Forde Inquiry exposes Labour’s biggest problem: Keir Starmer
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
A fine overview and critique of the Forde report from Jonathan Cook.
It highlights that the Report
- Is premised on the totally implausible assumption that Corbyn and his office wielded as much factional power as the combined might of Labour HQ and the parliamentary party
- concedes that antisemitism was used for factional advantage by the party’s right to damage the left but then then seems to deny it as a defence for those who were targeted maliciously
- ignores the ongoing factional reality
If Forde’s framework were correct we would have expected the civil war to peter out on Corbyn’s departure. We all know the reality is quite other and Cooke describes this even-handedness approach as “a continuation of factionalism by other means”.
This article was originally published by Janathan Cook's blog on Thu 21 Jul 2022. Read the original here.
Forde Inquiry exposes Labour’s biggest problem: Keir Starmer
‘Factionalism’ is identified as an electoral liability by Labour’s new report. But it has only intensified since Jeremy Corbyn’s exit
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This is a fine article about the Forde Report, its confirmation of bad things being done by the party establishment and the report’s washing-over of it.
However, many facts are now out. I am a long time Labour Party member. Like most, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn. I will always love Jeremy, our best and truest Leader. Through the foul undermining to now, I have seen the Labour Party establishment as corrupt, dishonest, hypocritical, arrogant and worse than useless. It is exemplified in Keir Starmer, who I admit to loathing.
Jonathon Cook so rightly points out that the sabotage of Corbyn`s electoral chances in the 2017 election was not an attack on Corbyn it was a subversion of the whole Labour membership. Corbyn was our choice and as Cook says the whole concept of democracy was destroyed by a handful of plotters who took the law into their own hands.
Forde does not think that the 2017 election was lost to Labour because of the manipulation of these criminals but had it not been for their obscene efforts aided by our “media” how many people might not have died of covid how many people might have afforded gas, how many people might not have been afraid to grow old when the Tories dismantle the health service.
How many possibilities for a country that works for the all the people have they destroyed. Their guilt is black.
When the British public is offered the choice between Starmer or the Tory leadership as a form of governance it is deeply embarrassing, in my eighty years this is our worst political moment.
The Forde Report also lays bare the incredibly poor, very passive, wholly unprofessional MANAGEMENT by the HQ senior staff of the Labour organisation from (at least) the Blair / Brown days up until Jenny Formby took over. The lack of rigour about basic procedures (recruitment; induction; staff supervision and mentoring; general administration; and discipline and grievance handling) would have been typical back in the 1950s – but Forde was reporting on Labour during the period 2015 – 2019. The laxness of Labour’s management controls made it much easier for mavericks to run riot.
If Mr Forde is so short sighted as to remotely subscribe to the fiction of an antisemitism “problem”in the Labour party I might ask him to use the logic a lawyer should be trained in and wonder if he can explain how either the Labour party or Jeremy Corbyn so strangely only became “antisemitic” at about 2015. The Labour party was 115 years Jeremy was about 65 (?) what took SO LONG to “discover” that both these elders were “antisemitic”
Not only is it a lie, it is a clumsy ludicrous lie, a child could see through it!
But, as usual, the adult population just believe.
What I find missing from Jonathan Cook’s piece (and others which I overwhelmingly agree with) is the failure to see that throughout this period there was risk that the Right would seek to split the Party. For example, Tom Watson’s invitation to members to send complaints to him signaled a willingness to create an alternative pole of authority within the Party membership, the PLP having already announced its divorce.
This implicit threat to split the Party was surely behind the failure to expel Margaret Hodge and deal aggressively with the traitors at headquarters.
Well said John Noble. As a young Labour Party member myself 60 years ago, I can well vouch for the truths in Jonathan Cook’s blog concerning the factional political nature of the right-wing bureaucracy, the majority careerist MP’s in Westminster and the Starmer regime.
No doubt it came as a shock for those multiple thousands of new members who were attracted to the beacon of hope raised by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for Party leader to discover the amount of venal hostility from day one of Corbyn’s election from those on Corbyn’s side of the aisle. As the Forde report indicates that hostility was replicated in the highest ranks at Party HQ, but to those of us who had long years of experience this came as no shock. Indeed the location of Party HQ might be different to Transport House and the incumbents in residence changed from Morgan Phillips & Bessie Braddock to the present right-wing, careerist bureaucrats, but their witch-hunting and subservience in pursuit of being “members of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition” and preparedness to politically knife in the back those who threaten their cosy relationship with the establishment hasn’t.
In my 80th year I too feel ashamed of the present leadership and the state of the Labour Party. The trouble is that neither Keir Starmer nor Martin Forde know the history nor the purpose of the Labour Party. It’s true that the Party has stumbled along for most of its existence but its present vindictive and visionless state is the worst I have ever seen.
‘Wilful subversion of the democratic process’
How is that not illegal with gaol time and unlimited fines
We now live in a One Party State, where is the opposition in politics, press or courts
The Unions are finding their voice with the support of the public, can they reclaim their representatives on earth the Labour Party
Mick Lynch could teach Starmer a thing or two, about connecting with people and understanding wealth distribution properly.
Starmer is a sell out and blatantly untrustworthy. Backed and advised by some very dodgy people. I would still have to vote for him as a better option to a Tory, but it’s oh so so close. I wouldn’t have the same heart to campaign for him as I did for Corbyn. Ban corporate lobbying we have a parliament full of bribe taking MP’s. They are not interested in their citizens needs or wants. Just their own. (with a few exceptions of course).
At the time of the capitulation of the Labour Party to the ‘whistle blowers’ in the John Ware Panorama episode, a member of the NEC told Skwawkbox: “This has cost the party a six-figure sum in a case our lawyers said we’d win – and how can anyone think the Forde Inquiry isn’t fatally compromised when we’ve ‘unreservedly’ withdrawn any suggestion of wrongdoing against some of the people mentioned in the report it’s supposed to be investigating?”
How true, a gift to Forde to use the standard BBC response of ‘bothsidesism’ in matters such as these.