[Last week, a number of Cumbria councillors and Labour Party members wrote a joint letter to the Cumberland News. The full text, prior to editing by the Cumberland News is here]
Dear Sir
We, the undersigned local Labour Party activists wish to express our utter disgust in relation to the contents of the Labour Party report entitled ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019’.
This leaked report contains a number of serious allegations which imply that a group of senior regional and national Labour Party officials worked deliberately and consistently to undermine Jeremy Corbyn from the moment he was elected leader of the Party in 2015, even to the extent of sabotaging the Party’s 2017 General Election campaign.
Carlisle was a marginal seat
The main allegations are that:
*During the period up until April 2018 when Jenny Formby took over as General Secretary, a destructive faction of senior Labour officials deliberately scuppered the handling of complaints of anti-Semitism in order to create a crisis for the Party leader.
*A culture of vicious bigotry towards certain black, female, and disabled supporters of Jeremy Corbyn within the Party was present amongst those same Labour officials. Interrogation of official work email and WhatsApp accounts has revealed messages which contain clearly racist, misogynistic and ableist comments which are in contradiction to everything we stand for, and which have no place in the Labour Party.
*Those same Labour officials worked secretly for a Tory election victory in the 2017 General Election by diverting election funds away from winnable marginal seats like Carlisle to safe seats with sizeable Labour majorities held by MPs who were staunch opponents of Corbyn.
Biggest increase in Labour vote since 1945
At that 2017 general election Labour achieved the largest increase in its share of the vote since 1945. Policies in the Party’s ‘For the many not the Few’ manifesto such as a £10 per hour minimum wage, the abolition of university tuition fees, taking rail, mail, water and energy back into public ownership and a green industrial revolution to tackle climate change, all gave millions of people hope of a better future.
Labour came close to winning that election from being 20 points behind in the opinion polls at the start of the campaign. We strongly believe that Labour would have won if it hadn’t been for the 18 month campaign, waged by large sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to undermine Jeremy Corbyn in clear defiance of Party members who had twice decisively elected him as leader.
It now appears that those Labour MPs, who we believe preferred a Tory victory to a Labour government with socialist policies, may have been aided every step of the way by a number of senior Labour Party staff.
We could now have been 3 years into a transformative Labour government which would have properly resourced public services including the NHS, with the result that the UK would have been better prepared to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Those implicated should be suspended
We are pleased that Keir Starmer has commissioned an independent investigation into this report.
We call on the Labour Party to also take the following actions:
*To suspend from Party membership all those implicated in acts of serious misconduct until the investigation is completed.
*To ensure that due process is followed during the investigation and that all those implicated in the report are subject to a fair process that provides them with the opportunity to defend themselves.
*To ensure that the findings of the investigation are unmistakeably evidenced based and are made public.
*To apply proportionate sanctions to anyone found guilty of the types of gross misconduct alleged in the report including expulsion from the Labour Party if the evidence is there to warrant this.
We stand in solidarity with all Labour Party members and staff who may have suffered distress due to the alleged behaviour of senior party officials.
Yours sincerely
Labour Councillors – Louise Atkinson – Carlisle City Council (Castle Ward), Alan McGuckin – Cumbria County Council (Castle Division), Karen Lockney – Cumbria County Council (Denton Holme Division), Chris Robinson – Carlisle City Council (Castle Ward)
Members of Carlisle Labour Party – Pete Sunter, David Niven, Jonathan Elliott, Duncan McFarlane, Rachel Hubbard, Fiona Goldie, Hilary Sunter, John Phillips, Craig Johnston
Members of Penrith & the Border Labour Party – Dave Knaggs, Hilary Barker, Hilary Snell, Peter Doyle, Steve Barker, Gary Clifford, Jacqueline Clifford, Laura Harrison, Liam McNulty, Joyce Payne
June 29, 2020
