Please pause for thought
Two political posts in 3 days – evidence of my distress.
This is a copy of an email I have just sent to the Labour Party
tom@tom-watson.com
theteam@labour.org.uk
northwest@labour.org.uk
Things are moving so fast that my feedback may be too late but I think it’s important to record it.
I was abroad the month before the referendum so I was slightly distant from the campaign and traditional media in that time.
I voted Remain and was very disappointed by the result. The perfidy of the Conservative party and the self-interest of David Cameron, Boris Johnson and other Tories in Leave, and of course Nigel Farage, is sickening and plain to see. What has absolutely floored me is events of the last few days to the point that Labour Shadow Cabinet members was the first news item last night. I can only imagine that MPs have failed to learn lessons from the two elections with good turnout: the Labour Party leadership election and the EU Referendum.
For me it’s pretty clear that many people are sick of elites whom they feel don’t listen to them: the Westminster bubble, their PM who offered them a referendum to ensure his own position in power, the EU, and the old Westminster stranglehold on the Labour party that allowed it to sleepwalk into GE 2015. I expressed my views here on Saturday https://francesbell.com/uncategorized/processing-our-grief-and-looking-to-the-future/.
When the Labour Party had an opportunity to show integrity, what happens? MPs start resigning because they blame their own leader for a cross-party campaign with David Cameron, the architect of this unwelcome referendum. It smacks of self-interest to me and no doubt 1000s of others who joined help the Labour Party change. If Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is toppled in this way, it’s not just his credibility that is damaged, it’s the credibility of the growing number of shadow cabinet members who are acting out of fear and self-interest.
If the Labour Party leadership is manipulated publicly by resignation and behind closed doors, and by trying to reject the leadership election process that has so increased the membership of the Labour Party then the trickle of resignations since March this year will become a torrent.
The high turnouts for the 2015 leadership election and the recent EU referendum are opportunities for learning and ongoing change – don’t waste them and return to old-style Blaire control , especially in the run up to the Chilcot Report publication.
Frances Bell, https://francesbell.com
