Labour must heed the Forde report’s advice to end infighting
JVL Introduction
Three letters on the Forde Report in the Guardian are reproduced below.
Tony Booth & Miriam David, both Professors of education and JVL activists, stress how it offers the Labour party a chance to move beyond factionalism over antisemitism. Will it take it up?
Culture is frequently identified as a root cause of organisational failure, says Mike Sheaff and Forde suggests possible steps to secure such change at all levels of the Party.
Finally Mark Blake simply points out how under Starmer “Labour does not now feel like a safe space for somebody with my socialist politics…”
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Mon 25 Jul 2022. Read the original here.
Labour must heed the Forde report’s advice to end infighting
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It seems to me that the lessons of the last 6/7 years in Labour are that if you fail to utterly crush your enemies when you have the chance, you will live to regret it – but not for long, because they will do away with you.
Fabian sentiment will not be enough to win in the front line of the class struggle that current runs right through the Labour Party.
Considering it took nearly 2 years, it seems in most parts to be making excuses for those who were responsible for the things the report highlights. This is a report into a party whose staff had blatantly broken the rules and who went over the Leader’s head to do so.
First, the question of money which, allegedly went to safe seats, rather than marginal but winnable ones. What investigation has there been into those staff alleged to have done this? It’s usually the treasurer’s job to release funds in any type of organisation that represents its members after an agreement with the committee as to what the money is being used for.
I have been on committees myself, granted where the membership is a lot smaller but who still pay their membership fees on a regular basis; if we had found out that money had been used without the committee’s approval and a full record of how it was used, we would call a meeting to look into that and, if this could not be satisfactorily explained and accounted, the police would be called, especially if some money was missing, as with c. £45,000 in this case. So why no investigation?
Now that Jeremy Corbyn has been vindicated by the report, why hasn’t the Whip been reinstated and am apology made to him? And the members unjustly expelled, surely they should be reinstated with a full apology. Why has the Leader allowed the weaponisation of something as serious as antisemitism and its use against good long serving members of the labour party who, in some cases, died before knowing what they had supposed to have done to be expelled. An apology to these members families should be made without delay
And the racial abuse made about a number of members including Diana Abbott, was truly disgusting.
I feel very strongly about the points I have made and I may be wrong regarding some of the rules of the labour party and I apologise if I am but these people who did this to those members and the previous leader Jeremy Corbyn should be held to account for the hurt caused
I shake my head in bewilderment at this call for an end to ‘factionalism’ and for ‘ “Behavioural change” and ‘a Party-wide consultation to identify shared values and the seeds of a healthy culture.”
This is to fail to see the wood for the trees. When Corbyn was elected leader the New Labour Right fought a bitter battle to regain their control of the Party. ‘Antisemitism’ was their chosen method of attack.
What was needed was not a futile attempt to find ‘shared values’ but a determined fight back. Unfortunately Corbyn and his advisors believed that common ground could be sought with his advisors and the method chosen was to appease his critics and detractors.
The results were all too obvious as he lost the initiative gained at the 2017 General Election.
Can Professor David and Booth not see that there is no common ground between those who demonised asylum seekers who believe in the continued privatisation of the NHS and oppose public ownership of rail and the utilities and those who have a socialist agenda?
There is no common ground between racists and anti-racists, between socialists and supporters of capitalism just as there is no common ground between supporters of Israeli apartheid and supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists.
The Right is well aware of this which is why they are doing their level best to purge the Labour Party of socialists and anyone not signed up to neo-liberal politics. Isn’t it time that others on the left, including the JVL, also saw that you can’t appease or tame a wild animal that is trying to kill you? It is kill or be killed.
What is being proposed is simply the traditional approach of the Labour Left which is to compromise its politics and principles in the name of electoral unity. That road is a dead end.
I see strong similarities between the division
in the Labour Party and the division(s) in Northern
Ireland between Unionist and Nationalist. In the
latter case the former ruled the region and the
latter were discriminated against from the moment
it was formed in 1921. The differences are partly due
to differences in the Christian Church – but racism
plays a part too.
The MSM and the current Labour Party treat
the Jewish Community as a single entity with
one opinion – that of LFI and JLM where other
opinions are ignored, no-platformed or at worst
deemed antisemitic – hence the harassment of
the JVL Committee and the purge of Jews from
the LP by Labour HQ.
Of course all communities have divisions but that
should not be the business of those outside-
the way the Nationalists were treated was contrary
to their Human Rights and similarly in the case of
the Jewish Community. For gentiles to discriminate
against a section of the Jewish Community is
anti-semitic – just about every definition of racism
points to this.
There is a horrible irony (as I see it) in this – a group
from the Irish Constabulary who had fought to pacify
Ireland during the War of Independence became
well known for brutality .. and only served as recruitment
for IRA.
After partition of Ireland in 1921 this group from the
RUC were sent as a gendarmerie unit of the Palestinian police to pacify Palestine.