More deselections. Where will it all end?
JVL Introduction
Within days of senior lawyer Martin Forde KC going public with his unease about a hierarchy of racisms within the Labour Party, news has emerged of the deselection of 19 councillors in Leicester, 15 of them from Black, Muslim and other minority ethnic backgrounds.
The Guardian’s Midlands correspondent Jessica Murray reported that a panel from the National Executive Committee stepped in to block about 40 percent of the ethnically diverse city’s Labour councillors from standing in the local elections in May.
Unsurprisingly, a number have reacted to the undemocratic intervention by deciding to defect to other parties or stand as independents. One told Leicester Live that Labour both locally and nationally is “crushing dissent”.
Another told the Guardian: “I’ve had people say to me: if your party cannot take care of its own members, how the hell is it going to take care of the city, or the country when it gets in government? And I think that’s a legitimate question to ask.”
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Thu 23 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Labour tells 19 Leicester councillors they cannot stand in May election
Some intend to defect or stand as independents after ‘undemocratic’ deselection of mostly BAME councillors.
Loading article text…
There’s a more detailed report in the Leicester Mercury (typically, the Guardian doesn’t tell us what’s behind this mass culling):
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/red-mist-leicester-19-sitting-8270715
Six Labour councillors have left the Party in recent weeks:
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/leicester-councillor-quits-labour-saying-8269438
The only thing that is likely to put a stop to this sort of thing will be considerations of cost. And that means that people should be prepared to stand as independents or to consider joining other political parties (hopefully not the Conservative Party).
People should seriously consider refusing to vote for imposed candidates.
It’s not necessarily the case that all these councillors are on the left as we’ve seen some right-wing Labour councillors deselected or resigning elsewhere and even moving to the Tories. Admittedly not many but there are some so more details needed in these stories.
I’ve come across Cllr Kitterick as a highly capable defender of Leicester’s healthcare services.
At the time, the University Hospitals Trust was competing against increasing numbers of competitors for a government grant that shrank markedly in the interval and required unrealistically optimistic financial assumptions plus closures of desperately needed existing NHS services and hospital beds.
Cllr Kitterick proved himself well-informed, sensible, good with the general public and with the Board of NHS representatives, media savvy … in other words, everything you’d hope an elected councillor to be. I’m staggered Labour is SILLY enough to deselect him. The Greens will think themselves lucky to have him on their side.
While I don’t know the other councillors, Kitterick’s deselection suggests it’s highly likely their deselection is equally wrong.
Leicester is a Labour city with a long, proud history of radicalism, multiculturalism, localism and sturdy independence. It’s quite possible Leicester will prefer to hang on to its existing councillors even if they become “Independents”. “Greens” or radical “LibDems” than accept unknowns with doubtful politics who’ve been foisted on the city from outside.
I’m in Leicester South and Patrick Kitterick is not only a very longstanding member of the Party, he is chair of the Leicester South CLP. Soon after Corbyn’s suspension, it became clear Kitterick was at loggerheads with regional office. Also at that time the secretary of Leicester South, Sue Strange, resigned her position over the issue. Meanwhile, the three right-wing Starmer-supporting councillors in my own ward, Knighton, are NOT purged. I won’t be voting for any of them.
Nothing makes it clearer than this that the Labour Party is in meltdown. It is losing the stability, the belief in a single unifying principle, required of any political party that lays claim to be fit for government. Those who are driving this disintegration have come by their own, somewhat contradictory, principles which have little or nothing to do with the principles on which the party was founded. They are dangerous, the more so because in the battle between traditional principle and modern ambition they are winning. We might have hoped that as the politics of the world, including those of the UK, are swinging disastrously to the right, our most powerful left-wing party would have done everything in its power to try and reverse that swing. But no; instead, it has found itself subverted by opportunists and charlatans who believe that the only way to get political power is to follow the trend. The cry seems to be, it’s working for all those other power-grabbers, why not for us? I don’t think the party will survive much longer as a viable party if something extraordinary isn’t done to remove these people with the same degree of force they used to remove Corbyn and are still using to remove those whom they dislike. Without a genuine, well-thought-out and well-presented alternative to the Conservatism which has disgraced this country for generations and is ruining it now, we will continue to live with the worsening chaos which the Tories have created for us. As things are, there is no such alternative. Starmer and his apparatchiks have much to answer for; we can only hope that they will be held to account before it is too late and this country’s politics are reduced to the right versus not-quite-as-right politics that have damaged the claims that they are democratic of many other countries, countries such as Israel and the USA. We really don’t want what they’ve got right now, but if the current Labour Party has its way we won’t have a choice.
Peter Soulsby has been elected Labour Mayor for 12 years. The City Council has been solidly Labour since 2007. The three Parliamentary Constituencies are all Labour. I grew up there when the racists and fascists were on the rise in the early 70s. What is happening is clearly politically motivated. There can be no other explanation. This move will potentially lead to Labour losing its position as the main party on the City Council, leaving a right-wing authoritarian rump. Leicester is a multi-cultural city, with a proud history of struggle and Labour Movement activism: going back to the Suffragettes. The Jarrow Crusade stopped there on their way to London and there has always been a strong anti-racist movement. The right faction is deliberately dismantling the Party – which only serves the interest of the status quo and the establishment. We saw this coming. I dont know what the answer is but to keep fighting.
The HQ deselected Leicester councillors have all worked with each other for years and now have a shared outrage at what’s been done to them and to local democracy. They’ve every prospect of staying together as a tightly-knit group on the City Council and in informal political groupings locally for years to come.
They’ve enough popular support (I think) for the local funding and activists to switch from the HQ incomers labelled as “Labour” to the 19 who are now forced to stand as Independents and Greens.
Assuming the incomers labelled “Labour” fail to attract local finance and local support and that they lose the sets they competed for to the previous holders, then HQ will be seen to be behaving stupidly and ineffectively as well as unethically. Creating the circumstances when a historically Labour city suddenly switches its political allegiances would be very embarrassing for Starmer and Evans. It’d attract a lot of media attention, frighteningly close to the run-up to the General Election.
So I was right – at least two of this lot have joined the Tories.
Leicester: Deselected Labour councillors defect to Conservatives
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-65070967
I’m seriously hoping that Labour have a terrible Local Elections, it might be the catalyst to the downfall of Starmer. For the record, if Jeremy stands as an Independent at the next GE, I along with many others will be doing everything we can to go to London, where we will be out campaigning for him and with St Pancras and Holborn only a walk away from Islington North, we can enjoy ourselves campaigning against Starmer.