Bethnal Green and Bow: Starters' Orders, They're Off

Rupa Huq has visited to comment on this story, and correct my spelling (see response!), with news that she has collected her first nomination in Bethnal Green and Bow where the Labour Party branches will be nominating THREE (including one woman and one BME candidate) and the affiliates are doing who knows what, but very likely one nomination per branch, mostly decided by General Secretaries and Political Committees.





Rupa also generously links to a Bethnal Green UNISON activist name of John Gray who gives a blow by blow account of what he certainly sees as sectarian behaviour from Tower Hamlets Respect.







This is in respect of a supposed template resolution on Islamophobia which John sees as a splitters charter to immaturely rant about New Labour, destroy solidarity within the Labour movement, and as silver spoon Trots letting down the real working people of Tower Hamlets.

Rupa is being generous in that John is supporting another member of the UNISON panel Ayub Korom Ali. Though she tends to agree with his post. That includes the following summary:

I accept that the proposer and many of the supporters at the meeting did genuinely believe that this template motion, was in their view, a positive attempt to "Say No to Islamophobia". But, and it’s a big But, the people who originally wrote it intended it to be solely an attack on the Labour Party and its supporters, and to libel them as racists and war criminals.

This is the comment which I left and on which I welcome your comments:

Mmmm. Clearly it should be Lebanon not Libya. When Reagan nuked Tripoli we ran a gig called Rock Against Reagan with RR's head on Rambo's body with the huge machine gun ... anyway.

I do mostly agree with this. But:
(a) government rhetoric and action on immigration and asylum is often unhelpful and the policy of deliberate destitution and threatening to snatch kids are hugely unhelpful and are in effect a call to soft racists to keep backing the LP;
(b) while you are quite right that it is the individual terrorists and those who manipulate them who murder people it is absolutely ridiculous not to own up to or accept as a fact that Britain's foreign policy is part of the landscape and contributes in increasing drip drip drips to unbalancing these people and turning them to homicide and suicide.

Also, it might be said that John is probably trying to roll over rather than win over people who simply don't have the benefit of joined up thinking, a tradition of a broad church, and the discipline of electoral party politics.

These may be the things that could be debated if Thursday's meeting goes ahead in any form.

FACTOIDS: Steve Bell's IF... picks up the Rambo theme with "Cambo" today. Bethnal Green and Bow CLP and their co-conspiritors ruled out almost half of those on the membership list. Those who had allegedly been recruited by contenders as their "gangs" purely to pack the meetings.

[The remaining selectorate is almost exactly the same size as that in Man Wit and so far four units have nominated and six candidates are up and running.]

Sounds like Lib Dem tactics that. They allow people to walk up, join on the spot and take part! Even babes in arms until very recently. Or Family and Kinship in Bethnal Green alive-alive-o and red in tooth and claw.