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Left-wing members of the Labor governing body have staged a massive strike in protest at the actions of the Labor leadership, including the election of a key Keir Starmer ally as chairman of the body.
The Guardian understands that 13 members of the National Executive Committee (NEC), including high-level members of the Unite and FBU unions, as well as representatives of the districts, including former MP Laura Pidcock, organized a pre-planned strike in protest at the elections. Margaret Beckett as President of NEC.
Several left-wing members of the NEC have expressed outrage at Starmer’s decision to withhold the whip from former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn after comments he made following an equality watchdog report on anti-Semitism in the party.
Chronology
Labor and anti-Semitism
Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labor leader and the party’s membership rises to more than half a million.
Naz Shah, a Labor MP, is suspended after sharing a post on Facebook suggesting that Israel should be relocated to the United States.
Labor publishes an investigation into Shami Chakrabarti’s anti-Semitism, but the post is overshadowed by a dispute over comments made by Corbyn in which he appeared to make a comparison between the Israeli government and Islamist extremists.
Corbyn laments after it emerged that in 2012 he had supported a street artist accused of producing an anti-Semitic mural in London’s East End.
Three days later, Corbyn issues his strongest condemnation of anti-Semitism yet, declaring that he is “a militant opponent” of anti-Jewish hatred as members of the Jewish community stage a protest outside parliament. Corbyn makes many similar statements in the run-up to the 2019 election.
Veteran Jewish Labor MP Margaret Hodge is subject to disciplinary proceedings after calling Corbyn an anti-Semite during an angry confrontation in the House of Commons, after Labor decided not to adopt the International Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety to Holocaust Remembrance (IHRA).
Three Jewish newspapers carry similar front pages, criticizing Labor’s decision not to adopt the IHRA definition. In a joint editorial, they write that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country.”
Corbyn refuses to apologize after footage from 2013 surfaced of him saying a group of Zionists “had no sense of irony.” Corbyn said he had used the term Zionist “in the exact political sense and not as a euphemism for the Jewish people.”
Seven Labor MPs, including prominent Jewish member Luciana Berger, resigned from the party to found the short-lived ChangeUK, in part accusing party leaders of not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.
Labor is decisively defeated in the general election, prompting Corbyn to resign.
The EHRC’s 130-page report concludes that the Labor Party could have addressed anti-Semitism more effectively “if the leadership had chosen to do so.” Following its publication, former leader Jeremy Corbyn is suspended for the match.
The Corbyn bloc in the NEC, which now has a majority supporting Starmer’s leadership, has been further angered by the decision to suspend the body’s rotating presidency system. The move allowed Beckett, the former Labor vice president, to be elected president in place of Ian Murray of the FBU, who was to take office after being vice president.
Murray was one of 14 NEC members to sign a letter to Secretary General David Evans who was highly critical of Starmer’s leadership and criticized “political interference” in the decision to suspend Corbyn’s whip after his suspension. of the party was lifted by a disciplinary panel of NEC.
In a second letter to Evans published after the strike, the 13 members repeated their request that Evans “admonish Starmer for his decision to undermine the role of the NEC by removing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn.”
They said the “long-standing protocol” was for the vice president to be elected as head of the body. “This is not protocol and is another example of the leader promoting factionalism within the Labor Party,” the letter read, citing Murray’s signatory to the previous letter as a reason he was barred from becoming president.
“The leader’s decision to promote factionalism again comes at a time when the historical relationship with the unions is under tremendous strain,” the letter said.
The letter said that the 13 members did not intend to resign from the NEC and would return to future meetings “to be the legitimate voice of the members and to continue to demand that the party unite and reject the leader’s current factional approach.”
The strike, which took place on Labor’s NEC absentee day at Zoom, is understood to have been coordinated by Pidcock and Howard Beckett of Unite, the current frontrunner on the left to succeed Len McCluskey as union general secretary.
Mish Rahman, one of the local constituency representatives in the body, said: “Once again, Starmer is trying to play with democracy and undermine the role of unions within our party. This latest action fits into a disturbing pattern of freak control reminiscent of the New Labor years.
“There can be no party unity until Starmer fully understands the need to work with the Labor movement and the many tens of thousands of rank-and-file members who can help bring about a Labor government. Our strike today was to remind you of this and to send you a message that we will not tolerate petty and repeated attacks on unions and members. “
NEC members described chaos when the bloc withdrew, allowing Margaret Beckett to be elected as the NEC by a unanimous 24 vote. One NEC member said it was “clearly planned in advance … they threw their toys out of the stroller … none of us came out when we didn’t get our way, we lost votes!”
Another called it a “total frontal attack” on the leader by Howard Beckett and Pidcock. The strike did not go as well as expected. A source described how Beckett had given an angry speech before the strike, but then spent an agonizing minute trying to find the button to exit the virtual meeting.
Labor sources said the decision to elect Margaret Beckett rather than allow Murray to take his turn as president was a restoration of the old system that had been in place until 2017, where the longest-serving NEC member becomes president. . Beckett was first elected to the NEC in 1980. Alice Perry, a longtime Islington councilor, was elected vice president.
Corbyn has had his whip suspended for three months, excluding him from the parliamentary Labor Party, pending an investigation into whether he had violated PLP’s code of conduct.
He had been suspended from the Labor Party as a whole at the end of October for comments he made after an equality watchdog report on anti-Semitism in the party, but his membership was reinstated after three weeks when the party gave him a formal warning. The former Labor leader has been asked to formally apologize and withdraw comments in which he said the scale of the problem had been “dramatically exaggerated for political reasons” by opponents and the media.
