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Corbyn Expected to Run as Independent After Starmer's Move to Bar Him From Labour
"Blocking Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate is an affront to decency and a declaration of civil war within a party about to metamorphose from a broad church to a toxic sect," said Yanis Varoufakis.
Mar 28, 2023
Former U.K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is expected to seek reelection as an independent next year after current Leader Keir Starmer and his establishment allies on Tuesday made good on their pledge to formally block the leftist member of Parliament from running under the party's banner.
After Starmer publicly declared last month that "Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election," the party's National Executive Committee (NEC) voted 22-12 on Starmer's motion to not endorse Corbyn's candidacy.
The Timesreported that Corbyn's allies say the MP has already decided to run as an independent, with one source telling the London newspaper: "It's become personal. There will be an announcement by the end of the week."
Our message is clear: We are not going anywhere. Neither is our determination to stand up for a better world.
Corbyn has represented the Greater London constituency Islington North for four decades and served as an independent MP since he was suspended from Labour in 2020 due to a battle over allegations of antisemitism in the party.
After news broke of Starmer's motion on Monday, Corbyn charged that the party leader "has broken his commitment to respect the rights of Labour members and denigrated the democratic foundation of the party."
Noting that Islington North voters have elected him as a Labour MP 10 consecutive times since 1983, Corbyn said that "I am proud to represent a community that supports vulnerable people, joins workers on the picket line, and fights for transformative change."
Also calling out the ruling Conservative Party, Corbyn continued:
This latest move represents a leadership increasingly unwilling to offer solutions that meet the scale of the crises facing us all. As the government plunges millions into poverty and demonizes refugees, Keir Starmer has focused his opposition on those demanding a more progressive and humane alternative.
I joined the Labour Party when I was 16 years old because, like millions of others, I believed in a redistribution of wealth and power. Our message is clear: We are not going anywhere. Neither is our determination to stand up for a better world.
Some other MPs, constituents, journalists, and leftists from around the world have, since Monday, blasted Starmer's "disgraceful" move and expressed solidarity with Corbyn.
Greek leftist MP Yanis Varoufakis warned that "Starmer's Labour Party is close to the point of no return. Blocking Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate is an affront to decency and a declaration of civil war within a party about to metamorphose from a broad church to a toxic sect."
Critics have highlighted that in February 2020, Starmer said: "The selections for Labour candidates needs to be more democratic and we should end NEC impositions of candidates. Local party members should select their candidates for every election."
In a joint statement Tuesday, officers from the Islington North Constituency Labour Party (CLP) denounced the move by Starmer and the NEC.
"We believe in the democratic right of all constituency parties to choose their prospective parliamentary candidate," the CLP leaders from Corbyn's area said. "Therefore, we reject the NEC's undue interference in Islington North, which undermines our goal of defeating the Conservatives and working with our communities for social justice."
Noting the CLP's statement in a series of tweets Tuesday, Guardian columnist Owen Jones, who identifies as a socialist and a longtime Labour voter, also took aim at Starmer:
While Starmer was seeking his leadership role, "I think he said a lot of things he didn't believe at all, because he thought that if he didn't, then he wouldn't be elected leader of the Labour Party. And he was absolutely right in that calculation," Jones asserted.
"A lot of Starmer's cheerleaders see themselves as upstanding liberals who believe in decency, honesty, and integrity in politics. They don't," he said. "They disregard the colossal deceit of Starmer because they hate the left, and they believe anything done to crush the left is a good thing."
"Anyway, I don't think it will end well for a Labour leadership which is founded on a load of lies, essentially believes in nothing, and is ahead in the polls solely because of Tory self-destruction," Jones added. "They'll win the election by default, then political reality will intrude."
The grassroots group Momentum, which has supported Corbyn since his successful 2015 campaign to lead the Labour Party, called Tuesday "a dark day for democracy."
While there was previously no appeals process for anyone blocked by the NEC, Sky Newsrevealed Tuesday as the party faces "accusations of fixing parliamentary selections for candidates who are preferred by the leadership," those "who wish to stand for Labour at the next election will be given the right to appeal if the party rejects their bid to become an MP."
According to the outlet, "Candidates will be provided with written feedback as to why they 'fell below the standards expected of a Westminster parliamentary candidate,' while an appeals panel will be convened to hear the claim."
Welcoming the development on Twitter, Momentum said that "socialists and trade unionists have been wrongly excluded in favor of those favored by a narrow London clique. The result has been a cohort of prospective MPs dominated by the professional political classes, making Labour less representative of the communities we seek to serve."
"This new process should mark an end to the Labour right's factional abuses of selections process," the group added. "In Islington North as everywhere else—let local members decide."
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Using Momentum to Build a Stronger Movement
Mar 02, 2016
When I taught at a small graduate school, we always looked forward to Saul Alinsky's annual visit. Alinsky was the terror of city hall bosses everywhere, and he told us colorful stories from his organizing experience. Our school was the Martin Luther King School of Social Change. The students could earn an M.A. in Social Change, which, when asked, I would explain stood for "Master's in Agitation."
This was the late 1960s, and most of our students were drawn from front-line communities where the struggles were hot. The students were famously direct and critical, and by the time Alinsky turned up, they would have read his "Rules for Radicals" and be eager to take him on.
"Where's your big picture?" they demanded. "How do all those stop-sign victories on a local level add up to larger institutional change?"
He challenged them right back. "What's your method of leadership development? What does empowerment mean if it's just about drama and a flash in the pan? Do the headlines grabbed by you romantics result in solid organizations that improve people's lives in the workplace or the neighborhoods where they live?"
The two great traditions -- mass protest and community/labor organizing -- continue to argue with each other to this day. In "This Is An Uprising" Mark and Paul Engler argue. Their book describes some of the foremost adversaries, including Alinsky himself and activist-sociologist Frances Fox Piven, and sets out their ideas fairly.
The Englers' book, however, could not have been written in the 1960s when Alinsky took on my students. Brothers Mark and Paul Engler shine much more light than we had available then. They draw ideas from the accelerating use of nonviolent struggle on local and national levels and the research that points out what did and didn't work to produce lasting change that affects people's lives.
Spoiler alert: The Englers propose a craft that makes the best of both traditions -- a craft they call "momentum." They don't pull this off by synthesis. They do it by calling everyone to a higher order of strategizing.
Born teachers, they show rather than tell. They show how momentum can work by sharing vivid glimpses from movements and campaigns as various as the DREAMers, Occupy Wall Street, ACT-UP, the Birmingham civil rights campaign, the Harvard 2001 student sit-in for a liveable wage, the LGBT movement, Tahrir Square and the campaign against Egypt's dictatorship, the overthrow of Serbia's dictator Slobodan Milosevic, and others.
Are we there yet? No, the craft is not yet fully embodied, but the Englers help us to see it emerging through the creativity and daring of activists in many places. They also bring to the conversation analysts like political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, sociologist/organizer Bill Moyer, civil resistance studies founder Gene Sharp, and others. (Full disclosure: I'm there, too. Plus, parts of the book first appeared on Waging Nonviolence.) All of this invites the reader to learn "how to combine explosive short-term uprisings with long-term organizing that can make movements more sustainable."
I've rarely seen movements described so intimately at their strategic turning points, supported with the comparative insights of scholars in the field. Reading the gripping stories alone makes the book worthwhile.
Framing our challenge as a skill-set
The Englers intend to help the reader become skillful in several ways: by "staging creative and provocative acts of civil disobedience," "intelligently escalating once a mobilization is underway," and making sure that "short-term cycles of disruption contribute to furthering longer-term goals."
They take the time to deconstruct the two traditions and show how the differences reveal strengths and weaknesses on both their parts. In the light of this book, Alinsky and my students were both right and wrong. Each side needed a creative leap to find ways of retaining their own strengths and borrowing the strengths of the others through a new theory and practice.
The craft does mean letting go of some assumptions held by both sides, and the Englers are frank about that -- again backing themselves up with the movements' own experiences. As I read, I imagined going through the wealth of campaigns in the Global Nonviolent Action Database to see more examples of people practicing aspects of the craft - or not.
An example of a questioned assumption from the mass protest tradition is: Disruption has the inevitable cost of getting backlash not only from the power holders but also the people caught in the middle. I remember surging with others into a center city street at the height of traffic on a Friday afternoon, for example, and shrugging off the cost to the jammed-up drivers who couldn't pick up their kids from school. The book points out that the political cost of disruption to the 99 percent can be offset by tactical choices in which the activists "put more skin in the game" through personal sacrifice. What I get from this is that creativity matters: It's time to drop the mindless reflex of blocking traffic to show we're indignant.
Another dubious assumption from the mass protest tradition is that sheer numbers win the day. I remember during the anti-Vietnam War movement, there were repeated marches down New York's 5th Avenue. The organizers rejoiced each time the number grew, but the Englers point out -- based on what works in getting change -- drama often trumps numbers. I contrast the "numbers obsession" with Alice Paul's choice to leave the woman suffrage organization's mass marches and start a campaign with smaller numbers and more significant drama -- and then win.
When analyzing what they call "the whirlwind," the Englers clearly describe a movement moment: "The defining attribute of a moment of the whirlwind is that it involves a dramatic public event or series of events that set off a flurry of activity and that this activity quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups."
We can see why mass protests worry some leaders of community organizations and unions - the loss of control. What those leaders miss is the opportunity for organizing that a whirlwind gives. The Englers recall Mine Workers union leader John L. Lewis' use of a whirlwind in the 1930s to organize more unions (membership organizations) and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations into a cohesive national force that gravely worried the 1 percent.
Some Occupy Wall Street leaders saw that kind of opportunity in the Occupy whirlwind, but as we know, the prevailing culture of Occupy prevented building a mass movement. Now I wonder if Occupy's resisters of growth might have been willing to play a bigger game if they had known about the craft of momentum-driven organizing.
In any case, now there's a new marker for us to go by in the Englers' book, and new reason for hope for effective outcomes of our work.
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Political Energy Electrifies Nevada Ahead of Bellwether Caucus
The Clinton campaign has been trying to lower expectations, spuriously painting Nevada as a largely-white state amid a Sanders surge
Feb 19, 2016
Nevada's unpredictable electorate and "fractured Latino vote" are in the spotlight on the eve of the state's Democratic caucus, with polls showing Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders going into Saturday's contest neck-and-neck.
While the Silver State was supposed to be a lock for Clinton, recent endorsements (and non-endorsements) and demonstrable voter enthusiasm have signaled a Sanders surge backed up by polling.
| #americatogether Tweets |
As The New Republicexplained, "Nevada offers a much different terrain" than Iowa or New Hampshire: "The state's population is 28 percent Latino, 8 percent Asian-American, and 9 percent African-American."
"Sanders needs to prove he can win over Latinos, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans--there's no other way that he can seriously compete for the nomination," wrote TNR's Jeet Heer. "Clinton, conversely, needs to prove that her 'firewall' of non-white support, which she's also counting on in the upcoming Southern primaries, will be strong enough to block Sanders."
Des Moines Register reporter Jennifer Jacobs wrote on Friday:
For Clinton to be victorious in the Nevada caucuses, she needs blacks and Latinos to turn out in numbers like in the 2008 race, and she needs to carry that Las Vegas-based segment of the electorate. She has to make sure she doesn't get swamped in rural counties like she did running against Barack Obama eight years ago. And although she doesn't need to dominate Nevada's other population base -- Reno -- she needs to post a decent showing there.
"Our state is a three-pronged approach," said Leo Murrieta, a Democratic political consultant and Latino activist in Las Vegas who supports Clinton.
Sanders, who didn't open his first office here until October, three months later than Clinton, must thwart her meticulously planned strategy in those three areas by stoking the last-minute fever of enthusiasm that left-leaning Nevadans are feeling for him, strategists said.
Indeed, "the fractured Latino vote threatens further to erode Clinton's aura as the party's nominee-in-waiting," the Guardian reported on Friday.
While Clinton "still maintains the backing of Nevada's older, democratic establishment, including a string of prominent Latino figures...look beyond the endorsements from prominent figures, such as civil rights leaders Astrid Silva and Dolores Huerta and actor Eva Longoria, and the Latino community's alliances begins to fray," the paper continued, writing:
The same is true for unions in Nevada, which also tend to be heavily Latino and, in a service-sector dominated state, have historically been kingmakers in Democratic elections.
While labor leaders back Clinton, low-wage workers and indebted students are being drawn to the message of radical economic change propagated by the 74-year-old senator from Vermont who some are calling "El Viejito" (the little old man).
Meanwhile, the Clark County Black Caucus, an organization in Nevada's largest county, endorsed Sanders late Thursday. On Friday, the Sanders campaign launched its #AmericaTogether hashtag, highlighting the Vermont senator's multicultural appeal.
To that end, the Clinton campaign has appeared to be trying to lower expectations, painting Nevada as a largely-white state.
"There's an important Hispanic element to the Democratic caucus in Nevada, but it's still a state that is 80% white voters," Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign press secretary, said last week. "You have a caucus-style format, and he'll have the momentum coming out of New Hampshire presumably, so there's a lot of reasons he should do well."
Renowned Nevada pundit Jon Ralston scoffed at that "canard," noting that "Nevada's Hispanic population is about 27 percent" and that "nearly half of the state's population is made up of minorities."
According to Politico, Sanders' surge in Nevada has been served by his "ability to tap directly into the bloodstream of Nevada progressives."
Politico reports:
While Clinton has been making a direct appeal to Latino voters here by saying she would go further than President Barack Obama on immigration reform, Sanders' resolute message reverberated across the demographic board here, party leaders said.
"Nevada was one of the states hit hardest by the Bush recession and the foreclosure crisis," said Rebecca Lambe, a senior adviser to the Nevada Democratic party and to Sen. Harry Reid, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race. "The unemployment rate was the worst in the nation. The Sanders campaign recognized that their candidate's economic message would resonate here and they pounced."
Or, as University of Nevada-Las Vegas English instructor and restaurant server Brittany Bronson wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Friday:
Clinton's proposals are a step in the right direction. But with the economy tepid and income inequality only growing, modesty is not a good enough policy. And as anyone who has spent time in the real Las Vegas -- the struggling, striving working-class metropolis behind the neon lights -- can attest, her proposals won't make a dent in most Americans' lives.
Nevada's recent history testifies to the tragic ramifications of corporate greed and power, but also to the benefits of worker-centered policies. Mr. Sanders speaks directly to those themes, and to voters' growing concerns. Nevada, more than any other early contest, will show how well he is getting through to them.
"With its relatively few delegates, Nevada isn't a do-or-die state--but its diversity does make it a bellwether state," Heer wrote at TNR. "If Sanders can pull off a win on Saturday, or even if he comes close, it'll be clear that his revolution has real legs."
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