Labour has lost members at a rate of nearly 250 a day since Sir Keir Starmer was elected last spring, with supporters of Jeremy Corbyn leading an exodus from the party. This is before Starmer’s personal decision to keep the whip from his former boss and Leader of the Labour Party.
Membership fell by just under 57,000 people, or 10 per cent, between April and November, according to official figures from its internal elections. Sir Keir Starmer was elected leader of the party in April this year since then the Party have seen an Exoudos of members who no longer feel the Party represents Labour values.
In contrast, the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn oversaw a surge in new members making the Labour Party the biggest Party in western Europe and reviving its membership from the losses seen after the devastating centrist take over under Blair and Brown. The current figures mark the first time the party has had less than 500,000 members since 2016.
Labour in the mid-1990s, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, peaked at 405,000 in 1997 but after two terms of Tony Blairs Tory tribute Party the membership plummeted and Brown stood little chance of being elected.
In the 2018 Labour NEC elections, 293,000 votes were cast. In this year’s it was 135,000. You suspect a lot of members have cancelled direct debits and this is yet to really feed through. It’s down by more than half.
The departure of Left wing and socialist supporters are believed to have hastened in recent weeks as thousands have announced on social media that they were quitting after Jeremy Corbyn was suspended over antisemitism.
It is also unclear how many more members have left the Party since the fiasco of Sir Keir Starmer refusing Jeremy Corbyn the whip and not allowing him to sit as a Labour Party MP. It will be significantly higher than 57,000 as there is a lag between a cancelled direct debit and membership elapsing.
As said before it will be significantly higher than 57,000 as there is a lag between a cancelled direct debit and membership elapsing. Suspect it’s more than double this by now.https://t.co/KWrhgtHoA0
— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) November 23, 2020
This follows Jeremy Corbyn’s recent suspension from the party over comments he made regarding a report in anti-Semitism within Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn said: “Antisemitism is absolutely abhorrent, wrong and responsible for some of humanity’s greatest crimes.
“One antisemite is one too many, but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. “
Meanwhile, sources have urged Labour supporters not to leave the party in droves.
One ‘source on the left’ told The Times the recent exodus from the party “shows the level of discontent with Kier”.
However, they also warned members to “stay and fight rather than handing over the party on a plate”.
The paper added that Sir Keir Starmer could more easily exert control on the party following the departure of Mr Corbyn’s supporters – though it could also hit the party’s income.
At the time of Labour’s national executive committee elections two weeks ago, the party had 495,961 members.
However, most suggest remaining in what is fast becoming a Blairite Tory tribute Party with the slogan ‘Remain and fight’ is as futile as the ‘People’s vote’ ‘Remain and Reform’ mantra.
#LabourLeaks
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” George Orwell 1984
Due in a matter of weeks potentially, the independent inquiry aims to probe a party report which was leaked last year. LINK
Starmer is soon due to face the results of an inquiry into infighting within the party. The 860-page report containing WhatsApp’s messages from Labour Party staffers and officers from the Legal and governance department appearing to work against the Labour Party in getting elected in 2017, banking old Anti-Semitism allegations and even creating a program to hunt out Labour Party members comments on social media that could be used against them.
Local parties warned against speaking out against Panorama settlement, EHRC, IHRA. Labour’s local chairs and secretaries were last night warned by the party centrally that their online meetings should not discuss a number of specified sensitive topics related to both the Party’s Panorama out of court settlement and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.
Then, of course, there are the damning racist comments about Black Labour MPs. Many of these Staffers are the same Labour staffers that Sir Keir Starmer later made a personal decision against legal advice to pay a six-figure out of court sum to after they threatened to take the Party to court.
Diane Abbott has called for the leaked Labour report that sparked allegations of anti-Black racism to be published in full.
This comes after the Guardian printed an article claiming the former staffers are now claiming the report contained misused private messages from their WhatsApp account.
The leaked 860-page report emerged in April, just after Keir Starmer became Labour leader, reigniting party splits by claiming that Corbyn’s chances of success were scuppered by disgruntled party elements.
Authored anonymously in the final months of Corbyn’s tenure, the report said opponents hampered his efforts to tackle antisemitism in the party and cited WhatsApp messages insulting Corbyn’s allies. Some of the messages had apparent racist or sexist overtones, prompting outrage among the party’s BAME members.
The Irony of these staffers claiming the messages were private is that these former staffers stand accused of creating a program that trawled through Labour Party members social media, the program hunting for keywords that would enable them to suspend or expel members, all done without any consideration for the member’s privacy.
The report even goes as far as to say they created what they called a ‘New Stasi’ system, this had a tool that could scrape Twitter accounts looking for left-wing members they could suspend or expel from the Labour Party
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