Anti-semitism

Stroud News & Journal, 5 June 2024, p. 25

Last week’s expulsion from the Labour Party of veteran former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tells us all we need to know about the current leader, Keir Starmer.

As a former Labour Party member myself, who voted for Rebecca Long-Bailey in the 2020 Labour leadership contest, I witnessed Starmer’s behaviour at close quarters.

Throughout his disingenuous campaign ruthlessly seeking power by any means, he flagrantly lied about his policy commitments, pretending to be a progressive left-wing candidate purely to mop up enough Corbyn supporters to win the contest.

A matter of hours after the leadership result was announced, Starmer started his unprincipled purge of the party’s left wing by sacking shadow education secretary, Long-Bailey, on a bogus, trumped-up charge of ‘anti-semitism’.

Along with seven other party members at the time, I submitted a very detailed formal complaint about Starmer’s disgraceful act – and of course, it was completely ignored.

Since then, Starmer has grandstanded and virtue-signalled to the mainstream media about ‘rooting out’ anti-semitism – which was never a major problem in the Labour Party, as numerous opinion polls at the time showed.

That there existed no substance to Starmer’s posturings didn’t matter a jot to him – as long as the headlines in the Daily Mail etc. were the ‘right’ ones. Corbyn came within an ace of winning the 2017 election – and would have won it, had it not been for the deliberate scuppering of the party’s campaign from within by the party’s own right wing – of which Starmer is of course a key member.

With Corbyn standing as an Independent candidate in Islington North in the coming election, hundreds of us will be be flooding to London to help his campaign and ensure he’s re-elected to Parliament.

The best way for democracy- and freedom-loving voters to make their voice heard in the forthcoming general election is to abandon the Uni-party choices, and vote for a candidate not representing the bankrupt mainstream political parties.

For only then can we really return parliament fo the people and have a genuinely representative democracy.

Richard House

Stroud