Galloway, Yakoob and the rabble of ‘independents’ in the election.
One of the refrains from the anti Labour left is that socialists should back independent left candidates.
The Greens are less popular these days as the choice of backing them in Islington South as Owen Jones does runs up against the Greens standing against Corbyn in Islington North – indeed we learn that a one time Labour councillor, a corbynista, here who left and joined the GPEW has now resigned from her new party on the issue.
The article below is well informed and hits hard targets, now the easy to highlight the more obvious far right crossovers in ‘Spode’ Galloway’s green and brown shorts. I was struck by the Birmingham references which I know something about. I note the role of former Fourth Internationalist Stuart R in this lash up.
Meanwhile right wing factionalism in Labour continues. After the disgraceful treatment of Diane Abbott this is their new target, Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
https://x.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1795862063480234472
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Tendance Coatesy 
If you don’t support Labour’s murderous foreign policy plus miserablist neoliberal economics and you have no reason to vote tactically and your Labour candidate is some ghastly party loyalist then why vote Labour? Millions will be asking themselves this question. This question is not radical, it’s just immediate reality.
Eric
May 29, 2024 at 6:46 pm
Moreover, Keir Starmer’s constant refrain is about how Labour has ‘changed’, and is now nothing like that horrible organisation on whose manifesto he was last elected in 2019. The problem is that a significant proportion of Labour’s voters in 2019 actually liked the leader and policies at that election. They may well only have been a minority of Labour’s voters, but they were not an insignificant one. The current message from the top to those people is, in effect, ‘go away, we don’t want you any more’. But if they go away, they take their votes with them. Somehow, previous right-wing Labour leaders, up to and including Tony Blair, had the self-confidence to coexist with the left of their party, and keep them and their supporters on board. Starmer doesn’t seem to be able to do that.
Francis
May 29, 2024 at 9:33 pm
Not to mention the way they have treated Diane Abbott a débâcle of their own making which has outraged people across the Party.
Andrew Coates
May 30, 2024 at 9:35 am
Politics is about building a movement, not about pushing this or that good person into parliament. We think Jeremy Corbyn should not have made his provocative and petulant October 2020 statement in the wake of the EHRC report into antisemitism within Labour. Perhaps he should have followed Tony Benn’s move at the same age (mid-70s) to quit parliament “to do more in politics” (labour movement politics).
Corbyn has noticeably steered clear of the loose network of “independents” revolving around Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras and the red-brown George Galloway in Rochdale, though Corbyn’s wife Laura Alvarez, who works closely with him in politics, has promoted it on social media.
If Corbyn’s campaign does anything to build a “movement”, it can only be either that network or the Communist Party of Britain (the party behind the Morning Star). Although the Feinstein network includes people with a genuine Labour left past, both that and the CPB are political dead ends.
We shouldn’t see this election as a matter of what people should do as individuals, but in terms of how we think the labour movement should intervene in politics.
A lash-up of “independent” candidates, unconnected by any coherent positive common political project isn’t an alternative to Labour.
If a network of excluded left Labour MPs got together and stood as “Independent Labour” candidates, that would be worth engaging with — but not as a “here’s someone you can vote for with a clear conscience” option, but because it might just contribute to building something for the future.
I can’t see how voting for any of the “independent” candidates currently putting themselves forward could do that.
Jim Denham
May 30, 2024 at 2:37 pm
No they won’t
davedraycott
May 31, 2024 at 12:31 am
if deselected labour candidates get in to parliament as independents wont they recieve apoligies and be allowed back in to the party?
confusedleftish
June 2, 2024 at 5:24 pm