Google doc going viral: Calling on Ian Lavery MP to stand for Labour Party leader

A Google document that thousands of Labour party members have signed is being circulated across social media asking Ian Lavery to stand for Labour Party leader.

Ian Lavery is seen by many in the Labour Heartlands as the only Labour parliamentarian able to reunite the Party and win back our lost regions. Many Labour voters are very resentful of the so-called ‘Waitrose bubble remain MPs‘ that even against Labour party policy used this election to campaign to remain within the EU.

MP’s like Emily Thornberry who not only openly pushed a for a second referendum and a remain position but used Labours defeat to attack Jeremy Corbyn hoping she can distance herself from the leader while diverting any proportion of blame from herself and other front bench remainers in their part in pushing a disastrous second referendum policy onto the Labour party.

Thornberry would find it very difficult to unite or bring back to the fold leave voting Labour supporters. Thornberry allegedly claimed voters from leave voting seats were stupid! allegedly saying to a fellow MP in a leave-voting seat that she was “glad my constituents aren’t as stupid as yours”.

Ms Thornberry was widely criticised five years ago when she mocked a white van man for draping an England flag out of the window of his home.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary – who has thrown her hat in the ring for the Labour leadership – blasted the claims as “utter lies”.

The document circulating around social media states.

The General Election result has been catastrophic not just for the Labour Party but for the millions of people who need a Labour Government. These are hard and worrying times for many of us.

The direction the Labour Party goes in now will be vital for the future of the country. There’s more than one reason we lost but we think the biggest one was our Brexit position. The people who have put themselves forward for leader so far are remainers who supported our Brexit position. Some have even written articles since the General Election defeat which fail to address how catastrophic our Brexit policy was. Quite honestly, we think if one of those is elected as leader they wouldn’t be able to reconnect to our traditional voters in our old heartlands where more people voted leave. Humility is needed right now but there seems to be little of it on offer.

One senior Labour figure argued that our Brexit position was completely wrong. That person, Ian Lavery is current Chairperson of the party. That’s one reason we are asking him to consider standing for leader, because we think that Ian had the correct view on Brexit and would be able to cut through the anger and sense of betrayal that leave voters feel.

Also Ian has been a full supporter of Jeremy Corbyn during his 4 years leading the party and we think that’s very important. We think its vital that’s there’s no backtracking or watering down of policy. Ian has a fantastic record. For instance he rebelled against the Welfare Reform Bill like Jeremy Corbyn did in 2015 when so many in the party voted for it.

So in essence we think that Ian Lavery is the person to take the Labour Party forward and build on the progress of the last 4 years. Please sign and name constituency if you agree. Thank you.

Add your name to the list to show support and for Ian Lavery to become Labour Party leader please sign here.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdXZ8TdUcZpJ_dUr_0TkLjwweAC7cWmYbrY9Yt4t_98UW2g-g/viewform

#Lavery4Leader

Labour’s Brexit stance left people hurt, abandoned and betrayed. We have to rebuild a hope that things can change

Ian Lavery says Labour needs more socialism, not more liberalism, if it is to win back the confidence of people outside Westminster

Ian Lavery wrote an article describing his experience of the run up to the general election in the Morning Star where he explained:

Two weeks before polling day I went on a tour of seats across north and Midlands, from Middlesbrough to Carlisle via Blyth and finally down to Crewe and Cheshire.

They are all very different places, with different traditions, landscapes and political cultures. But they share an experience of having been abandoned by politics. Forty years after Margaret Thatcher went to war on British industry and made our economy dependent on the City of London, governments of both parties have done little about the rise of boarded-up shops, poverty wages and hopelessness. I am proud of my former mining town and I cannot imagine living anywhere else in the world – but there is a lot that needs improving.

This is why our anti-Brexit stance hit us so hard. When people who had been ignored made a political choice for change, many for the first time, they expected it to be honoured. Labour telling them that we had to re-run the referendum because they had got the wrong answer left people feeling hurt, angry and betrayed.

Brexit is not the only issue we need to look at when analysing what went wrong, but it is the single biggest reason we could not build on our huge advances in 2017. Of the 54 English seats we lost, 51 voted Leave – often in places that are Labour to the core and have been loyal to the party under leaders from Blair to Corbyn.

Our radical manifesto failed to get enough of a hearing because in many places we looked like the Establishment. It also made it difficult to expose how the Tories are using Brexit to put the NHS up for sale and attack workers’ rights, because we were not trusted to be serious about delivering a better Brexit.

Those who argued for Labour to take a second referendum or Remain position in defiance of the largest democratic exercise in modern British history must accept that they made a serious mistake, and must listen to voices outside Westminster.

I say Westminster specifically, because while working-class communities in London did largely vote Remain, the obsessive hard-Remain lobby are not representative of the working classes of either Hackney or Hartlepool. Too many of those in the political bubble rarely get out in London, let alone get out of London.

So Labour must ensure it values and encourages working-class leadership from across the length and breadth of this country. And we need to ensure that the North and Midlands are adequately represented in our leadership and in our party at large, rebuilding our relationships in the places we need to win.

This does not mean compromising on an agenda for radical change. Because only radical change – only the will to redistribute wealth and power on a significant scale – will be able to end the long term managed decline of Northern and Midlands towns and restore hope and pride.

We cannot allow the conversation about why we lost to degenerate into a culture war. We cannot be divided by region, by race, by the way we voted in the referendum, or in any of the other ways the Tories have tried to drive wedges into our movement.

The solution is not more conservatism or more liberalism; it is more socialism, a socialism that revives the spirit of solidarity and community in northern towns which gave birth to the Labour Party in the first place.

The Conservatives are looking to use their majority early on to attack working-class communities and finish the job they began in the 1980s. They are going after railway workers’ right to strike. They are going after our rights at work in their dodgy Brexit deal. They are making noises about investment while in reality keeping austerity for another five years. We should ensure the coming leadership election shows our party at its best not its worst, and puts the focus onto everything this rotten government is trying to get away with, having hijacked the votes of working-class people.

But above all, we need to organise in our workplaces and communities and bring people together around a vision of hope. We have lived in a bleak post-recession world of bad jobs and crumbling services for so long that too many people did not believe another future was possible.

Hope is the argument we have to win.

-Ian Lavery