Starmer’s purge of the left matters beyond the Labour Party
JVL Introduction
Simon Fletcher, one of Keir Starmer’s former advisers, outlines what has been happening to the Left in the Labour Party, Starmer’s desire to distant himself and the Party from left wing members, MPs and ideas and highlights the risks to the wider public of the centralised and narrowly focused approach.
“Labour’s infighting can seem very distant from the interests of the wider public. But the party’s internal culture should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what a Keir Starmer-led government would be like. An ethos of command and control can harden in office to the detriment of legitimately-held differences of opinion about major issues of policy. And narrowing the composition of the next generation of Labour MPs so that many more of them are hand-picked from the centre will tend to cut the parliamentary party off from people, movements and ideas at the sharp end of the multiple crises a Labour government will face.” (Our emphasis)
Even Conservative commentators are noting that Starmer’s main priority seems to be emphasising that he is not Jeremy Corbyn and Penny Mordaunt reminded everyone that he reneged on all the pledges he made when standing to be leader.
And with the Tories in total disarray and Labour determined to no longer be a “broad church”, there are implications for our whole political system. Might this mark the end of the first past the post system which is clearly not operating at all in the interests of the people?
This article was originally published by Byline Times on Tue 18 Oct 2022. Read the original here.
Keir Starmer’s Squeeze of the Left is a Worrying Sign of Things to Come
The Labour Leader is seeking to rebuild the party as an increasingly narrow church, argues his former advisor
With the prospect of a general election looming, in which Labour is now the clear favourite, the party is embarked in an increasingly bitter internal war over its process of selecting candidates.
Last week, 13 members of the Sedgefield Labour Party executive resigned amid accusations of a “stitch-up” to select the constituency’s parliamentary candidate in favour of one hopeful. Rows have also been exploding over blocked candidates in places like Stroud, Wakefield, and Hastings and Rye.
On Saturday, a black left-wing candidate in Harriet Harman’s seat of Camberwell and Peckham, Maurice McLeod, was blocked from the party’s longlist in the constituency. Now, Emma Dent Coad, the former MP for Kensington and Chelsea – and leader of the Labour group on the local council – has been prevented from standing for selection in her former seat.
It may be getting closer to government, but Labour’s never-ending war shows no sign of making way for unity.
Keir Starmer was elected Labour Leader on a promise to end factionalism. Instead, his leadership has been dominated by command and control. A sense of injustice is growing within the party, as machine politics cuts through local concerns.
In many cases, there is a feeling that longlists and shortlists are being manipulated to a degree never seen before, to make the terrain as safe as possible for candidates favoured by the Labour Leader’s office. While that is not always possible in every selection, the complaint is rife.
Julie Gibson – a senior local Labour councillor, postal worker and trade unionist – was excluded from the shortlist for the West Lancashire by-election. In Hastings and Rye, Labour blocked both the left’s candidate Maya Evans and also Bella Sankey, a human rights campaigner, formerly of Liberty and Reprieve.
After Camberwell and Peckham, two members of Labour’s frontbench went public with their concern about the process. Shadow Paymaster General Fleur Anderson and Parliamentary Private Secretary Flo Eshalomi maintained that party members should have been allowed to decide. Both MPs nominated Keir Starmer to be Labour Leader.
On top of the selections controversy, the saga of deselection rumbles on, with some sitting left-wing Labour MPs faced with a battle over their position.
Liverpool West Derby MP Ian Byrne is now the subject of a reselection fight. The case of Apsana Begum, MP for Poplar and Limehouse, is extremely disquieting. “I can’t think of any circumstance where it would be acceptable,” she has said, of the party’s decision to continue the selection trigger process while she was signed off sick from work.
Numerous complaints have been submitted about her treatment but Labour stands accused of having abandoned its duty of care towards her. The widely-held view on the left is that, if Begum were not a member of the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, the party’s response would have been completely different.
While Sam Tarry was deselected in Ilford South, other fellow members of the campaign group have been reselected. In the same week as Tarry’s defeat, the left MP for Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, completed her reselection with a unanimous set of nominations.
What really stands out in the case of Ilford South was the aggressive posture of those who wanted Tarry gone. The finger-pointing and gloating of senior Labour sources in briefings to the media were directed not only at the Labour left but senior ‘soft left’ Shadow Cabinet figures too.
It revealed a problematic culture that is flourishing under the present leadership. The Times’ Patrick Maguire reported that his WhatsApp “was ablaze with crowing Starmerites last night”, the morning after the result.
Several journalists reported being briefed by a senior Labour source who singled out Labour MPs who had supported Sam Tarry for particular opprobrium. One former senior party aide, not on the left, told me: “I want a Labour government with the same passion as I did in 1997, having lived too much of my life under a Tory Government – but I hate this side of politics. Factional, nasty, macho and unnecessary.”
The MPs who supported Tarry were not restricted to the socialist campaign group. They included the former leader of the party, Ed Miliband.
Miliband has been on the receiving end of sustained negative briefings to the press himself. “Three names recur when senior Labour figures air their grievances with Starmer’s operation”, reported The Times, after a Labour HQ reorganisation was announced last week. One of those names was Miliband’s.
A row over Labour’s conference slogan was, according to the newspaper, “symptomatic of more significant tensions over the party’s economic policy and the influence of Miliband”.
Miliband has never been forgiven by some New Labour figures for defeating David Miliband. But that historic grievance has dovetailed with a newer sin – that since he ceased to be leader, Miliband has his own base and an openness to ideas that is regarded as unsound by many on the party’s right.
Within what might be called ‘Starmerism’, there is a grouping that insists on political purity and adherence to the traditional viewpoint espoused by those like Peter Mandelson. It is not much interested in the views of those who deviate from its orthodoxies, even if that includes senior Shadow Cabinet members – up to and including the former leader. Where this group is strongest is in its grip of the machinery that oversees disciplinary matters and selections.
Many Labour people in Westminster see this group as not terribly invested in Starmer himself but loyal to their own project. Of course, there is a big problem with this theory – which is that however far the machine group has its own political dynamic, it is undeniable that Keir Starmer’s leadership has deployed it as an instrument of party regulation, so that its behaviour has now become one of the defining characteristics of Starmerism.
As a result, Labour’s leadership is consciously remaking the parliamentary party through the present round of selections, at the behest of the Leader’s office. Under the guise of ‘due diligence’, many now believe that the real litmus test is who a candidate would nominate in a hypothetical leadership election. If the answer is that they could not be relied on to back somebody like the Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting, they will be seen as unsound.
One reason that Labour’s candidate selections have become a flashpoint is because the central party has granted itself greater powers to determine the outcome of the longlisting and shortlisting of parliamentary candidates. That process is being used to assist centrally-favoured candidates against people coming from quite wide strands of opinion.
No one should be so naïve as to believe that the political ups and downs of the internal life of the Labour Party can, or should, be eliminated. They do however go through differing degrees of intensity. A question for the leadership of any party is how far it wants this divisive culture to predominate.
Labour’s infighting can seem very distant from the interests of the wider public. But the party’s internal culture should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what a Keir Starmer-led government would be like. An ethos of command and control can harden in office to the detriment of legitimately-held differences of opinion about major issues of policy. And narrowing the composition of the next generation of Labour MPs so that many more of them are hand-picked from the centre will tend to cut the parliamentary party off from people, movements and ideas at the sharp end of the multiple crises a Labour government will face.
Taken as a whole, the range of forces affected by the new machine politics is now very large. The left, the soft left, the affiliated trade unions and numerous local constituency activists, have now all felt the extent of the reach of the party’s centralised machine. The only question is whether a sufficiently powerful movement will evolve to constrain it.
Simon Fletcher was campaigns and elections advisor to Keir Starmer until 2021 and previously worked as a senior advisor to both Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband
Sometimes hearing ‘the other guys point of view’ can be helpful.
But how much can be trusted from someone writing the oxymoron of a phrase…
“adherence to the traditional viewpoint espoused by those like Peter Mandelson”?
How is having the opposite politics to Labour PMs Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan ‘traditionalist’?
When you face hostile forces determined to wipe you off the face of the earth; who can’t be dissuaded by negotiating; and who (seemingly) don’t give a damn about ethics or law, then the ONLY thing you can do is to work out HOW to force them into giving up ground.
Currently David Evans, Starmer and Mandelson control the levers of power within Labour. What “left-field” and conventional tactics are there which would remove their control of those levers and return it to organisations and individuals whom we might prefer?
I have absolutely no trust in Simon Fletcher.
It is interesting to see Byline Times publishing this article, as well as an article on October 11th by the producer of the ‘Labour Files’, Richard Sanders: https://bylinetimes.com/2022/10/11/bbc-panorama-and-the-labour-anti-semitism-crisis/. Byline Times is four years old and, as far as I know, this is the first time it has been willing to carry anything suggesting something deeply corrupt mightly be going on in the Labour Party. Contrary to this, immediately after the December 2019 election it was fully behind the totally inaccurate mainstream narrative, insisting that Jeremy Corbyn had failed to deal with “some serious accusations of anti-Semitism against various key personnel and politicians close to the leadership”: https://bylinetimes.com/2020/02/14/how-jeremy-corbyn-and-labour-failed-the-country/. I hope that Byline Times’ belated discovery heralds a new willingness to probe the horrors of the Labour Party, and that it will not simply revert to form.
Not sure that a one sided purging of the left can be described as “infighting”
Just one thing prevents my unalloyed pleasure at the self-destruct aspect of Tory collapse: the idea of Starmer becoming even more blatant in his cull of the left. He is more and more openly going about his primary intention. The absolute refusal of he and his acolytes to acknowledge the existence of Al Jazeera’s “The Labour Files” is truly shocking, and ably assisted by MSM.
Politics is at its lowest since the contrived scenario which gave those who didn’t want to know an excuse to back Blair’s excursion in Iraq/Afghanistan.
To hear that Ed Miliband is now one of their targets creates little sympathy from me, given that he himself suffered from a very minor version of Corbyn’s treatment, yet swiftly supported the very same section of the party that aimed to destroy both Ed and Jeremy. Give Starmer an inch and he will ……….
Proportional Representation Starmer style would mean the end of members having control over selection of MPs.
All MPs centrally chosen by a bureaucratic clique in London.
Still, I’m not that worried … if Starmer gets a good majority he’ll ditch PR because he’s not interested in it for democratic reasons, only opportunist ones. And if he gets a slim majority or the MSM lay into the idea he won’t do it either.
Dream on “progressives”.
I see the ‘Socialist Campaign Group’ as a vehicle to sustain MP status of self-acclaimed ‘socialist’ MPs and a facade to convince genuine socialists that someone in the party is fighting for socialism on their behalf. If the SCG realy is a means to a desired socialist end, then where are the arguments and strategies for change within the Labour Party under Keir Stalin?
Simon Fletcher paints a depressing picture of the Labour Party under Starmer’s leadership. Not only is the party machine determined to distance Starmer from miltant trade unionism, but to drive out those MPs and aspiring candidates as well. I think it is time for the CWU, RMT and UNITE to consider supporting a party that does not value their affiliation.
I get no sense from this that the
outrageous inhumanity employed by the parties responsible for the
shenanigans is a serious issue, or that the weaponisation of A/S or anything which might destroy the reputation of anyone whose politics they wish to exclude is dangerous and McCarthyite. It isn’t just political nuance that suffers from the current purge, it’s human beings. The thought of the country being governed by such inhumane manipulators is actually frightening.
The country is lost, Labour is lost. Enough is Enough. We will have to do this without them because people really can’t afford to wait. The longer we put up with what is being done to people the more it becomes the norm and the further the country moves towards an authoritarian state with complicit silence from MSM and a cowed BBC. Will a Starmer govt repeal all the Tory attacks on our democratic rights? So far I have only heard of intentions to repeal the anti union legislation and I am not optimistic that all the anti protest legislation will be reversed. Wes Streeting plans to clear the NHS backlog by more private provision and presumably by taking nurses and doctors trained by poorer nations mainly from South Asia as per the Conservatives and we’re all aware of Rachel Reeves views on benefits claimants.
At our last CLP AMM the report back from conference was that there was a great atmosphere of unity which just shows how far the purge on the left has gone. They were dancing on the grave of the Labour Left. Our other rep who happens to be a Corbyn supporter was suspended the day before conference.
I will try to stay in the party purely for what small influence I can have in supporting others on the left even though I know my views are not wanted.
Some contrition from the author of this article would not go amiss.
The warning signs were certainly there such as Starmer’s two attempts to oust Corbyn as leader.
The comments by Penny Mordaunt about Starmers abandonment of all 10 pledges he made to become the ‘electable’ Labour leader (PM) could be widely used by the Tories and their spokespeople in the mainstream press to discredit his bid to get Labour into government and him the Prime Minister. That’s, of course, presuming the ‘establishment’ doesn’t trust him to do ITS bidding. His out of touch supporting members of the PLP should take steps to dump him, or they might possibly lose their seats in the general election, though ineligible to offer themselves as leader in his place, since they condoned his obvious deceptions.
David Bull and Eddie Dougall have said everything I wanted to say. I will not be out on the streets doing the hard graft that gets you a victory in a General Election.
I’m still a member of the LP (though I’m staggered that I’ve not been expelled) only to fight against Starmer and his supportive Rightwing MPs, who worked together to stop a genuine Socialist.
The article is replete with vacuous clichés and fashionable euphemisms
which debase the English language are used onlyto mask reality. Obsequiousness to finance capital is described as ‘political purity’ while cynical opportunism is dignified with the label ‘centrism’, a term which has lost all political meaning in contemporary usage.
The only interesting aspect of the piece is its source and the fact that it was published by the liberal Byline Times. What this indicates is only that a certain unease is begin to develop amongst a section of the tame bourgeois intelligentsia, that the totalitarian aspirations of the current gang in charge of the Labour Party would, if that party were in government, pose a threat to the civil liberties of the intelligentsia itself, and not just to those of the working class, socialists, and victims of the UK’s foreign policies, whose human rights can normally considered as of little consequence.
Otherwise the analysis is entirely superficial, euphemistic, and ignores the existing mountains of detailed evidence concerning the inhuman barbarity of the party machine under the present leadership, as revealed in JVL’s archives and more rećently in the Labour Files..
I tried for two years to stay in the Party to fight for what I believe in. I’d been a member for 30 years, was CLP Chair, and had been a Councillor for 12 of those years. I finally resigned in February this year because the vile injustice of the leadership’s behaviour coupled with bullying from right wing clp members was beginning to affect my mental health. I am very concerned that any government led by Starmer will be small improvement over the Tories and just as dangerously authoritarian and undemocratic.
The idea of Starmer and his team becoming the actual Government is worrying for the whole country, not just the left or the Labour Party. In the Party’s internal disciplinary processes we have seen a whole catalogue of offences against due process and the principles of the Human Rights Act; retrospective legislation, secret tribunals, guilt by association, hearsay and anonymous evidence, ‘auto-exclusion’ and many more. Would any sane person want to put the group responsible for all this in charge of the Criminal Justice system?
The frequently exercised power to expel people from the Labour Party virtually on a whim does not cause much public concern because most people do not know why anyone would want to be a member anyway. The idea, however, that the same group of politicians might acquire an equally arbitrary power to revoke someone’s British citizenship if they felt like it would surely scare anybody.
You might find this more useful???
I’ve tried to examine his methods, and use historical precedents to demonstrate how alien Starmer & neoliberalism are to the Labour Party.
‘Starmer’s Road to Voter and Labour Party Suppression’
https://labourheartlands.com/starmers-road-to-voter-and-labour-party-suppression/
Am surprised that the Labour Party can afford to fight
a General Election – unless there is hefty funding from
private individuals. Not only that but they have still
not sorted out the problems of data outage caused
by criminal activities.
I have no comment to make about Simon Fletcher apart from
a sigh – and a hope that others come to the same conclusions as himself. A glimmer of hope amidst the gloom – I think there will
be more in the Labour Party who have his views than apparent
plus there is much Trade Union activity and also action within
Communities.
“Enough Is Enough”.
This article from Simon Fletcher should really be in the Guardian, imperfect though it is (see David Bull’s criticism above).
Pleased the BBC are finally discussing Labour’s Forde Report in terms of antisemitism – and antizionism – on Radio 4 Sunday (23/10/22). But this report was published over 3 months ago to almost total silence. Likewise it’s a month on from the serious allegations made by the Labour Files documentaries and I don’t think the BBC has even mentioned them.
If the MSM continue to either ignore or minimize negative news stories about Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – because he looks to be the next prime minister – then what is this but propaganda by omission? It’s not necessarily any paper’s deliberate strategy but the generalized effect of mainstream journalists excruciating timidity. Their refusal to ask difficult, awkward questions and risk losing favour. How different it might be now if serious questions had been asked of Liz Truss’s blatant ‘tax cuts for the rich’ proposal during the conservative leadership race.
With the Tory government evermore scrooge like, it’s no good the political class seeking to salve it’s conscience by offering up a freshly squeezed Labour Party as team B. Labour has heart, they want to say, but this isn’t how democracy works. What party’s best to lead the country isn’t for journalists to decide beforehand but the general public come election day. Yet how can the public make an informed choice at the ballet box if they’re being kept in the dark about Starmer’s ‘squeeze of the left’, the contents of the Forde Report, and Labour Files revelations?
To know what a party would look like in office is to know how it operates. Starmer’s top-down my way or no way approach now ‘squeezing the left,’ constraining the reach of party democracy, looks set to win power by reversing Corbyn’s party slogan: ‘Vote Labour for the few and not the many’. His promise to keep the seat warm for the Tories, rather than deliver real change when the country needs it most, is unforgivable.
Are the so-called liberal press really willing to turn a blind eye to what’s going on here? After the banking crisis, all the Covid profiteering, and now this cost of greed crisis, are the MSM really going to stick us with yet another Neoliberal government with a preferential ear for big business and corporate power?
We need a PR system for elections. With all it’s faults PR is still the only way Government can represent the views of the Country – which will show it is far more Left Wing than Labour’s Leadership, (hence the surge in membership on the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Leader – with backing of the Parliamentary Party instead of opposition Labour would have had a much better result in 2019).
Day by day I only have my suspicion confirmed that the ‘political voice for organised labour’ exists entirely outside the Labour Party. We are seeing the creation of a ‘political careerist’ & lobby friendly Party with no intention of endangering the status quo. To do that the internal conversation MUST be stopped. Thatcher & Reagan would have been proud, two broadly similar parties changing hands occasionally.