Read here the words of a past General Secretary of the Labour Party.
He should be expelled, of course.
But he won't be, of course.
If the "serving" London Regional Organiser can remain on the payroll while campaigning for the re-election of Boris Johnson, then why bother to deal with a former General Secretary who merely expresses the view of Tony Blair and David Miliband that the cuts do not go anything like far enough?
However, all existing Labour Party employees should publicly declare their disagreement with the view expressed by by their boss, Peter Watt. Perhaps in a letter to the Guardian? However they do it, if they have not done it by this time next week, then they must be assumed to agree with him.
Is there a Blairite slash-and-burn, bomb-to-hell party within the Labour Party? Yes. Is it on the staff? That is what now remains to be seen.
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If there is then at least it is within. It is not people like you and some others I could name exercising huge influence entirely secretively through internal figures who have appeared from nowhere since the unions made Ed Miliband the Leader against the wishes of the party in Parliament and the country.
ReplyDeleteI want my party back. It is my party, not yours. I pay a subscription, you don't. I have a membership card, you don't. I campaign for Labour candidates, you stand against them or endorse candidates against them. But my views and the views of everyone else who voted for the candidate who WON THE MEMBERS' BALLOT count for less than yours and those of several other people who refuse to rejoin years after they were EXPELLED.
Neil Fleming would agree with every word of Watts' vile little post and then some. Simply not Labour at all. Never was. Nothing but a social climber in the North East.
ReplyDeleteBut a little bird tells me that you used to share a house with the rising Dr Tom Hamilton. What do you think that he would make of all of this? They say he was very left-wing was.
Back when I was a Labour Party member and he wasn’t, yes. He is a very recent recruit, previously known as “Ethno Tom”. I am not the only person to have noticed that.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that he was ever in anything specific such as the SWP or what have you. But he was certainly a generic upper-middle-class student Leftist. I doubt that he would like to be reminded of the time when he spoke alongside George Galloway, who described his contribution as “the speech of the night”. Or of the time when he told an audience that “the ideology of the State of Israel is Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer”.
He’ll go far: no background in the party, signed the Euston Manifesto, probably never delivered a leaflet in his life. Or did those days end with the defeat of David Miliband?
Tom is in a very odd position now that the Labour Whips' Office contains the man who ran Durham University Labour Club at the time when he was not even nominally in it.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, if he is a Euston signatory, then would he not be ideal to write for that faction's response to your fothcoming mighty tome? How is that response coming along?
How, necessarily, would I know?
ReplyDeleteAlthough I would be interested to find out.
Was it the Northern Echo, the Journal or the Evening Chronicle that Neil Fleming got to announce that he was going to be our MP, the day before the women-only short list was imposed?
ReplyDeleteBy signing up to something denouncing Peter Watt, he could make himself seem a little more serious than that. Not saying a lot, I know.
I'd be fascinated to hear of any point of political principle on which either Neil Fleming or Tom Hamilton disagreed with me.
ReplyDeleteFrom where each of them started out, I suspect that they have rather met in the middle by now. Where I have always been.
I haven't seen Tom for the better part of a decade, by the way.
I am genuinely confused. Should debate about policy not be allowed in the Labour Party? What has he written to make his expulsion necessary?
ReplyDeleteHe's right, of course. It is his detractors who make Labour impossible for any personal with a grain of financial sense to vote for.
ReplyDelete