..to think that Labour is rotten from the inside?

[bounceoff]

I’m not a Tory voter, so I’m not posting to say how good they are (cos clearly, very clearly, they’re not!).

Has anybody else listened to The Labour Files on Al Jazeera English? (Link to podcast and web page below)?

Basically Al Jazeera got given years of communications from the Labour Party and investigated it. It details anti-Semitism, but not from Jeremy Corbyn - against even holocaust survivors, deep seated Islamophobia, racism/xenophobia any misogyny. To be honest the Labour Party primed Labour votes to vote Tory.

Labour councillors and members were followed and had files kept on not only their movements, but those of their children.

It actively took steps to avoid Muslim members being elected.

It actively purged members who joined to vote for Corbyn.

Brickgate had no brick ever found.

The list goes on.

I have zero faith in politicians, but this is something quite different. The level of control exerted to stop alternatives views being heard, to prevent democratic processes happening is quite horrifying. There is a clear thread that the party only likes democracy when it’s controlling it.

I have been confused about why the Labour Party lacks so many people of colour in the parliament and this was squarely answered. Same with why there’s not been a female leader. Because from what we hear from the party it makes zero sense. After listening to this report, I’m surprised anybody other than a handful of white men vote for it.

The party seems completely rotten from the core.

AIBU thinking this after listening to the investigation? Anybody else heard it?

www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/23/unprecedented-leak-exposes-inner-workings-of-uk-labour-party

podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/al-jazeera-investigates/id1488977521?i=1000581016758

jgw1
@ Clavinova can you explain why the government is introducing a windfall tax on green energy producers, but not one on fossil fuel polluters?

What do you mean? The Government announced a windfall tax (The Energy Profits Levy) on UK oil and gas profits at the end of May;

www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/25/rishi-sunak-to-announce-windfall-tax-on-energy-firms

House of Commons
The Energy Profits Levy is an additional 25% tax on UK oil and gas profits on top of the existing 40% headline rate of tax, taking the combined rate of tax on profits to 65%.

The Levy takes effect from 26 May 2022. HM Treasury estimates that it will raise around £5 billion in its first 12 months.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9578/

bills.parliament.uk/bills/3306

Liz Truss hasn't extended the windfall tax to cover other generators (or raise the rate) - but she hasn't cancelled the existing one either;

23 September 2022

Bloomberg
The UK expects to raise more than £28 billion ($30.9 billion) in the coming years from a windfall tax on oil and gas firms.

The revenue will go toward offsetting the huge costs of subsidizing energy bills amid a cost-of-living crisis driven by soaring gas and power prices. The forecast was released as part of Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini budget presented in Parliament on Friday and includes the period through the 2026-27 fiscal year.

When announced, the tax was expected to raise £5 billion in the first year. The latest government estimate puts revenue from the levy roughly 50% higher at £7.7 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year, with the figure set to exceed £10 billion the following year.

The total amount raised will ultimately depend on oil and gas market prices. Plus, companies that invest in new production can reduce their liability.

www.bnnbloomberg.ca/windfall-tax-on-uk-oil-and-gas-producers-to-top-28-billion-1.1822870

So far, Labour have only published an energy plan with an £8 billion windfall tax on oil and gas profits - let's see them publish the rest.

or raised the rate

Why has this thread been usurped by an unrelated conversation, between two individuals with no obvious interest, in the OP's original Comment?

Is this a normal occurrence, on Mumsnet?

@eesy It is a regular feature of Clav's posting style that they cut and paste links to irrelevant squirrels. I thought I would copy their style.

@Clavinova Jacob Rees Mogg will not be pleased with you calling it a windfall tax. He was busy tying himself up in knots this morning on the radio to avoid stating the obvious.

Corbyn's 'English irony' comments were extremely antisemitic, there is no doubt about that. He also has a very long history of being mixed up with and defending racist antisemites including those who called for the mass murder of Jewish people. I certainly wouldn't, I'd tell them how disgusting they were and completely shun them. Wouldn't you?

There aren't that many people in the York photo. There never are. I'm still curious as to where Corbyn was in Liverpool in September where he got a standing ovation from 4000 people because the only event I can find was in a room which would have had max 100 capacity only if 3 rooms were hired and configured together, otherwise it would have been under 50.

Thank you, for that information. There's no longer any point, in being here.

Thoroughly, rude and ill-mannered.

jgw1

Labour MPs (including sometimes Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer) keep claiming we haven't got a windfall tax - some Labour MPs seem very confused indeed.

So 'extremely antisemitic' that, that's the court case I referred to earlier, that has been thrown out of court, as nonsense.

Neither party, conceded, neither party paid any compensation or costs. A complete waste of the courts time.

'There aren't that many people in the York photo.' 🙂🤔

Laughing at the idea of the Labour Party as far left! 😄

@Clavinova are you saying we have some kind of Schrodinger's windfall tax.

We have one, but the Conservatives say we don't and we shouldn't, Labour say we should have one, but we don't have one.

Or do we have the wrong kind of windfall tax.

Maybe you can help me with the important question of the day?

Do unicorns in sunny uplands live on growth?

NC for this. I was a Labour member and CLP officer with some connection to the national party machine since before Corbyn's election to the leadership, until 2020 when I resigned in disgust. I've watched all the al jazeera episodes. I can't say for certain that every detail they claim is true, but it all certainly accords with my experience of the party and we had many similar experiences locally. The right wing of the party and the unelected bureaucrats who do their bidding are an astonishingly ruthless, amoral force with no regard for democracy, justice or decency whatsoever. When they can't get their way fairly within the overt procedures of the party, they just make stuff up, lie, cheat and do whatever it takes to do so unfairly.

The OP and other posters who actually have experience of this, particularly @SummerWhisper , are bang on the money. Starmer's project is one of utter, morally bankrupt, unashamed lying and corruption. You can say what you like about left and right, who you like or don't like and whether you think Jeremy was useless from the start and right to be gotten rid of by any means necessary, or the last great hope of challenging the establishment and destroyed because they genuinely feared him. But in a situation like this, facts matter. What are the facts that suggest he was an antisemite? There aren't any. The BBC panorama "documentary" gave a one sided view based on supposition and believing who they wanted to believe. Anybody who has seen the farce that is the Labour party disciplinary process from the inside knows just how little they care about anything to do with facts.

Unfortunately most people are not in a position to research these kinds of internal party machinations in enough details to judge for themselves whether AJ are correct or not, and neither should they need to be. You should be able to presume that a political party's internal processes operate with a reasonable degree of accountability and natural justice, in accordance with the values that that party expresses externally about how it intends to run the country. Unfortunately in the case of the Labour party, that is not so. This also matters, because the Labour party was founded on the principle of representing working people and communities, and one of Corbyn's (temporary) achievements was to start reinvigorating that purpose. For democracy to work, it needs to consist of much more than people simply turning out to vote once every five years and then forgetting about it. Political parties that function to represent normal people arguing for their concerns from day to day are one way that politics can remain genuinely representative, and the Labour party was the only mass membership party that had some structure for doing that. Now that is gone, destroyed by Starmer, and we're left with a choice between two remote and unrepresentative professional organisations.

Having said all that, others are also probably correct that Starmer's Labour would do a better job of governing than the current Tories. My God though, what a low bar.

Having said all that, others are also probably correct that Starmer's Labour would do a better job of governing than the current Tories. My God though, what a low bar.

If Starmer and his right wing bunch get elected, then they will use it as proof for evermore that people want a right wing Labour Party, and we will never again have a socialist Labour Party again.

#anyonebutStarmer

Yes, there is that.

The electorate do want a centre-left Labour Party. You can't get anywhere without the voters.

There is a Labour Socialist Party

The Labour Party are not that party voters do not want a socialist party we are not a socialist country

when Labour go to the left they are rejected by voters. What’s the point in being in opposition where you can’t make changes. I know there are too many party members who would prefer that Labour stay further to the left than have the party be more to the centre. And look where we ended up 🙄

and again with the crowds so what are we
still having to hear that under Corbyn the party had the highest number of party members. Well that worked out fantastically at the last GE hut not for Labour

the damage has been done by Corbyn and the left of the party it’s kept us in opposition (and often a pathetically poor opposition) for far too long but he brings in crowds 🙄

Good Lord, HRTQueen, at least scan through the videos, or listen to the accompanying podcasts, before you leap onto the thread with your entrenched prejudices.

It's not a good look.

@HRTQueen

What you're saying is commonly received wisdom, which up until recently might have had a point. The problem with it is that we're in a period of unprecedented turbulence and change now, in which the neoliberal consensus is being more and more exposed as incapable of providing a decent life for many citizens. I'm not sure that established prejudices about what the country "is" simply because it "always has been" are worth very much. We are going to need solutions to things from outside the box, simply because the box is manifestly failing to provide those solutions itself.

I'm not saying that socialism as traditionally understood is necessarily that solution. Just that capitalism, and thus the assumption that an electorally successful Labour party has to be capitalist-leaning, doesn't appear to be. Many of the policies in Labour's 2019 manifesto were/are extremely popular, and many of them (such as nationalisation of utilities) are looking a bit different now that we've experienced the worst of the alternative.

The idea of a pervading sense of continuity from the last 70 years into the future - and with it the whole raft of cultural and political assumptions including the necessary centrism of the Labour party - just seems denialist and lazy. Because of climate change if nothing else. I wonder what level of desperation and destitution capitalism will be able to lead us to, while people still stand around convinced that There Is No Alternative because "we are not a socialist country".

Just about the only thing that seems certain to me is that we as a country are going to have to become something different to anything we have been before.

eesy i have listened to the podcast, it’s nothing new.
opinion is formed from one fact the Tories won an 80 seat majority and it was the worse election for Labour in what 80 odd years

Jolly there is an alternative to the Tories it’s just not a Labour Party that is too far left

you work with what you have not what you ideally want.

I have no doubt in ten years time Labour will once again make the same mistake and vote in a leader that is far to the left and once again shall remain in opposition but we shall hear about the party having the biggest membership, how they shall smash up the establishment and turn the UK into a socialist country

@HRTQueen you've nailed the problem with the left in the UK - so mired in ideological purity that they won't vote for a party that isn't perfectly sweet and good. Meanwhile the Tories keep getting in. Learn pragmatism, hold your nose and then make changes from the inside because otherwise we'll be stuck with this lot forever. And it'll be on left leaning idealogues as much as it is on diehard Tory voters.

There aren’t enough diehard Tory voters to keep them in if Labour get a Blair type centrist vote

Loads of people do switch and tend towards the middle so get those people and being in power is possible

Same is true for die hard Labour which is why the last election went as it did

@MarshaBradyo this is why we need PR - so that the two parties we currently have which are composed of warring factions can break apart into separate political movements with a chance of being represented in parliament. And so that each vote actually counts.

It was/is infiltrated by fifth columnists. We have no democracy. Johnson should never have won in 2019. Whole system is corrupt. Depresses me, thinking what we could have had. Now that this is more public knowledge, surely that result should be declared null, and we can get Corbyn in as leader.

Labour is rotten on the inside, the Tories are rotten on the outside. There’s some good sorts in both, but the good people get tarnished by the shits. It’s depressing