Labour Party

Shona Thomson, Glasgow workers' leader, barred from Glasgow Labour selection Presiding over a pay scheme which discriminates against women workers is no barrier to being selected as Labour candidate for election to Westminster. But being a leader of the strike which put an end the scheme does not prevent you from being disqualified at the first stage of selection. And you can be old enough to join the army and kill people – but simultaneously be too young to be selected as a Labour candidate. The decision of Glasgow Shettleston and Glasgow Provan Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) to hold...

Keir Starmer has now at least criticised the "Brexit purity cult ” of the Tory right. Starmer was speaking about the Brexit-related impasse in Northern Ireland. But he still wants to squash discussion within Labour of Brexit, or even of significantly modifying the Tories’ version of it. London’s mayor Sadiq Khan has pushed the other way by calling for “a pragmatic debate about the benefits of re-joining the Customs Union and the Single Market”. He made the call at a posh Mansion House dinner, not in a labour-movement meeting, and was motivated as much by concern for London-based capitalist...

The tiny, inactive and secretive BAME Labour grouping has been back in the spotlight, after Labour’s National Executive junked plans to create a democratic structure representing black, Asian and minority ethnic party members. To give a flavour of this “organisation”, in 2018 it had less than a thousand members, out of an estimated 70,000 party members of colour. Yet it has representation on the National Executive. A quick look at BAME Labour’s website confirms it is a non-organisation. But its “What is BAME Labour” statement is worth scanning. Generally vapid in the extreme, it says: “The...

In 2018 the Labour Party’s democracy review proposed creating new democratic structures for Labour members of colour, including a conference and national committee; and, at 2021 Labour conference, plans for that were adopted almost unanimously. After recent issues of anti-black and anti-Muslim racism in the party, as discussed in the Forde report , you’d think this would be a priority. Instead, as part of its drive against democracy, Starmer’s leadership has got the party National Executive Committee to suspend the idea of such democratic structures for “BAME” members (and disabled ones). The...

Since lockdown in 2020, nearly all my regular labour movement meetings have stayed as wholly online affairs: Labour Party meetings, union branch meetings, union left caucuses, even many Workers’ Liberty meetings. Finally, after many false starts and technological troubles, my Labour Party has moved to hybrid meetings. I have focused on getting there in person. It has been a revelation about what we had been missing by not meeting in person. The last three years have seen a long series of defeats for the left in the Labour Party, and locally we have had dwindling attendance of zoom meetings...

Keir Starmer addressed the CBI last week and said Britain needs to get off its “immigration dependency” and companies need to be weaned off “cheap labour” from oversees and to “start investing more in training workers who are already here”. This marked a big shift in Starmer’s position: in 2020, while standing for party leadership, he’d championed freedom of movement and implied he’d continue to campaign for it even after Britain left the EU. Few commentators (the exception being the i ’s Ian Dunt) seem to have noticed that Starmer’s argument made no sense: as Dunt put it: “Is the problem with...

Sign the statement protesting against the Labour leadership's attempt to ban Workers' Liberty here Labour’s new lead in the opinion polls has encouraged the unreconstructed Blairites who now run Keir Starmer’s office to push further to make the Labour Party ultra-safe for capitalism. Labour has expelled Andrea Egan, president of Unison, and Martin Mayer, formerly a Unite rep on Labour’s National Executive. The charges are risible: “liking” social media posts from Socialist Appeal (Egan) and Labour Against the Witchhunt (Mayer), many years ago, when (even if you think the current bans are right...

The “trend of Bregret” — people who supported Brexit changing their minds — “is accelerating and looks set to cause a growing problem for the... Conservative Party”, wrote Matthew Goodwin, an academic focused on the Eurosceptic hard right, on 18 November. It may — it should — cause a problem for the Labour leadership too. Goodwin identifies the main things driving this as “younger and more pro-EU voters entering the electorate and people who did not vote at the 2016 referendum changing their mind”. In any case, it is indisputable. The view that Brexit was right has not held a lead in polls...

Andrew Gamble, author of The Conservative Nation and other books, talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . There’s been a long civil war in the Conservative Party over Europe. It became more intense after the 2016 referendum. A majority of Conservative MPs and Cabinet Ministers voted Remain, but 57% of voters who had voted Conservative at the general election only a year before in 2015 repudiated David Cameron and voted Leave. Ever since 2016, the party has been disoriented. It has radical factions who want to do different things with Brexit, and a bigger group of MPs who haven’t known what...

Join the solidarity protest at Manston detention camp on Sunday 6 November: details here The appalling conditions in which refugees are being held at the former RAF base in Manston, Kent, are part and parcel of the ramped up “Hostile Environment” presided over by Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Braverman has relished the opportunity with her second bite of the cherry, reappointed by Rishi Sunak after having to resign in disgrace on 19 October after six weeks in office, to be even more hardline than Priti Patel. The scandal at Manston will not be the last. Opened to process migrants more...