Labour has decided to start their campaign with a bang, pruning women of colour and left wingers from the ballot due to reasons such as liking tweets sharing Jon Stewart videos. At the end of the day it boils down to support for Palestine.
Looks like Labour is doing what they can to make sure UK politics remains completely fucked even after the end of the Tory rule.
I was making my own post about this, but I’ll just post what I was going to write here instead of having two posts about the same thing.
Labour deselects left-wing candidates
Two Corbynist have been barred from standing by Labour party, with a third suspected to be also soon be barred.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle, MP for Brighton Kemptown, has had what he described as a ‘politically motivated’ complaint made about his behaviour eight years ago. He notes that the complaint being made so close to the election that there isn’t time for him to clear his name before then.
Meanwhile, Faiza Shaheen, candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, announced on Newsnight that she had been deselected over a collection posts and likes she made on Twitter. She says one of the tweets brought up is one describing her experiences of Islamophobia within the Labour Party.
One that she apologised directly for is this tweet of a John Steward sketch captioned with “every time you say something even mildly critical of Israel, you’re immediately assailed by scores of hysterical people”.
Leaked Whatsapp messages have revealed that Poplar and Limehouse MP Apsana Begum has had a complaint made to the NEC about her by her CLP calling for a selection vote, supposedly from friends of her abusive ex-husband.
These announcements come on that back of Starmer allies being parachuted into seats, including director of think tank Labour Together Josh Simons, and NEC member and director of Labour First and We Believe in Israel Luke Akehurst.
Much more informative than my post - thank you for the write-up, sorry for jumping the line!
Looks like Labour is doing what they can to make sure UK politics remains completely fucked even after the end of the Tory rule.
Literally what Starmer was brought in to do - make sure the country continues to be run by and for capitalists.
How anyone can see what he’s done and continues to do to the party (never mind what little his party does as the opposition) and still think he works for anyone but the establishment is wildly depressing.
ge2024: basically just trading the blue tories for the red tories.
Has “people of colour” caught on over here now? It always sounded uncomfortably close to “coloured people” as a kind-of-offensive term for all non-whites.
That’s how it used to be used, but has since been reclaimed. It’s safe to use.
That’s good to know. Doesn’t really matter if I think it’s weird as long as it’s not actually upsetting anyone!
Pretty sure the UK term was BAME, but US culture is pretty pervasive.
There has been a move away from BAME in recent years in favour of more accurate, less broad terms:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53194376
https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2022/05/19/why-weve-stopped-using-the-term-bame-in-government/
Thanks, those were both really good articles!
Seems “BAME” is being rejected mostly for qualities it shares with the term “PoC”.
Happy to help, and yes, there is definitely a move away from the more general “catch-all” terms that seem to exist mostly to make life easier for those outside of the group in question, rather than those in it. It’s a good move.
They’re basically fancy ways of saying “non white”.
There’s a use case for making that distinction but it’s a lot narrower than expecting people to self-identify in those terms.
Which, within that use case (e.g talking about wide and systemic oppression by white-led cultures) I guess that could be like the argument some people from certain countries have made that “Third World” is useful term because it does retain the history of its useage, whereas when it’s exchanged for terms like LDCs>Global South>LICs>etc that sort of obscures the historical material conditions and relational aspects which inform the present. Or something.
Tories leave massive open goal for Labour. Labour: what if we were the Tories too!
