Back to business-as-usual for Sir Keir Starmer’s authoritarian, anti-democratic Labour Party

• Secret imposition of pro-Starmer candidates in Brighton and Hove — including turncoat Warren Morgan (@warrenmorgan), with no involvement of local Labour Party members;
• Hardline supporters of Peter Kyle MP (@peterkyle) imposed on most-winnable seats across Hove, guaranteeing his acolytes a majority in the new council-controlling Labour Group;
• Julie Cattell (@cooljool80) imposed on Westbourne and Poets’ Corner, despite being “reminded” of Labour values on anti-semitism after being found guilty of targeting Jewish colleagues with antisemitic language.
• Cattell exposed — mid-campaign! — to be suing the Labour Party after she was exposed for being involved fake allegations of anti-semitism!

By now, you will have grown weary of the photographs on social media: the small huddles of the same or similar people — most of them candidates — smiling vacuously as they take selfies on a street near you.

Thankfully, however, we can say au revoir to #LabourDoorstep. Because today (Thursday, May 4) we have a once-in-four-year opportunity to elect the people who control a budget of nearly £1 billion of our money and help frame how nearly 300,000 of us live our lives.

With the implosion of the Conservative Party, combined with the incompetent incumbency of the current Green administration, it is certain that the Labour Party will — for the first time — win majority control of Brighton and Hove City Council.

My expectation is that 34 of the 54 seats — in 23 wards — will elect Labour candidates.

Only two questions remain: Who exactly are these candidates? And how were they selected?

I say “selected” rather than “elected”, because none of the 5,000-plus Labour Party members in the city was allowed to take a view on who should represent the party — and potentially the rest of us — in or after the forthcoming elections.

On December 13 last year, party officials sent out a late appeal for members to put themselves forward for consideration. (The initial invitation had been sent out on September 20, with a deadline of October 3.)

Officials were not, however, too desperate for. volunteers. Because 36 candidates had already secretly been selected to fill the most-winnable seats.

Inevitably — and deliberately — these select few were concentrated in the dozen or so most-winnable wards, at least half of them in Hove.

What most party members did not know were the names of the candidates — including 18 of the 21 Labour candidates in Hove — that had already been imposed by a panel appointed by Sir Keir Starmer’s apparatchiks at Labour Party headquarters.

This anti-democratic intervention was purportedly because of claims of anti-semitism — all of them bogus — levelled against left candidates who stood in 2019 and because of alleged concerns that black and ethnic minority candidates had been “shunted” into unwinnable seats. No evidence to justify such (previously-unreported) concerns was ever provided.

Indeed, such claims are beyond irony. In 2019, Alex Braithwaite, a black socialist, was suspended mid-campaign after the Daily Telegraph was fed poisonous lies about her. By her anti-Corbyn party colleagues!

Meanwhile, Sunny Choudhury, an experienced party activist and a prominent representative of the Bangladeshi community, came within 73 votes of being elected in Woodingdean. This time, however, he has been barred from even standing, resulting in his decision to quit the party.

It is worth noting that, before the last elections, more than 100 people put themselves forward to be Labour candidates in 2019 — with thousands of members voting at well-attended branch meetings to decide who they wanted to represent their local communities.

Since then, Starmer-inspired apathy — accompanied by a huge drop in party membership, locally and nationally — has resulted in moribund branch parties whose meetings attract a tiny number of members. And that is just fine for the small clique of pro-Starmer, anti-democratic individuals who call the shots.

Where I live, the Patcham and Hollingbury Branch Labour Party had not met — either online or in person — since July 2021. In January, it held its first [inquorate] annual meeting in nearly two years to elect branch officers, including a new secretary. Since this abortive attempt, it has still failed to meet to elect any officers. (The last secretary — who had not once communicated with members following his election in October 2019 — died after a short illness in November 2021. He has never been replaced.)

The three “paper” candidates in Patcham and Hollingbury were introduced to local party members as a fait accompli — in a poorly-attended informal gathering in the public bar of local public house. All they will do today is split the anti-Conservative vote and jeopardise an historic victory by the Green Party.

Other branches rarely meet. And, when they do, few members feel inspired to attend.

All this should be a significant concern to all citizens, since Labour’s majority control of the city council will be determined only by the extent to which the Green Party vote holds up in heartland seats such as Brunswick and Adelaide, Preston Park, and Hanover and Elm Grove.

The stakes are high. Including for the candidates themselves.

The select few individuals vetted and chosen by a handful of anonymous Labour Party officials will be in charge for the next four years, during which time they will receive allowances totalling as much as £1.9 million of council-tax-payers’ money.

Some will go on to hold office for much longer than a single four-year term.

For example, Cllr Les Hamilton — a retired teacher who will be 85 if he serves a full council term — is standing yet again in the ultra-safe Labour stronghold of South Portslade.

In May, he will enter his 52nd year as a councillor. In the last 20 years alone, Cllr Hamilton has received more than £373,000 in allowances. Unusually — because Labour Party rules two-councillor wards usually to include at least one woman — his sidekick is Alan Robins, another old-timer.

Meanwhile, Cllr Hamilton continues to exert control of what used to be a £100,000 slush fund — known as the shadowy “Ben Gowlett Trust” — that funds candidates favoured by Peter Kyle, the Labour MP for Hove. The so-called “trust fund” — now in a Portslade Branch Labour Party account — is thought to comprise about £40,000.

Even as Labour scrambled to find a full complement of candidates, manoeuvring had begun to decide who will be leader of the new Labour Group after the May elections.

And with good reason: the 34 or so successful Labour candidates will choose a group leader who will be entitled to nearly £200,000 in allowances in four years. The person most likely to be leader is Cllr Bella Sankey, the newly-elected councillor for Wish.

As we have seen, a small group of anonymous Labour Party officials — with little or no connection to Brighton and Hove—long ago decided which candidates will stand in the most-winnable wards. Cllr Sankey was the first beneficiary.

Whether they realise it or not, most of the other 20 candidates will be “paper candidates” — little more than names on a ballot paper — with few resources and little or no connection with the communities they purportedly want to represent.

We will never know how many would-be candidates were barred because their views were unacceptable to the McCarthyites who hold sway in Sir Keir’s Labour Party.

Therefore, let us instead take a closer look at those most likely to be elected.

The first point to make is that these favoured and well-resourced candidates include a significant number of anti-Corbyn activists who undermined the party’s electoral chances in 2019. (It is worth recalling that Labour was the biggest party until July 2020 when it voluntarily surrendered control to the Greens after hounding out of the party three of its own councillors, all supporters of policies epitomised by Jeremy Corbyn.)

Secondly, it is clear their candidacies were sewn up as soon as self-nominations were initially invited — and certainly well before the reminder email to party members last December.

For example, Julie Cattell — who in 2019 helped Labour lose all three seats to the Greens in Preston Park ward, where she lives — is standing in Westbourne and Poet’s Corner, where the two Labour councillors are standing down: Carmen Appich, the current co-leader of the Labour Group, along with Chris Henry, the grandly-titled “director of operations” for Peter Kyle, the MP for Hove. Leslie Pumm has the misfortune of being on the same ticket as Cattell.

As a stepping stone to becoming a councillor, Cattell was secretary of Brighton, Hove, and District Labour Party — albeit one who rarely managed to send out proper notice of the all-member meetings of the new “City Party”.

By the time she was elected in May 2015, as one of two Labour councillors in her home ward of Preston Park (in Brighton Pavilion), she had already made headlines, along with her friend Cllr Warren Morgan.

In what became known — albeit ironically — as the “Battle of Springfield Road”, the two fabricated a Twitter storm about how canvassers had been shouted at by the partner of Caroline Lucas, the Green MP. Nothing of the sort happened. Later, it turned out Cattell had made similarly false accusations against a rival Green Party candidate in Preston Park.

As director of her own planning consultancy, Cattell raised eyebrows by being appointed chair of the council’s planning committee. She finally resigned her directorship when her company was dissolved in in May 2016.

By then, Cattell was a hate-filled anti-Corbyn activist who initiated and propagated fake allegations of “antisemitism”.

In characteristic manner, Cattell quickly fell out with her fellow Labour councillor. In the wake of Morgan’s own fake allegations of “antisemitism” at the party conference in Brighton in 2017, Cattell sent an abusive email to her ward colleague — at 2.21am. It began:

“Tonight at the Preston Park Ward meeting you reached a new low..…you used your slot to launch a disgraceful attack on Warren and his brave stance on racism at Conference. I was utterly disgusted that some members actually applauded and supported you.

“Only minutes before, the ward had passed a motion in support of a member who had been expelled without being given the opportunity to defend himself. Your hypocrisy in similarly condemning Warren was breathtaking.”

For such reasons, Cattell became a footnote in Labour Party history. Or rather, a footnote on Page 425 of the leaked Labour report of March 2020. In the report, she was named as one of eight supporters of the self-styled “Labour Against Anti-Semitism” who coordinated to make multiple, similarly-worded complaints against party members they targeted.

Since then, she has been found guilty of using an antisemitic trope when targeting Jewish members in her own branch — for which she received only a slap on the wrist and a “reminder” of Labour values. It was a reminder that Cattell ignored — as Novara Media revealed only yesterday.

Having lost her seat in 2019 — a defeat she did not take well (hence the infamous photograph of her sticking her tongue out at the election count) — she has been imposed in the safe Labour ward of Westbourne and Poets’ Corner. Even though she is suing the Labour Party for an alleged data breach that revealed her anti-Corbyn machinations. Peter Devonport, her partner/husband, has. been imposed as a “paper” candidate in Regency ward in Brighton Pavilion constituency.

Emma Daniel, who in 2019 lost her seat to the Greens in Hanover and Elm Grove, is not standing in Roundhill, where she lives; instead, she has been imposed in Central Hove. Which is handy — because that’s where she works, within a few steps of both the council chamber in Hove Town Hall and Kyle’s constituency office.

It’s also handy, because when she put her name forward to be a candidate in a Hollingdean and Stanmer by-election in May 2021, she got three votes from local branch members; when the young man who was selected candidate stood down (for fear his social-media would be trawled by McCarthyites), she got just one vote.

Daniel was, of course, a vocal anti-Corbyn activist who — in a strange accident of history — played a pivotal role on July 9 2016 in the emergence of Morgan’s “spitting” lies:

Joy Robinson is Daniel’s running mate after switching to the Labour-held ward — despite having come a creditable third in 2019 in the neighbouring (but much less winnable) ward of Brunswick and Adelaide, a Green Party stronghold.

In North Portslade, two low-profile Labour candidates were imposed early on — but only after Cllr Peter Atkinson, who left Labour during the anti-Corbyn weaponisation of “antisemitism”, was reportedly invited to rejoin under Starmer.

Cllr Atkinson is standing again, as an independent. But not before he repeated the oft-repeated smears against his former ward colleague Cllr Anne Pissaridou, who was suspended and then expelled, ludicrously, on the pretext of her being a member of a proscribed group because she had once joined a Facebook group (which had changed its name some time after she had switched to a new Facebook account).

Cllr Pissaridou is also standing again, as an independent, in North Portslade.

In Goldsmid, Birgit Miller — a prominent Kyle supporter who failed in Hangleton and Knoll, a Conservative stronghold in 2019 — has been gifted a place on the ballot paper in Goldsmid, where Labour is expected to achieve a hat-trick of seats, along with Cllr Jackie O’Quinn and Trevor Muten.

In Wish, Paul Dann was a shoo-in as candidate even before his running mate Cllr Sankey was elected in by-election in December last year.

Separately, there have been some interesting moves by three of its sitting councillors:

Cllr Amanda Grimshaw, after four years in the Labour stronghold of Moulescoomb and Bevendean in Brighton Pavilion, is moving closer to home in Hangleton and Knoll in Hove;

Cllr Gary Wilkinson, respected by the few left activists still in the party, is turning his back on the Kyle heartlands of Central Hove in the hope of winning the new Kemptown ward (the southern half of Queen’s Park extended along the seafront into what was East Brighton); and

Cllr Amanda Evans, formerly of Queen’sPark, has successfully sought a safer haven in Moulescoomb and Bevendean — albeit meaning she has to campaign with Ty Goddard, on the right of Labour, and Jacob Taylor, a party staffer.

The most egregious imposition by Starmer’s apparatchiks is the Warren Morgan, back in the fold despite being one of the most notable of the party’s turncoats and traitors in recent years.

Morgan, a student supporter/member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), was eventually convinced to join the Labour Party in 1993 by Tom Watson, his long-time friend and predecessor as president of Hull University Students’ Union.

In the Tony Blair years, he climbed the greasy pole working for an MP and then being elected a councillor in the safe seat of East Brighton from 2003, before quickly giving up his job as a call-handler with Sussex Police.

His three years as leader of Brighton and Hove City Council included a proposal to increase council tax by 67% for the 15,000 poorest households in the city. Under pressure from anti-poverty campaigners, he relented and increased it by only 33%!

Morgan — along with Kyle — was a prominent member of Progress, the Blairite “party within a party” funded by billionaire Lord Sainsbury, founder of the SDP.

Most infamously, Morgan lied about “spitting”, as well as “abuse” of Kyle, at the annual meeting of the Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party that elected a new pro-Corbyn in July 2016. As a result of such mendacity, the results were annulled and the “City Party” suspended.

Morgan had to apologise for libelling a party member, who was Jewish, as a “Holocaust-denier”. In 2017, he even threatened to ban Labour from holding conferences in Brighton amid fabricated claims of anti-Semitism.

Eventually, in February 2019, Morgan showed his true colours and quit the Labour Party, to become an “independent” councillor, supporting another ex-Labour, anti-Corbyn “independent” candidate — against his former Labour Party colleagues in East Brighton — in the city council elections. Soon afterwards, he joined the short-lived Change UK Party to stand in the European Elections in May 2019.

Within a year, after Jeremy Corbyn ceased being leader, Morgan applied to rejoin Labour — despite party rules saying such an application would not normally be considered for five years. After his application was rejected, he appealed. Successfully, with Sir Keir Starmer newly-installed as leader and David Evans as general secretary.

While helping Al Jazeera Investigative in the making of the Labour Files, I was shown full versions of emails about me — from Morgan, as it turns out— to Labour Party headquarters. Previously, I had seen only the redacted version, resulting from a Subject Access Request (SAR):

In the unredacted version of the above late-night email sent on July 26 2016, Morgan fabricates provably-false allegations about an event he admits he did not attend for “mental health” reasons; the event included a panel featuring Peter Kyle, Fiona Sharpe (later appointed spokesperson of the self-styled Labour Against Anti-Semitism), and Sgt Pete Allan, head of hate crime for Sussex Police.

For the record, I made only one brief statement at the end of the meeting — sitting in the front row directly opposite Sgt Allan — offering solidarity with the Jewish community in Brighton and Hove. I made no comparison between my treatment (as secretary-elect of the newly-suspended Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party) and antisemitism.

What is more shocking in the unredacted version is Morgan’s additional claim that I even likened it to the Holocaust! Without doubt, Morgan weaponised “anti-semitism” for factional reasons. Morgan has been imposed on Westdene and Hove Park.

With Cattell, Daniel and Morgan all being imposed in Kyle’s fiefdom, have no doubt that it is back to business-as-usual in the Labour Party. Unfortunately, the “business” is rigged selections, fixed elections, no democratic debate, and no hope of socialism.

And the “adults” who are “back in charge” are vicious McCarthyite individuals who now regard a once-great party as their own private members’ club.

The Labour Party is a corrupt, racist party that is a criminal conspiracy against its members.

#DoNotVoteLabour