Mike Creighton, the Labour Party’s “Head of Risk Management”, has just retired. He has published his leaving speech, a large chunk of which is hagiography of Tony Blair, on his blog, and prefaced it with this:
“One of my proudest moments was to look at the team I leave behind to deal with the governance and legal issues of the Labour Party.
“And contrary to popular belief that’s not just about expelling Trots from the Labour Party – although they will continue to do that. Militant, Socialist Appeal, Alliance for Workers Liberty have no more place in the Labour Party than the BNP or the EDL.
“No, the team I leave behind will spend the overwhelming majority of the time, as they always have, making sure that ordinary party members, the hard-working activists who organise the Party, run elections, raise the money have the tools and expertise to do that job within the law and and to the best of their ability.”
Comparing socialists to fascists is outrageous. And what about about “hard-working” party activists who decide they want to join such a socialist organisation? Are they transformed into fascist-equivalents who must be expelled? What about individual members of the party who aren’t part of a socialist organisation but agree with Marxist ideas? What about the many thousands of members, possibly a majority, who oppose the purging of socialist activists? Are they appeasers of fascism?
Imagine the outcry if a prominent Corbyn supporter wrote an article comparing Labour right-wingers to the BNP and EDL!
These chilling comments are a reminder of the kind of people who are still running the Labour Party machine. If the Labour left does not get serious about pressuring the leadership to deal with it, then that machine will eventually bring down Corbyn and open the way for much wider purge.
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