Category: Labour
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What else is the Labour Party being useless at?

(Just to be clear – this is not an advert for any other party. We need to demand better from ALL our politicians) For most of the last five years or so, if I’d said ‘you know that toxic issue in Labour’, people would have thought ‘ah yes, the left-right thing’ or ‘ah yes, the…
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Four Long Years

It feels like about 200 years ago I stepped down as a Labour Party CLP officer, and got stuck into the women’s rights campaign. Initially, I didn’t have a particularly articulate view of the conflict between women’s legal rights and Stonewall et al’s demands under the title ‘trans rights’, but I did have a very…
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We have got what we need

We wanted a Corbyn government. The others wanted a ‘more electable leader’. No matter. Meanwhile, the Tories wanted to stay in charge, despite not having anyone remotely suitable, so the nation got Boris the Liar, Boris the evil clown who let his friends run away with anything that wasn’t nailed down, then literally sat there…
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Who speaks, who listens, and who is heard?

The extract above is from a statement by Ruby Cox, a former councillor in Hastings, who has been asked and asked, for months, for her version of something that happened to her but, after all this time, will anyone want to hear? I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of…
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The original mistake?

Has it ever occurred to anyone that the founding of the Labour Party might have been a mistake from the start? I have spent a large part of my political time over the last decade on campaigns arguing for workers’ rights and women’s rights. The Labour Party has been, to put it generously, a fair-weather…
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Never let a bully win

I was told when I signed up as a Labour Party officer that I should ‘never let a bully win’. I looked at the situation in the Party and agreed that it was true. The evidence was manifold. We lefties inherited an organisation that was impossible to steer because it had, for several decades, been…
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To speak or not to speak?

Have the May council elections given women an answer to that dilemma? Surrounded by bullies, propagandists, and comfortable males who can’t be bothered to understand, women have had a hard job working out when or whether to raise women’s issues. There was much discussion in the lead up to the May elections as to whether…
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Useful idiots

Whatever your personal political position is, please indulge me while I set the scene with a couple of paragraphs of reminiscence. It’s 2017, and I am a lefty delegate from a lefty CLP. Lefty CLPs are in exuberant ascendancy, and we came to conference, one and all, with the intention not just of furthering our…
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We must rebuild trust – Ha ha ha!

***Long read for the weekend*** I’m writing this as I anxiously await the results of local council elections. It’s been a strange one for me, because it’s the first election since I foreswore party allegiance (I maintain that I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me) – but the result still matters to me, because I…
