A leaflet from Labour’s candidate for Hastings and Rye arrived at my house yesterday. It was an interesting read, and it asks us to tell the candidate what we think. Here goes…
I too am very keenly aware that we need a change of government. That’s why I joined the Labour Party and worked daily to promote the 2017 and 2019 Labour Party manifestos, and tried to win a genuinely local, genuinely socialist MP for Hastings and Rye.
Water
The leaflet rightly states that the current government has no answers to the problems we face. That’s why the Labour Party I worked for was campaigning to reinstate our NHS, and reclaim our other essential services, such as water. Ours is just about the only country in the world daft enough to allow our water and sewage systems to be run by private, supposedly competing profiteers. Did anything ever demonstrate why essential services need to be publicly owned and run by accountable local authorities as blatantly as the sad mess that Southern Water have made of our sewage and drainage systems? And they cheerfully make a plastic-barrier-strewn toilet of our town whilst sending bills for their ‘service’ sky high. Labour’s candidate Helena Dollimore makes much of her campaigning to improve our water services locally, and yet asks us to vote for the Party that has abandoned its former, popular, intention to reclaim our services and run them on behalf of the community.
Expulsions
I note that the leaflet’s authors put a lot of effort into talking about what’s wrong with the current government and I agree, that is the only reason anyone can think of for voting Labour but that’s not a line that will work well in Hastings. We had a very large and very active Labour Party in our town a few years back and it was gutted by Kier Starmer’s purge of socialists. We even lost some of our former hard-working councillors and party officers in what felt to us like Labour’s cull of Jewish Socialists.
There don’t seem to be any pictures of Labour’s candidate surrounded by party activists so I suppose that Dollimore, like Starmer, intends to manage without them. I wonder if she’s forgotten that those former activists are voters too. They are still here, and they can and do tell their stories. We had around 2000 people at work on the Labour campaign in the run up to the 2017 election. Dollimore has a handful of obligated councillors and half a dozen activists. Has her campaign manager forgotten that the town is regularly hearing from the people the Labour Party offended, and then abandoned? And remember, that includes all the women who’ve been trying to tell the Party for some years now that it had dumped not just women’s rights but the anti-racism and anti-austerity stance that Jeremy Corbyn called for and supported.
Environment
As for Dollimore’s comments about the environment and the sea – I can’t help noticing that just like the Tories, the Labour Party are making their literature as green as possible lately (in colour that is – do they know that green isn’t just a colour?) the leaflet makes much of Dollimore’s work for a children’s charity, but doesn’t mention that she used to work as a green-washer for Unilever. I wonder if she knows that when it comes to real plans for environmental protections, our candidate for 2017 and 2019 produced a local manifesto that out-greened the Green Party’s? I can’t see Labour doing that nowadays.
Tell them what you think
Are you a voter reading this, and thinking we’ll have to hold our noses and vote Labour? You may well be right, but if you are in any doubt as to how our former activists feel, have a read of this, from Another Angry Voice…
Click here to read Another Angry Voice
Sure, at the moment, it looks as though voting Labour will be the best way to get the Tories out in Hastings and Rye but make no mistake, we do not need to support Labour’s current line of thinking. In fact, if they’re going to be a part of the next government, it’s absolutely essential that we tell them, and keep on telling them, that they need to change a lot before they’ll be any good to us as anything other than a tool to remove Tories.
Just to give you one example of how important this is, it says in Dollimore’s leaflet that “Labour has a plan to build an NHS fit for the future” well we have already heard, from Starmer’s right-hand man Wes Streeting, what they mean by that – they mean private investment – in other words, more theft of the funds and resources that should be going directly to our NHS.
Vote Labour if you need to but please get really serious about telling them what they need to do, and not do, to earn that vote. Perhaps rather than writing leaflets about the #CostOfLivingCrisis and standing in front of random ambulances and fire engines, Labour’s candidate should spend more time on the picket lines, where everyone from nurses to train cleaners, to teachers and local government workers have been putting in the hours actually fighting Tory austerity. The people she would find there can tell her exactly what we need…
Things to tell Hastings and Rye Labour Party’s candidate and her team:
We need to see a central and relentless campaign for decent wages and working conditions, and a proper respect for all our essential workers.
We need to hear an apology to our former Jewish socialist activists, to our women and to our former BAME groups, too many of whom are currently languishing beneath unexplained suspensions.
We need Labour to get rid of those MPs who can’t see anything wrong with being funded by private healthcare companies.
We need Labour to commit to bringing our NHS and essential services back into full public ownership.
We need Labour to commit to dismantling the laws, rulings and charges the Tories have built up that stop trade unions and local councils functioning properly.
We need our councils properly refunded. Neither voting Labour nor voting Green can do anything to solve our problems unless councils are freed up to deal with local problems directly instead of spending their time desperately writing bids for grants that never quite hit the button, and all too often lead them into trouble with both developers and voters.
Unless Labour seriously addresses all those points, Labour is not Labour. Unless we see the local party clearly and unequivocally supporting local democracy, local workers and local government, there’s no reason to see them as any better than the Tories or anyone else who might throw their hat in the ring come the next election.
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 