Batley and Spen Is Not a Victory for Keir Starmer
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
We’re delighted that Labour held Batley & Spen even if only by the skin of its teeth.
Many reactions followed in the immediate aftermath and we repost that by Tribune’s editor Ronan Burtenshaw as one of the clearest and most helpful in identifying “plenty of reasons to be worried about the result”.
Others have weighed in too, with lots of interesting thoughts: readers might like to follow up with Mark Perryman’s Facebook post, or Taj Ali article in The New Arab and Daniel Finn‘s in Jacobin, on how Labour is losing the Muslim vote.
This article was originally published by Tribune on Fri 2 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
Batley and Spen Is Not a Victory for Keir Starmer
Labour’s razor-thin victory in Batley and Spen owes to Kim Leadbeater’s popular local candidacy – not to a party leadership that continues to alienate its own core voters.
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If Corbyn was “toxic on the doorstep”, what does that make Starmer?
The rightwing Labour leadership’s attempt to characterize the Left as a peripheral “them” and not “us” is insidious and antidemocratic.
I know plenty of ‘Corbynites’ who put their time in to campaign for Kim, the Left are not the problem and never have been.
Starmer`s position as leader is like a ship anchored in shifting-sand. Dont let us make the mistake of visualising reactionary forces within and without the party as a homogenous whole. We will defeat them and restore democracy in the Party.
I had a premonition that Labour was going to do badly in the Batley & Spen by-election because our Party is being hollowed-out from within.
Labour was spared a deserved defeat, to a dismal near miss, actually, by George Galloway, who took the bile which the establishment media usually dumps all over Labour, who also took a lot of the votes of local Muslims who are dismayed with the underhand Zionist purge to do down the oppressed Palestinians, votes which would otherwise have been protest votes for the benefit of the Conservative candidate, and also by the late breaking of the Matt Hancock scandal, which the Conservative Party had been desperately trying to delay until after this by-election, which disenthused many Conservative voters, to Labour’s relief. .
A naval captain who sets a course to a near miss is court-martialed.