Recently I have got in the habit of using more extensive segments of the articles I am finding online and I realize that some might consider this inappropriate. This isn’t laziness on my part as it still involves quite a bit of work. All of the segments are attributed to the writer, or the publishing organization, meticulously and repeatedly throughout my inclusions in order to separate the quoted text from my own interjections or relevant data from another source. I will always identify the original headline in full and try to embed a Link as long as it doesn’t cause posting problems. This tactic represents a conscious choice I made to adopt a strategy of what I call ‘Megaphoning’ the important revelations made by the neglected alternative media outlets. All of the articles and Internet sites selected are desperately trying to get the truth out there, despite being drowned out by alt-right Fake News. The far-right Tory press get to Megaphone their biased, bigoted and sometimes downright hateful propaganda on the BBC Papers Review; I will just try to make sure the progressive Socialist Left gets an equally loud blast!
In the Open Democracy Article entitled, “I saw from the inside how Labour staff worked to prevent a Labour government” Joe Ryle exposes, “The work of senior Labour staffers to stop Labour winning is only just starting to come out.” Ryle says that, Nearly 5 years ago, Jeremy Corbyn pushed open the doors into the spacious and airy Offices of the Leader of the Opposition, overlooking the River Thames on Victoria Embankment.” How much did the Corbyn team know about the concerted efforts to scupper Labour’s electoral chances just to derail the progressive Left? According to Ryle, “He already had some suspicions at this point, but he could never have fully comprehended what was being plotted against him less than half a mile away at Labour’s headquarters on Victoria Street.” Ware’s arrogance and greed might just prove a blessing in disguise as it will place the whole sorry debacle under intense scrutiny in Court where ‘Fake News’ in the biased press is torn apart under forensic legal questioning: Ware is now running scared!
Ryle reminded readers on the 7th of August that, “Today is the deadline for submissions to the internal Labour inquiry, chaired by Martin Forde QC, which is examining the past behaviour of former senior party staff. I’ve just written to the inquiry and these were my experiences. As one of the first staff appointments in the office of the former Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, I worked on the same corridor as Corbyn’s team. I was new to the Labour Party, with a background in climate activism, and mostly unaware of all its different political affiliations and factions. This was something I shared with many of my colleagues who also weren’t from the world of machine politics. We were in for quite a shock when we were confronted with the machine of Labour HQ.” It was vital that those with knowledge to support the findings of the shocking leaked report submitted evidence and the alternative media helped to get the message out there: if the evidence is overwhelming it will be hard for Martin Forte QC and his team to ignore the facts.
The controversial leaked report was prepared for a legitimate reason, in defence of Labour in response to the EHRC investigation. Starmer is trying to hide this fact, paint the report as a ‘fishing expedition’ by keeping it from EHRC consideration; he failed as Craig Murray submitted an unredacted copy to EHRC and they have no choice, but to take all this evidence seriously. The heavily Tory stacked EHRC were determinedly on track to support the Tory Government agenda of demonizing Jeremy Corbyn to lend a thin veneer of legitimacy to their ‘borrowed votes’ – ‘landslide victory‘ claim of winning the Covert 2019 Rigged Election. Chris Williamson’s legal challenge against EHRC presents a major complication worthy of our support with over £24,000 raised already. John Ware has bought into his own propaganda regarding Corbyn’s popularity; the reality must be hitting him now, no coerced cash settlement to reduce financial risk, unsupported by the Party, Jeremy’s Legal Fund has surpassed £330,000; Ware must realize he can’t win in Court.
The huge response to Jeremy’ Legal Defence Fund and the sum of money raised totally disproves the fake claims that Corbyn is despised by voters. This must be a worry for Starmer too as it exposes Labour Party members resentment over his cowardly capitulation with shocking facts now revealed at last. Ryle states that, “When I’d started previous jobs I’d arrive to some kind of handover notes. But when Corbyn and McDonnell walked in on day one, the small team that had joined after working on Corbyn’s leadership campaign turned up to find that someone had prepared for our arrival in a more unconventional way: many of the computers had gone missing and the offices weren’t properly set up.” Ryle noted that, “The few computers that were in the office were the oldest ones possible and they kept crashing all the time.” Ryle quotes, a former senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn tells me. “The situation was so dire that one time after a day on the road with Jeremy I came back to find that a new colleague had taken my screen because he didn’t have one.”
Ryle reveals how the situation in John McDonnell’s offices was even worse. “When we took up the offices they were completely gutted of their contents. There were only half pulled out staples in the walls and bits of blue tack. The desks were without chairs let alone computers and I had to work off my own mobile and laptop, my former colleague James Mills, who was John McDonnell’s Head of Communications, remembers all too well. I don’t remember anyone ever getting to the bottom of where the computers had disappeared to. But the responsibility for ensuring the offices were set up was Labour HQ’s and this was to be a first warning sign. Some of the behaviour of senior officials at Labour HQ has already been documented in the 860-page leaked Labour report. But there’s a lot more that went on behind the scenes and I think it’s important that people have the whole story.” Those who leaked the report probably knew that unless they did so the disgraceful truth about massive sabotage within the Labour Party would stay buried.
As astounding as these revelation are there were other issues that impacted the progressive new team that now highlight the harm that would have destroyed a less determined and imaginative Leadership group. It is all the more credit to them for accomplishing as much as they did given an excessively high level of internal sabotage. Ryle stated that, “Another constant battle that took place was over the hiring of staff. Almost every appointment was either delayed, frustrated or blocked by Labour HQ, which had control of the party’s finances.” Ryle reports that, “A full year into Jeremy’s leadership, we still only had around 16 members of staff which was about half the amount compared to when Ed Miliband was leader”, the former senior Corbyn adviser told Ryle. Apparently, “James Meadway, a former treasury economist and chief economist at the New Economics Foundation, had to be seconded from one of the trade unions to serve as Economic Advisor in McDonnell’s team after the party repeatedly refused to hire him.”
Ryle described the damage caused by repeated leaks and how they had to work around the problem saying, “Relationships were so strained that colleagues would regularly turn up to meetings with party staff, get back to their desks, and be left feeling horrified on learning that the contents of the meeting had already been leaked to journalists. This became a major headache as it was almost impossible to plan effectively without the ability to share vital information between the leader’s office and party HQ. Senior aides close to Corbyn were regularly forced to withhold information on policy announcements until the very last minute for fear of leaks. This fear had the effect of putting most people on edge and helped contribute to an office in a justified state of paranoia. It was in these early days that one Corbyn aide aptly renamed the party’s HQ from its official name – Southside – to the ‘Darkside’, a term which quickly caught on – reinforcing a sense of them and us.”
Ryle reports that, “The most shocking sabotage I personally witnessed was an encounter with the notoriously difficult regional offices who were often the most ideologically opposed to the Corbyn regime. At my request, attempts were made to organise a rally for John McDonnell via one of the regional offices. Given that John was one of the most senior members of the shadow cabinet, I expected my request to be met with enthusiasm. When I found out that the location they had chosen was in the middle of nowhere I was left flabbergasted. I was told this tactic had been used before – apparently to avoid lots of members showing up and being won round by the new regime.” This too failed to some extent because a newly enthused progressive support base became really efficient at spreading the word and drawing huge crowds for Corbyn much to the dismay of his opponents. The BBC and right-wing Media did an incredible cover-up job to keep such gatherings under wraps, but pictures were shared widely online.
Ryle stressed that, “There were hundreds more incidents like this that I’m aware of; press releases regularly blocked from going out, staff members briefing against Corbyn’s office, weekly planning grids leaked including the 2019 General Election grid, an almost constant refusal to share content on the party’s social media platforms and the coordination of staff resignations to damage the party. As a political first, the party’s 2017 manifesto was also infamously leaked.” In a way that must have frustrated those who hoped this crucial leak would have a devastating impact, instead it put rocket–boosters on the progressive Corbyn project and shifted the Overton Window of politics significantly to the Left. The Blairites and the Tory Party have had to contend with this shift in public opinion ever since as scraping Tuition Fees, Nationalization of Rail and Utilities have all joined saving our NHS as priorities. Along with divisive anti-immigrant messaging and belligerent Brexit rants, Johnson had to include empty pledge lies regarding the NHS.
Ryle recalls, “Perhaps the most Kafkaesque example is the bizarre story of party officials designing Facebook adverts to be seen by only Corbyn’s team.” Ryle explained how, “A party official helpfully explained the strategy to the Sunday Times: ‘They wanted us to spend a fortune on some schemes like the one they had to encourage voter registration, but we only had to spend about £5,000 to make sure Jeremy’s people, some journalists and bloggers saw it was there on Facebook. And if it was there for them, they thought it must be there for everyone. It wasn’t.” Quite possibly this tactic also failed in that the positive messages were widely shared online and progressives were getting the message out there to the public via not just Facebook, but the growing presence of vocal activists like Rachael @Swindon on Twitter. However, while the progressive Left were sharing the possibility of a new truly Socialist Left Labour Government with the many, Cummings VICS program was singling out the most vulnerable with weapons grade PsyOps!
Ryle turns to the reactions on Election night and says, “It gets worse. On the night of the 2017 General Election I was in the press team at the party’s HQ. I’ll never forget the deathly silence and the looks on the faces of those staffers that we knew to have been plotting against Corbyn since day one. While we celebrated robbing Theresa May of her majority, party staffers mourned in the room next door: ‘they are cheering and we are silent and grey faced. Opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years!!’, one senior staffer allegedly wrote on WhatsApp that night, according to the leaked report.” Ryle reports that, “They were so confident Corbyn was going to do badly that just before the exit poll results came in, all of Corbyn’s staff had their access to Labour HQ revoked.” That is a massively damning piece of concrete evidence that will now be exposed in Court; very hard to explain how, in combination with those WhatsApp messages, there could have been anything but a conspiracy to sabotage.
Ryle points out that, “It’s important to note that all of the key staff implicated have already moved on from working for the party. But the Forde Inquiry must heed the outcry and astonishment from many of the party’s half a million members. For the inquiry’s recommendations to be seen as credible, a lifetime ban for these former Labour staffers has got to be the bare minimum.” I believe that appropriate justice and accountability demands so much more than that, because elements of the above revelations demonstrate a conspiracy to commit what is essentially fraud: these people were not volunteers, but employees paid via Labour Party membership dues to do a legitimate professional job! This far exceeds the bounds of innocent incompetence by a country mile; if a similar conspiracy was to occur in a large Corporation or public organization a number of key figures would be facing serious criminal charges.
Ryle says, “Jeremy Corbyn may have been ideologically further away from his fellow Labour MPs than any former leader, but that doesn’t justify the relentless nature of the attacks. What Corbyn and his team had to deal with behind the scenes went far beyond factionalism and showed a scorched-earth mentality. Not only did they not want Labour to win under Corbyn, they seemed to be actively trying to lose. Once the dust finally settles on the Corbyn-era, historians may ponder how different things might have been if these Labour staffers, and numerous Labour MPs, had spent their energies supporting their leader rather than working against him.” We have already endured a decade of misery under Tory austerity and the only deviation from that we will get from Boris Johnson will amount to lies, empty pledges and good PR spin. The most critical deadline for the Tories now is getting past crash-out Brexit as that will represent a point of no return where we cannot appeal against injustice and Human Rights issues to the EU.
Ryle reminds us of the slim margin of loss in 2017 saying, “The number of extra votes in marginal seats that Labour needed in 2017 to give Corbyn a chance of being prime minister was an agonising 2,227. This will forever remain a sore point for many of us. Because as the leaked report exposed – we know that in 2017 party resources never reached many of the winnable seats that they should have, with allies of the small faction in party HQ standing in safe seats seen as the first priority.” Ryle says, “We were a young and diverse team, mostly new to electoral politics and passionate about our jobs. Of course we made mistakes. But we came incredibly close to changing this country’s politics for good. Without the actions of this small group of highly experienced saboteurs, I genuinely believe we would now be three years into a Labour government investing in our NHS and public services – an outcome which surely would have better prepared the country for the Coronavirus pandemic.”
I believe that the alarmingly close call for the Tories in 2017 prompted them to step-up their plan to steal the Covert 2019 Rigged Election by rapidly increasing and consolidating control of the postal votes under Idox. Cummings knew his Voter Intention Collection System would reveal an accurate profile of exactly where and by how many votes the Tories would need to rig the system; he promised 80 seats and he delivered as predicted. But the PR campaign to make this unfathomable result appear legitimate had to be equally relentless and aggressive to convince people that they really had voted against their own best interests to focus on Brexit. Even after voters knew that under Labour Brexit would safely prioritize workers rights and environmental concerns the BBC propaganda machine and the Tory controlled Media tried to convince us we had opted for the brainless slogan of a pathological lire and that it was ‘borrowed votes’ that elected a thoroughly despised Tory PM who was forced to avoid public appearances for damage control.
But while the BBC News featured Johnson in tightly controlled small gatherings, the other side of this grotesque PR con trick was to make sure that all the massive Corbyn support rallies never featured at all on the BBC or in the press, where he was demonized on a daily basis as an absolute monster. Court cases will hopefully reveal the truth, because only when we manage to correct the false narrative can we fully mobilize the people in mass demonstrations. The fact that the Tory Party used state funds to pay the Integrity Initiative to pump out propaganda defaming the official opposition is as yet an ignored criminal offence; it renders this Tory Government illegitimate even without a full investigation into the Covert 2019 Rigged Election. Once that knowledge is highlighted and confirmed during a Court case it will drive public opinion. Young people and minorities know they will suffer under the coming Tory agenda; they are already taking to the streets, without jobs they are free to protest. Belarus protesters are trying to extricate their Dictator; must we suffer decades of corruption before we remove this Tory Government from office? DO NOT MOVE ON!