The Canary is excited to share the latest edition of our letters page. This is where we publish people’s responses to the news and politics, or anything else they want to get off their chest. We’ve now opened the letters page up so anyone can submit a contribution. As always, if you’d like to subscribe to the Canary – starting from £2 a month – to support truly radical and independent media, then you can do that here:
This week’s letters
This week we have readers who are unhappy with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. Who would have guessed it?
Nothing is more important than Gaza
We do not have Proportional Representation so we are stuck in this two party system which is not democracy. We deserve better. Greens and independents, TUSC, wherever you live it is vital your vote is withheld from both main warmongering parties and given to the peacemakers.
Caroline Wilkinson, grandmother of six, via email
ED: we completely agree Caroline, and would urge readers not to fall for the ‘tactical voting’ con some are pushing. Vote with your conscience, wherever that may take you.
Labour McCarthyism
Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Corbyinite Party? Paraphrasing the grotesquery of Joseph McCarthy in 50’s USA.
The list of those who have been purged or marginalised by Starmer’s Junta-led political party grows ever longer. Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Mark Wadsworth, Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, Diane Abbott, Faiza Shaheen, and apart from the well known figures, the literally hundreds of CLPs and CLP members who have been labelled antisemites or just plain anti.
Starmer calls himself a Socialist and but displays all the characteristics of an intolerant political leader in a Banana Republic. Constant lies and drip-fed repression of any one who deviates from his narrow clique of Poundshop Blairites, careerists. and opportunists.
The right wing makeover undergone by some like Nandy, Lammy, Thornbury, Ashworth, et al is startling and sickening.
They have hijacked Labour just as the Mandelson tendency did in the 1990’s. It will not end well. Starmer is no Clem Attlee. Streeting is no Bevan. They will die on the barricades of their own lack of courage and excess of caution. If I were 30 years younger I would emigrate.
To Scotland.
Alan Marsden, via email
How Labour lost the Black and Asian vote
I always said: ‘Islamism’ seeks your demise for not worshipping its god, whilst ‘White Supremacy’ seeks your demise because it thinks “it is” god. In fact the two delusions are ripe for intimate cohabitation on some yet to be founded prison moon… but I digress. Unless you’ve lived in a cupboard, the sheer spectrum of prejudice is un-ignorable. But no one people on this rock has the right to edict a “hierarchy” – as blocked Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen put it.
Yet since the referendum, to ingratiate the far right, this has been precisely Tory modus operandi – pitting Black and Asian against Jewish Britons in a brazen script of “tolerable” verses “intolerable” prejudice, respectively. And not satisfied with relegating anti-Black racism and Islamophobia to irrelevance, then to enthusiastically whip-up the nation against their existential threat – decreeing open-season on our disrespect, ridicule, gaslight, and laissez-faire contempt.
The result for me was that the Tories had finally moved me to rip-up my civil contract. Indeed, arsonists Johnson, Patel, and Braverman had positively spurred its recovery from bin to be set alight and stomped upon. Still Labour had been the narrow, redemptive ledge to which any semblance of my civil ethic longingly clung.
But alas, in an act of unabashed treachery, its divorced and indifferent middle-aged patriarch now deems it expedient to blithely mimic.
Britain now boasts a rap sheet of rapidly-dethroned people (or champions-for) of colour: After Markle… Corbyn, Abbott (attempted), Russell-Moyle, and now Shaheen; the unavoidable pattern of misogynoir now well-established behind a “lefty-culling” sleight-of-hand, and wrapped formidably in a dreadful McCarthyistic veil.
But we’re not supposed to see that.
Black and brown Britons are not the readily-depicted homogenised imbeciles, or the invisible chattel of this country’s imperial heyday. We observe the subtext that both looks-like and quacks-like the proverbial duck. So how ironic that on this 80th anniversary we bear witness to a Farage-courting country once again listing feverishly to the extreme, with a blinkered elected destined to repeat the dangerously incremental mistakes of nearly a century ago, all over again.
I will instead vote Green… if at all. I now realise what Labour always was, or perhaps never was, and this foolish party has lost me forever. And amongst millions at the business-end of all this I won’t be alone. For to us they are flirting with terrorists – forces once fringe, now mainstream, that would very much like to bring us, our families, our children, harm. And that is unforgivable.
Snuffle-uffle Gus, via email
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