Dark Times

Using a trick of the light, they have made his skin darker. I am the first to say that politics is a rough old trade, but really? Why is anyone still in the Labour Party?

Mind you, it has always been like that. 20 years ago this month, a Statement of Persons Nominated was published without my name on it because the then Government Chief Whip, and purely hereditary Member of Parliament for North West Durham, had forbidden Lanchester Branch Labour Party from holding a selection meeting at all rather than allow it to nominate a mixed-race candidate in her constituency. Despite chairing the Branch at that time and for several years previously, the first that I heard of any of this was when I was shown the nomination papers in the pub, bearing instead the name of a lilywhite member of her staff who not only failed to be elected, but took a senior Councillor down with him. After decades of calling me a “Mulatto”, he was recently named in the Forde Report as having used the Angry Black Woman trope against Diane Abbott.

Meanwhile, the Labour Leadership of the then Derwentside District Council was in shock, having simply assumed that it was going to be getting me, and having had a portfolio lined up for me, whereas it had a policy of putting down the telephone on the MP and her staff, and would have adopted the same attitude to any of them in person if he had been a Councillor. They would literally not have spoken to him, because they had despised her so much even before this. The long-serving Leader of that Council has been one of my Campaign Patrons since 2017. Having been refused any committee assignment whatever by the old right-wing Labour machine on the unitary Durham County Council, he now chairs the Audit Committee, while it is the former Leader of that Council who is unassigned. And the Labour Party is even more racist than it was two years ago, when I wrote this:

The Labour Party is unworthy of the support of anti-racists, including the BAME communities that are now to be found, not only in every constituency, but in every ward. Keir Starmer has his knee on our necks. Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions. In his Labour Party Conference speech, he could not bring himself to mention either the Windrush scandal or the fire at Grenfell Tower. Never mind the Forde Inquiry into racism among the party’s staff. One of its subjects has been racially abusing me since 2003 [see above].

Starmer presides over the victimisation of black women MPs. He dismisses Black Lives Matter as a “moment”. He identifies with those who have taken selfies alongside the bodies of black murder victims. He has replaced Diane Abbott with an all-white Shadow Home Office team that has repeatedly been outflanked on the left by Priti Patel. He has promoted Jess Phillips. He rejects self-determination for Kashmir. He indicates his view of self-determination for the Chagos Islands by revelling in his role in the torture of Julian Assange. He refused to bring charges in relation to the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson. He failed to oppose the early lifting of the first lockdown despite the far higher risk of Covid-19 to people of colour. He never mentions that black pupils’ examination grades are under-predicted on a staggering scale by his supporters. 

Starmer has whipped abstentions on the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill and on the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill. He has not suspended those remaining Labour MPs who had failed to vote against the Immigration Act 2014, the Hostile Environment. He failed to correct white replacement theory when it was expressed by a caller to his radio programme. He continues to extend party membership to Tony Blair, who has killed more brown people than any other white man alive. He seeks donations from David Abrahams, who tweeted as recently as 2017 that black South Africans, “preferred white rule as less corrupt and more viable and professional.”

Abrahams remains in the Labour Party. Yet from the number that Labour is able to find, the “wrong” sort of Jews must comprise at least 40 per cent of Britain’s tiny Jewish population, 60 per cent of that small minority of British Jews which might ever consider voting Labour, and 80 per cent of those Jews who were members of the Labour Party. Labour is sacrificing its existing Jewish base, and the possibility of electoral appeal to those rapidly growing Jewish communities in which issues of economic inequality were very pressing, while antagonising larger ethnic minorities that had hitherto been loyal to the party. Black South Africans preferred, as Joe Biden might put it, “clean” white rule? Really?

Starmer supports Biden, who was Strom Thurmond’s eulogist, who restored the federal death penalty, who was the father of the prison-industrial complex, who opposed bussing because he did not want his children to grow up in a “racial jungle”, and who served as Vice President throughout the Obama Administration’s mass deportations, its caging of children, and its wars. Kamala Harris locked up African-American men as if it had been going out of fashion, and she kept them locked up as cheap labour for her corporate donors. Such would be the lodestar of any future Starmer Government. Indeed, Labour already exhibits Anglo-Saxon capitalism’s visceral fear of the black male of African descent, with only three such MPs, two such Peers, and 81 such Councillors. There has been no such member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, or Labour member of the London Assembly, in more than 20 years.

A black woman MP is among the victims of the Crown Prosecution Service’s systematic persecution of Starmer’s critics the length and breadth of England and Wales. I am another. As is Apsana Begum, whose hijab-wearing in Parliament cannot be tolerated by Starmer, his Labour Party, or his CPS. Permitted not to give her home address in court for fear of physical violence from within the Labour Party, Begum joins Claudia Webbe as a victim of Starmer’s racist lawfare, which enjoys the full might of the State even before the nightmare Starmer Premiership that must be prevented by any means. 

Starmer has said nothing about the deportations to Jamaica. We may be well rid of those people. But Boris Johnson has also admitted to Class A drug use. He appears to be guilty of sexual assault, and of criminal damage. He has certainly conspired to commit assault occasioning grievous bodily harm, because there is a recording of his conspiracy to that effect with an old lag. And he clearly misappropriated public funds in the case of Jennifer Arcuri. When is he going to be deported to his native United States? If anyone is asking that, then it is not the Leader of the Opposition.

And Starmer subscribes to the IHRA Definition, which is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee experience redolent of Windrush and Grenfell. It imports the New York practice of branding as “anti-Semitic” any uppity black or other challenge to the metropolitan liberal elite. It establishes a hierarchy of race. It has led to the expulsions of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and Tony Greenstein, anti-racist activists of many decades’ service who had been party members in good standing even under Blair. Thousands more expulsions and suspensions are openly being planned and perpetrated by the entryists, led by a man who could not have been a party member eight years ago.

One’s attitude towards the Palestinian struggle is the test of one’s attitude towards the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain. Labour has failed that test since 4th September 2018. It would now be expulsionable from the Labour Party to criticise an Israeli nuclear attack on Britain. The defeat of Starmer’s Labour Party is the principal Palestinian political objective outside the Middle East, and the principal anti-racist political objective in the Global North.