‘Keir Starmer may want to fight the Labour Left – but we won’t stand for it in Liverpool’ (Alan Gibbons, former SWP member and now secretary of Walton Constituency Labour Party, The Independent 26 February 2021)
Fighting words, indeed, but words that would eventually signify nothing. The occasion was a decision by Labour head office to restart a selection process for a candidate to represent Labour in a mayoral election in May. Three possible candidates had been nominated by Liverpool Labour councillors; members were due to vote at the end of March on who would go forward. However, for reasons it chose not to explain, the Labour leadership suspended the process, re-interviewed the three councillors, decided that they could not longer stand, and replaced them with two others. Cue outrage from the Labour left, with talk of getting one of the original candidates, black councillor Anna Rothery, to stand as an independent in the way Ken Livingstone had when he was prevented by the Blair leadership from representing Labour in the 2000 London mayoral election. Rothery, who had unexpectedly received Jeremy Corbyn’s endorsement when many of the left favoured another of the three, Ann O’Byrne, announced that she would take Labour to court over the fiasco. That cost her £65,000 as she lost her case to be put back on the shortlist.
The two candidates who are now to go forward are Anthony Lavelle, who was one of the several hundred councillors who signed an open letter to Corbyn in 2016 calling on him to resign, and Joanne Anderson, like Rothery, a black councillor. She had tweeted condemnation of Corbyn’s endorsement of Rothery as ‘interference’, stating that ‘the people of Liverpool should decide for themselves’. That did not stop her accepting the benefit of the Labour leadership’s own interference. Since then she has realised that tacking to the left will make it easier for the Labour left to get over its tantrums, let bygones be bygones, and vote for her. After all, if Rothery were to stand as an independent, any member supporting her would be expelled from the party – not an outcome the left would countenance. So, a bit more hot air from Alan Gibbons: ‘After a year of Keir Starmer’s leadership, large swathes of the membership think the party has to change course and change course quickly, or else risk sliding into an electorally disastrous civil war.’ Some chance!
Since then, Gibbons has seen sense – after all, he is standing to be a Labour councillor – and has toned down his roar of defiance to something close to an abject whinge: ‘It is hard to find anyone in Labour’s ranks, from whatever wing, who thinks the chaotic running of this election will have done anything to improve the party’s prospects in May. Labour activists have their work cut out.’ Indeed, given the number of Liverpool Labour Party members who have announced their resignations over the debacle. It now seems that the Labour leadership had been tipped off that a review of Liverpool City Council would shortly reveal evidence of widespread corruption, and that was the reason why it had suspended the mayoral nomination process. Now the Labour left has to decide whether it will fight the imposition of commissioners to run the council’s planning services – a government move the Labour leadership supports even though it has failed to fight vastly greater Tory corruption.
