbyn”. Well Mr Lammy, if I knew then what I know now I would have never given you the credence I initially did, and would have resigned the day Starmer became Leader instead of waiting six months.
The Labour Party is rotten to the core. Each and every person who is proscribed is further evidence of this. Why spend time and energy to stay in an organisation which is virulently anti-socialist? Maybe you will be allowed a niche but your influence will be minimal. As for elections, if/when you are offered a choice of three or four anti-socialist candidates the suggestion is that you choose the least anti-socialist! It’s a nonsense.
My membership of the Labour Party, similar to that of Anne Belworthy, goes back to the days of Hugh Gaitskell when, following the example of both parents who’d become Labour councillors, I was an early member of the Young Socialists.
Initially I too was warned off by Party higher-ups not to be influenced by the so-called “extremist”, left-wing pamphleteers & newspaper sellers which were offered outside Party functions. This line was in accord with all the “Red Scare” tactics pushed out by the Tory press barons and loyally parroted by the Labour Party right-wing establishment. Little did I know that a few years later I would find myself questioning that all I’d been brainwashed into believing was a pack of lies perpetrated by people who had their own agenda of monetary, self-advancement, aided by conning working class voters that they were acting in their best interests.
By the early 1960’s the immediate post-war boom in Britain had hit the buffers when the economy started to feel the heat from the rebuilt economies of Germany & Japan and the Tories enacted measures to make the working class pay for the growing economic crisis and that the cosy, post war, temporary truce between labour and big business was coming to an end. It came as a shock when the first job I’d had since since leaving school was under threat by government cuts as a result of the economic downturn. But did our Labour Party leaders take up the fight? Oh sure, a load of fine speeches and hot air from our Westminster wind-bag representatives but action to organise against Harold MacMillan’s government, which was already rocked by the revelations of the Profumo Scandal and the lifestyles of the aristocratic rich and famous? Not on your life! Epitomised by our local Labour MP who would make no commitment to support the march against growing unemployment and lobby of parliament in March 1963 by the North West trades councils whatsoever. Suffice to say that this careerist, who held an important post in Labour’s shadow cabinet, would later go on to accept a life peerage and support the “Gang of Four” in their split from Labour and the formation of the SDP culminating in their alliance with the washed-out Liberal Party.
The Labour Party is today in politically similar hands, namely careerist, self-seekers, like the odious John Mann, who will stop at nothing to prevent their exposure as being nothing more and nothing less than a 5th column, ideological agents of the Tories within the labour movement.
The opportunity had been there with the revolt in 2015 of Party members and supporters against the dead hand of all the right-wing, bureaucrats and time-servers to reclaim Labour for socialism, but the opportunity was thrown away by a total underestimation of the depth of treachery that these political crooks were prepared to sink to, instead frittering it away in order to cobble together a front bench to play the game of parliamentary “charades” in the name of “broad church unity”.
My political condolences go out to those self-sacrificing Party stalwarts like Anne Belworthy, now being cruelly politically stabbed in the back by these traitors. Let’s hope they learn their lesson that the Labour Party is back in the hands of those who have no interest in forwarding the movement for socialism whatsoever and want it only insofar as it progresses their personal, political careers, ambitions & quest for titles (are you listening Sir Starmer?), not to mention their bank balances.
Hugs to Anne, I’m deeply saddened by the dreadful way she’s been treated and hope all her friends and family are rallying around her.
I too was shocked by the David Lammy nastiness. He is someone whom I’d previously respected. While I think Lammy was probably bullied and manoeuvred into saying what he did (just as Angela Rayner was, months earlier), politicians who cave into that kind of pressure destroy forever their personal reputations for integrity and sense.
(I speak as someone who was once bullied so badly that I had a headache every work day and didn’t dare take any leave for fear of what the bullies would do next. What I never did was tell self-serving lies or attack other innocents. Very many people – with a lot more at stake than Lammy or Rayner – hold on to their sense of ethics, come what may. Why do so many politicians fall below the standards so many of their constituents maintain in their own lives?)
I was, also, expelled for so called antisemitism because of my support for the Palestinians and associated criticism of Israel. I could not be more anti racist and have been so all of my life. I am a supporter of JVL.
Since then, I have watched the Labour Party become less and less representative of people like me for whom social justice is paramount.
I am glad now to be out of this increasingly toxic organisation.
No Anne, it isn’t, but the only satisfaction I believe you can feel in these circumstances is that you’ve joined a group of illustrious and true ‘Labourites’ and that -surely – there will come a time when others within the party will wake up to what’s happening to a once socialist caring political party. For my own part, I found your personal Labour story really impressive. You’ve beaten me in years of membership, recruited in 1970, left in protest when Blair who’d given me so much heart became rather warlike, then rejoined in the Corbyn years, ever hopeful. Thank you for your years of service, not just to our party but to our country; I can hardly imagine what Britain would be like if the Labour party hadn’t been formed. Like you I await the return of the real Labour party and hope we can both rejoice and rejoin. Best wishes. Happier New Year.
The process is an affront to justice and fairness. The behaviour of Starmer and his gang of political thugs in the PLP and Party bureaucracy is an obscenity. Their treatment of a duly elected leader, J Corbyn, is symptomatic of the treatment of all those who don’t subscribe to their subservient, sycophantic and morally corrupt view of Israel. That is the nub of the issue. Any support for Palestinians, or association with any individual or organisation that supports the Palestinian fight against the brutal Israeli Apartheid regime is deemed heresy and is warrant for expulsion. The Labour Party is a neo liberal establishment party and it is indistinguishable from the Tory and LibDem outfits. I would trace the antecedents of this reality to Callaghan, Kinnock and crystallised in Blair. Corbyn is perceived as an aberration – a consequence of neglect and mismanagement on the part of the behind the scenes cabals that really run the Party. In what democratic universe would/could the Evans/Starmer gang be tolerated. The expulsions, retrospective guilt by association, the obscene slur of antisemitism, the implicit classification of Jews as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Jews (itself antisemitic) characterise a Party that is unprincipled, corrupt and little more than an instrument of coercive State control.
It is a badge of honour to be expelled – I am resigning. The spectacle of Lammy apologising for nominating Corbyn and his rationale for the apology is contemptible devoid of integrity and cringeworthy.
I respect your dedication, commitment and tenacity and am saddened that the reward you receive for a lifetime co tribion is to be smeared by the political crooks in the PLP and Party bureaucracy.
I would like to say there is a sea change taking place in our politics but sadly I think that we are witnessing the last desperate acts of politicians who genuinely believe the ends – getting into power, stopping the Tories – justify the means. But they don’t and the cost to the country, as we see in the cost to decent people like Anne, is huge. I am alternately angry and very sad. We are fighting, not fire with fire, but dishonesty and lack of integrity with those same weapons. Shame on Starmer, Raynesr, Lammy and those who shout loudest in their cabal.
How dare these apparatchiks expel Anne Belworthy? She has an impeccable track record of Labour Party activism. What madness is this? Solidarity Anne. So glad to hear that South Thanet activists are sticking together and keeping the Red Flag flying.
Hi Anne. I wish I could to more to help. The way you’ve been treated is disgraceful. It’s a mad world where the racists are being called anti-racists and vice versa. It sounds like you’ve worked hard for the party and been a real asset to them. The to add insult to injury, to hear those complaints and not having a right to reply, or to discover nobody is listening, must feel dreadful. I hope you know, however, that there a great many of us out here that support you. All the best.
Support and solidarity Anne , you are truly an inspiration. Those that have trumped up these nasty, false charges are not fit to tie your shoelaces.
It’s an egregious example of the Labour Party’s witch hunting under Starmer, who appears to be wholly under the control of the Israel lobby in the UK. The question is, how are we going to fight back?
Dear Anne, I am sorry that you have literally been attacked & accused by a kangaroo court of Zionists!
As I see it, Anyone who believes in Labours original motto of supporting the OPPRESSED & not the OPPRESSOR has & will be excluded using the strangest of reasons.
Since Starmer was voted in he opened the flood gates & he welcomed back the knife wielding Right wing Blairites.
Those we once thought were decent became different people before our very eyes. Someone on this site already mentioned David Lammy, I was so happy that I wasn’t alone noticing he’s becomes so different!
Luke Ackhurst was a sneak when Mr Corbyn was elected, McNicoll, Austin & Ackhurst did everything to ruin Mr.Corbyn back then.
Now under Starmer the tables have turned & now its the Jews, Muslims, Socialists who are targetted & accused with lies & false stories.
Corruption is at play, rules are being created that make no sense.
Above all the name of Israel is being protected vigorously & with aggression.
ISRAEL IS an ARPARTHEID STATE & the fact that Starmer & co are defending it, means the rest of us are collateral damage.
So Anne you are now part of the big group of expelled whose integrity remains intact. Stay strong we are with you.
I am absolutely blazing with anger after reading this story. I support you all the way. You and I joined the Labour Party in the same year. I left school in 1956 and became a member of the Young Socialists in Dewsbury. I have pounded the streets and knocked on doors. My faith in the Party never waivered until Starmers’ treachery. I actually voted for him as leader but when he reneged on everything he promised and gave in to the Israeli government lobby I knew it was time to resign. The Party offers the people of this country nothing. A moderate centrist government means maintaining the status quo. Power without purpose is uselesss
I find Ann’s treatment by the faceless powers that be just disgusting.
She deserves our full support and should be restated, and a big thank you for all her hard work.
There is also the matter of the slow or no responses to the members defence. Plus the fact that as members we have no idea of the identity of the accusers, nor of whom we are dealing with at Labour HQ.
Sorry to hear you have been suspended by this despicable leadership of the Labour Party, we need a new leadership that is democratic not a dictatorship! Hoping once we get a change all that have been wrongly suspended or had the whip withdrawn will welcomed back into the Party with welcomed arms . Thanks also for your support during our Miners strike. Yours in Solidarity, Ron.