Tag Archives: Momentum

DO WE DESERVE BETTER THAN ‘WE DESERVE BETTER’? 

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We deserve better

Freshly minted Green MP Carla “Head Girl” Denyer has had to publish her financial interests for the House of Commons without any of the unlawful fucking about allowed at Bristol City Council.

One £15k donation to her came from ‘We Deserve Better’. A shadowy Tankie organisation whose best known supporter is the Guardian’s “Oxbridge” Owen Jones. 

We Deserve Better is currently run by a “committee” of three: Hilary Schan, former Co-Chair of Momentum and independent councillor in Worthing; Dr Carl Walker who left the Labour in May to serve as an independent councillor in Worthing and former Manchester Labour councillor Amna Abdullatif, who resigned from Labour in October 2023. 

Until recently, the committee also included Hamza Ali Shah, “British Palestinian journalist, writer and political researcher”. A few years back, Hamza agreed with George Galloway that “abortion is murder” and posted a number of racist comments, including “Sikhs? Clean hearted?” along with laughing emojis. 

More problematic for openly gay Oxbridge Owen and bi-sexual Denyer is that he also posted messages like “Looool, imagine getting banged by a fag.”

Classy stuff!

LABOUR NEWS

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The selection process for the Labour mayoral candidate in 2020 continues to be gripped by BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA. As nobody, it seems, in the entire Labour movement still has any idea how the trigger ballot process they’re proposing to use to decide if the Reverend runs again or not actually works or when it might take place.

However, we do now have some idea about the Labour-affiliated organisations who will DECIDE whether the Reverend Rees gets a free run at re-election next year or whether he will need to go through a proper and, likely, very tricky ONE MAN ONE VOTE selection process within his own party.

We’re reliably informed that 25 Labour WARD BRANCHES made up of members have a vote each in the trigger ballot; 15 SOCIALIST SOCIETIES have a vote and 77 TRADE UNION AFFILIATES have a vote. Members, many of whom oppose the Reverend, are therefore outgunned THREE TO ONE by the votes of faceless trade union bureaucrats. If this ballot ever happens, the result seems a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile the Bristol Labour Party, encouraged by Momentum campaigners, has forged ahead with an “open” selection process for its candidates for councillor. Although all might not have gone quite to plan after a well-organised LGBT LOBBY helped out by right wing  DARREN “DIPSHIT” JONES SUPPORTERS in Bristol North West managed to get two female socialists and opponents of Rees’s Tory austerity agenda REMOVED from the councillor list for “transphobia”.

Naturally, the usual ragbag of Blairites, social climbers and former Lib Dems who tend to make up the majority of Labour’s council candidates have all been waved through for selection as candidates.

HEY MOMENTUM – WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU AT?

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MOMENTUM is the movement within the Labour Party that has, according to their own manifesto, set out to radicalise the party behind leader Jeremy Corbyn.

While this principle is to be lauded, to the average punter on the Bristol street the internal Labour Party struggles of Momentum against its well-entrenched old guard of (neo)liberals, careerists and self-serving jobsworths means very little. Why?

Sometimes I wonder how many of you have your ear to the street, because we’re in a MASSIVE SOCIAL CRISIS this winter. The homeless are strewn everywhere. No social housing, just rack-rent slum landlords. Wages going down in real terms. Benefits being trashed. Fewer and fewer social services. The NHS on the brink of total collapse. That means GRAPPLING WITH THIS EMERGENCY can’t be put off until ‘after the next election’, but needs to be addressed RIGHT NOW. Here in the socially-cleansed margins of working class Britain, we’re LITERALLY dying by the thousands.

And Bristol’s Labour Party elected representatives are STILL nearly all diehard Blairites. Happy to implement Tory austerity, yet craftily using Momentum activists to keep themselves in power and/or looking good in public. This happens any time one of these anti-Corbyn quislings needs re-election – or to give a recent Bristol example, when they need your street presence to give them the kudos they lack on say, a so-called ‘March Against Austerity’, WHERE THEY DON’T MENTION AUSTERITY OR THE CUTS ONCE!

What would JC do? He’d agree with us. Look back at his record since the 1970s. He always saw Labour Party internal politics as being SECONDARY to the struggles of the countless social movements he was active in. His principles never changed, but he always had the humility to listen to the people first. He didn’t wait until authority had been cleared through his control over the Labour Party – he just GOT STUCK INTO THE ISSUES. That’s why people voted for him and it’s why many more support and trust him today.

There seems to be some confusion in Momentum ranks as to what a social movement is. A social movement is not about ‘getting our guys into office’ in the Labour Party. It’s a MASS GRASS-ROOTS militant and democratic CAMPAIGN built around the key issue of the moment, and also one that isn’t a covert vehicle for any one political group or another. Think of the 1980s Anti-Poll Tax Campaign as a model. Right now, that key issue is STOPPING AUSTERITY DEAD IN ITS TRACKS – while we still can.

So Momentum needs to HELP BUILD that social movement and GET STARTED on it right away. Let the changes in the party structure and democracy be propelled forward by the social movement, not the other way around. Because quite simply, without such a movement, we haven’t a hope of effecting any real change – either within the Labour Party or without.

ANGRY BRISTOL LABOUR PARTY MEMBER

WOOLLEY WANKER AND THE FAKE NEWS FACTORY

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The Reverend meets Woolley Wanker earlier this year. But no one knows who leaked that private Facebook post to Wanker.

As the Reverend heads towards the end of the second year of his car crash term in office, he’s increasingly resorting to calling in favours from friends to silence the mounting number of his critics, not least within his own party, by making WILD ACCUSATIONS of racism.

On 17 November community radio station, BCFM’s Politics Show ran an embarrassing item regarding the Reverend’s father and his antics in St Paul’s in the 1980s. The Politics Show had originally attempted to run the item on 10 November but BCFM bosses PULLED it after the Reverend got wind of it and directly intervened with the station’s bosses.

When the item ran the following week, the calm and collected Reverend told the show the item was “RACIST MUDSLINGING from a racist mudslinging show”. Although there was no discernible racism in the item beyond the fact that the main protagonists were black.

In the same week, on the 13 November, on a PRIVATE local Labour Party Facebook group, Mal Sainsbury,a female Labour activist, to mark the anniversary, posted a historical account of suffagette Theresa Garnett assaulting Winston Churchill in 1909 with a HORSEWHIP at Temple Meads Station .

Mal then invited readers to join her on a demo OPPOSING CUTS at the Council House with the ill-advised rejoinder, “Please join us and bring your metaphorical horsewhip to lick our Mayor and Councillors into shape!”

The Reverend – not unreasonably considering he’s a black man and the role of the horsewhip in slavery – took OFFENCE at this remark and objected in the comments to the post. It was then agreed that the Reverend and the activist would resolve the issue, which had obvious hallmarks of a CLUMSY ERROR rather than RAMPANT HATE SPEECH, privately.

So far, so reasonable. However, fast forward a week and a FAKE NEWS article mysteriously appears on the national Operation Black Vote website under the byline of its boss, Simon Woolley “Wanker”, and headlined, “Labour party must expel Bristol’s racist members”. Coincidentally, Woolley Wanker was a MENTOR to the Reverend at the start of his political career and regularly writes puff pieces about the Reverend on his tedious Blairite website.

A cursory reading of Wanker’s article revealed that he’d been LEAKED some partial, selected and incomplete quotes from the Mal’s private Facebook post. Woolley therefore failed to mention the suffragette context in which her horsewhipping quote appeared.

However, despite only having been SPOONFED a couple of incomplete and conveniently incendiary lines from a private post devoid of all context, this didn’t stop batshit crazy Woolley Wanker calling on Labour Party bosses to “purge the party of its racists”, smearing an individual as well a section of Bristol’s Labour Party opposing Rees’s Tory cuts agenda in Bristol.

Woolley Wanker’s rant continued, “As a matter of urgency Labour party head office must SUSPEND its racist members in Bristol until a investigation is undertaken, and SANCTION those who have supported such appalling rhetoric.”

So not only should an activist who happens to vigorously oppose the Reverend’s shite politics be thrown out of the Labour Party over a poor choice of metaphor but any member who in any way defended her against OBV’s scurrilous FAKE NEWS accusations should also be thrown out as a racist too!

A social media storm naturally followed, stirred up by supporters of the Reverend and Woolley Wanker and with Mal at the centre being subjected to HARSH public accusations of being a racist on the basis of Wanker’s fake news. Mischievious Labour right-wingers piled in too, using the opportunity to attempt to smear Corbynites and anti-cuts activists in the local Labour Party with racism.

Even Alex “Half Baked” Raikes, queen of the local race relations scene and boss of publicly funded SARI, paid by us to deal with SERIOUS RACIST INCIDENTS, waded in to this overblown internal party row. Urging people to complain to the local Labour Party, “the more who write. The better. I’m planning some work with them due to this institutional racism and race hate speech. It’s so cancerous,” she thundered. Apparently perfectly happy to use public money and resources on any old fake news bullshit she discovers on Facebook to assist her friend, the Reverend.

We predict a lot more fake news bullshit as the 2020 mayoral election approaches. Be sure to keep an eye out for any RACIST WITCHHUNTS aimed at anti-cuts activists and Corbyn supporters in the local Labour Party as the Reverend attempts to get reselected in 2019 to run again for mayor in 2020 to deliver another four years of crappy Tory austerity.

Let us know if you spot any fake racism stories.