Liberal fascism is trending in Britain, marked by a crackdown on dissenting voices. The Labour Party is keeping pace with the times; Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership has turned Labour into the liberal wing of a Uni-party that runs Britain in the interests of the global financial system and at the expense of the rest of us. Kensington Labour Party has succumbed, surrendering its power to a system of myopic control managed by zealots, liars, and racists. How did Kensington’s red flag fade to pinkish blue so quickly?

The Pivot: Labour’s Racism Report

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour became associated with antisemitism in the public consciousness thanks to a determined smear campaign some of the country’s most powerful institutions waged against the anti-racist Islington MP. A leaked report details the workings of a racist, sexist, right-wing clique operating at the highest levels of Labour’s governance during the Corbyn era, collaborating to prevent the party from forming a government under the veteran socialist. Upon replacing Corbyn, Keir Starmer recruited the independent barrister Martin Forde KC to investigate the leak, asking Forde to identify the changes required within Labour to eradicate discrimination.

Having considered 1,100 submissions from party members, Forde confirmed both “overt and underlying racism and sexism” at the highest levels of the party, noting “the particular disdain which colleagues reserve for ethnic minority MPs, councillors and CLP members”. The barrister described “a hierarchy of racism or of discrimination with other forms of racism (other than antisemitism) and discrimination being ignored. For a party which seeks to be a standard bearer of progressive politics, equality and workers’ rights, this is an untenable situation.”

Forde criticised Labour’s refusal, under Starmer, to engage with Jewish Voice for Labour’s proposals for antisemitism education, reporting that Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) had been barred from engaging with that organisation despite their obvious expertise.

Labour’s website summarises the Forde Report’s key recommendation: “The report urges the Party to treat all forms of discrimination among staff, elected officials and the wider membership with the same seriousness as incidents of antisemitism.”

David Evans, General Secretary of the party since 2020, responded to Forde by offering “a commitment to you and all other members that such a situation will not arise again and that we will tackle racist and discriminatory attitudes wherever they arise in whatever section of the party.”

Following the report, Labour created a Diversity & Inclusion Board chaired by a trans person. In 2021, the party established codes of conduct on Islamophobia, Afrophobia and anti-Black racism. Meetings were slated for early 2023 to establish a working group to consider the Forde Report. But in May this year Forde lamented the lack of action, saying his work will be rendered pointless unless the recommendations are implemented. The barrister said Labour was still prioritising antisemitism and the Me Too movement at the expense of other forms of discrimination.

Kensington Takeover

Labour and the media have largely ignored Forde’s recommendations and the problems of discrimination have become far worse than the “hierarchy of racism” the barrister described. Under Starmer, Labour has turned its back on vulnerable communities and deployed a strategy of deliberately provoking fear among Jewish communities to create moral justifications for party officials to siphon off decision-making powers from the party’s membership. In Kensington, the effect has been both surreal and chilling.

Local Candidates Removed

As we reported late last year, unelected party officials hijacked the selection process for Labour’s Kensington candidacy. First, members of the National Executive Committee barred the probable winner, former MP Emma Dent Coad, from standing on spurious grounds including having once made a joke about Prince Harry. Labour’s London Region bosses then intervened, eliminating the new favourite to win, another grassroots candidate, Kasim Ali. London Region bureaucrats then took full control of the selection process, declaring branch results without publishing vote counts.

These events passed without protest from the CLP’s members, who have not raised concerns about the process at any subsequent meetings. The usurping of party democracy in Kensington came after the publication of the Forde Report and Evans’s “commitment” to anti-racism, yet a method senior Labour officials employed to rig the Kensington selection was the manufacture of an antisemitism crisis. Out of nowhere, an email was circulated to CLP members featuring clumsy antisemitic language. The party’s London Region Director, Pearleen Sangha capitalised on the email, declaring that CLP members had been suspended and stating that there would be a “serious investigation” into antisemitism in Kensington CLP.

To remove Kasim Ali from the running, Sangha took sole control of the vote at Ali’s home branch. She summarily removed up to 20 British Somalis (the same ethnic background as Ali) from the meeting, preventing them from casting their votes. Is this a party serious about Islamophobia, Afrophobia and anti-Black racism? To date, there have been no complaints made about this incident of prima facie racial profiling at CLP meetings and we understand the CLP has not submitted a complaint to the Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC).

We wrote to London Region multiple times offering them opportunities to retract Sangha’s claims of suspensions and an investigation into antisemitism, but they stuck by her story each time. Kensington CLP officials immediately confirmed to us that there were no suspensions and no investigation, reconfirming this prior to the change in the CLP’s leadership in February. The current CLP Secretary, Monica Press, confirmed to us that there have been no suspensions or investigations relating to alleged antisemitism during her tenure.

Despite it being an established fact that Labour officials created an antisemitism hoax in Kensington, and despite what appears to be, at the very least, a case of targeted discrimination against Black, African, Muslim British-Somalis, there have been no consequences for the officials responsible or for the party as a whole. And Labour members in Kensington, apparently decent and liberal-minded, have remained mute as officials have disenfranchised their comrades. Some are dissonantly focused on the campaign to unseat Conservative MP Felicity Buchan while others fear that speaking up would mean expulsion from the party.

Affiliations Cancelled

More of the same is incoming. When Diane Abbott used clumsy language to point out the indisputable fact that anti-Black racism is far more prevalent throughout our society than antisemitism, anti-Irish, anti-traveller or anti-red head discrimination, Starmer immediately labelled her words “antisemitic.” Like Jeremy Corbyn, Abbott is no longer a Labour MP, and any semblance of left-wing presence in parliament is now in doubt in a country in which millions of people hold socialist values.

In Kensington, as with constituencies around the country, central control has increased with members’ power decreasing in direct proportion. Under Starmer Labour has amended its rules so CLP members no longer have a democratic choice over which comradely organisations they can affiliate to. We have seen an email from a London Region official to Kensington CLP stating that the CLP’s affiliate organisations must be pre-approved by the NEC, not according to a robust set of criteria, but solely based on “the opinion of the NEC”.

In emails seen by us, parliamentary candidate Joe Powell outlined the affiliation rule change to CLP officials, listing the grassroots organisations that were to be disaffiliated at the CLP’s February AGM including Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Stop the War Coalition; Republic; Jewish Voice for Labour; Somalis for Labour; Sikhs for Labour; All African Women’s Group and Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project. A London Region official also wrote to CLP officers warning that affiliating to any of the above organisations would breach party rules.

All requests for affiliations are now considered by just two senior regional party officials, but one of them pre-empted any such requests by telling Kensington CLP to focus their resources on campaigning for their parliamentary candidate, as opposed to building a broader labour movement.  

Kensington members elected officers amenable to the Starmer project, marking a significant turnaround from 2021 when the chair Monica Press resigned from her councillor position citing factional bullying by a small group of left-wing councillors who were then dominant in the CLP. But the votes cast at the February AGM did not mark a renewal of democracy and the authoritarians continued to consolidate their grip.  

Meetings Suspended  

Labour officials have transformed Kensington from a CLP dominated by a small group of allegedly factional but elected left-wingers to one apparently under the control of unelected party bureaucrats. In July, without consulting its membership, the CLP’s executive committee announced the suspension of all branch meetings until February 2024, justified by low turnout at meetings and a need to focus on general election campaigning. In early 2024, the constituency will change its boundaries and become Kensington & Bayswater. The Executive will then decide whether to reinstate branch meetings or to continue their suspension until after the general election.

The CLP Executive also announced it has replaced All Member Meetings with bi-monthly ‘policy forums’, further reducing the ability of local members to engage in the party’s processes and influence policy. The NEC and London Region are expected to retain a close watch over proceedings.

The NEC is pursuing a rule change to reduce CLP executive committees to just six positions. Presuming their proposal is successful, this will be another significant change for Kensington which currently has 15 committee members. Roles such as Environmental Officer, Political Education Officer, Disability Officer and BAME Officer are expected to be among those to be abolished.

Local Labour activists and politicians continue to campaign on some important issues, some no doubt struggling to identify a means of organising that could replace the party’s apparatus. But these campaigns come in the context of a party that supports the World Economic Forum’s vision for our future: “You will own nothing, but you will be happy.”

Don’t Worry Be Happy

Looking from the outside at the chaos of first Emma Dent Coad and then Kasim Ali being removed from the running to be Labour’s Kensington parliamentary candidate, it seems likely that party officials were motivated by a fear that either politician might have been responsive to local demands around the economy, justice for Grenfell and an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and a major component of the Starmer project is to separate decision making from popular demands. At no point has the local membership resisted the takeover by the national party, and by the time Starmer is in number ten, it will be too late for grassroots members to have any influence on Labour’s policies.

The Starmer team’s disfiguring of Labour’s internal democratic apparatus is matched by its draconian worldview. The party is marching in ideological lockstep with sweeping state repression of our rights to protest and free speech (Keir Starmer had professional involvement with the initial harassment and persecution of Julian Assange.) Starmer declared unconditional loyalty to NATO and Israel, aligning Labour’s foreign policy with the Tories’ and reversing the progress made under Corbyn.

Labour’s asphyxiated reactionary policy approach coincides with the Conservative party collapsing from within and a time when the country requires investment after 13 years of austerity. Some Kensington CLP members might believe the crackdown on party democracy is an election-winning strategy masterminded by Jeffery Epstein’s close friend Lord Mandelson. Others will see it for what it really is, part of the freezing out of workers’ concerns from parliamentary politics fortified by intense repression of free speech to demonise and proscribe dissent.

Sir Keir Starmer was more culpable than any other politician for Labour’s 2019 election catastrophe. As Shadow Brexit Secretary, he defied party leaders and pursued a disastrous policy of cancelling the democratic Leave vote. Starmer’s sabotage went unpunished because Labour was desperate to preserve a façade of unity in the face of relentless lies and attacks from the media, and political and military establishments. Starmer and his team have sought to sever the party’s connection to progressive and working-class causes. Cuckolds to war criminals like Tony Blair and the corrupt media class, Labour has moved decisively and ruthlessly to kill off pro-peace, pro-worker, anti-racist interests within its ranks. In Kensington, there has been no rage against the dying of the light.

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles