The race to succeed Hazel Blears as the Labour candidate for Salford and Eccles has run into controversy following last weekend’s shortlisting meeting.
Complaints have been made to the party’s North West regional office after the unusual decision was made to shortlist just two candidates, despite other applicants having multiple branch nominations.
Yet, unsuccessful candidates have been told by local officials there is no appeals procedure and no feedback has been given about the decision to proceed with such a small shortlist.
Sarah Brookes, a senior manager for Manchester Airport Group, who was born and actually lives in the seat, had four branch nominations. This would normally ensure a place on the final shortlist.
Meanwhile Sara Hyde, who works as a mentor for young women in the prison system, received two branch nominations.
Under Labour’s internal system of preferential voting, it is usual that at least three candidates are shortlisted for a parliamentary selection.
Instead, members now face a choice at next month’s hustings meeting of either Cheshire solicitor Rebecca Long-Bailey or Salford City Councillor Sue Pugh, chair of the party’s North West regional board and partner of NEC member Peter Wheeler.
At the 2010 General Election, Hazel Blears had a majority of 5,725.
Update: 10:05 15/07/14
Sophie Taylor has also been shortlisted. However we understand she only had a single nomination, raising questions about how Brookes and Hyde could possibly be left off the shortlist.
Tags: fixing, Hazel Blears, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Salford, Sara Hyde, Sarah Brookes, Sue Pugh
Flipping hell! about time Hazel went. Is there no integrity in politics these days?
But we could do with a few less professional politicians at Westminster so if I was a Manchunian I’d be backing Brookes Hyde and Long-Bailey, with 3 names on that Shortlist AWS.
So the same old game continues. We now know the operation. Corporate funding( eg JP Morgan) of IPPR (via Blair) which creates a non-bind-able, non-democratic, unaccountable policy platform introduced by a “Lefty” (in name only) Cruddas by the same old people who were in power before. Easy also to see how seats are delegated to the “right” people. Its a funny thing. I thought beyond charity hacking and jobs for the same old, same old people who could not let go of the trappings of position and money there would be some deeper more terrifying truth based on the efforts over the years to try and exclude so many Labour Party members from the process of discussion and debate (even and especially on “public”blog sites). Though it also shows why the people controlling the Labour Party were so slow to understanding what opposition is, because they had banned it within themselves and of course they still has power (as they perceive it lol) over the party and via IPPR Even and this is the rub, when there were so many better ways for these people to make money and have influence that would not have brought so much harm to our political system.
Which of course leads onto the motive. The strangest part of all this is the psychology. When you speak with these people and I mean in person without cameras and audiences, some are fully aware of what they are doing, of course there are always the stupid ones who enjoy being taken seriously and think they are with their peers and who enjoy the flattery and attention that they would get nowhere else.
In fact I genuinely believe that if the outcome of the corruption was somehow beneficial to society Kinnock, Blair and all the rest of them would lose interest lol.
Of course Labourlist is now a press operation desperately seeking to counter the exposure on Guido Fawkes blog with a smattering of “lets get the Tories” and “oh isn’t it terrible how the poor are being treated” etc etc So the spinning is on as ever and in vain, because once the truth is out their efforts to subdue it fail and in fact give the truth greater power and legitimacy.
But then this was never about politics. It was about jobs and money and a desperate need to feel important, to cover that massive internal anxiety “I am not worthy, I am not a valuable person” and having to replace it with some title, Lady Sir Honourable Kinnock, or Chief Executive of the Masters of the Privy Prescott with the money and the appalling sycophancy by people under you pretending they hold you in high esteem when in truth they do not. And then their is the public, oh how they can change their minds and how little they know! I guess this justifies the endless rants to which the culmination is zilch and nil in terms of the difference it makes, because to cover the sense of inadequacy and replace it with something so addictive as the big title and the money and the sycophancy you also need to believe for a luxurious moment or period that it is true that you do know best, that the world is better in your hands…with the bitterness coming with the drug of hating the world whose fault it is that in the end you find there is no meaning beyond survival and wealth.
But there was always a better way. There was always from the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s and millennium years, there was always a better path, one that would have made the people in charge very powerful indeed, would not have sought to smash one group in society at the expense of another as a result of the Trade Union conflict.
There was never any massive need to purge the Party of intelligent moral members, there was no need to eliminate democracy and weaken the fabric of UK democracy. There was never a need to change the way the Party was funded to keep it broke to prevent it subsidizing newer members from poorer backgrounds and re-routing the money to think-tanks and charities. Legitimacy would have done all those things for the people in control of the thing that is now the Labour Party. The most amusing and in many ways sadly tragic conclusion to all this is that all the damage done to our county’s electoral system was not needed, we did not need the BNP and UKIP and Tower Hamlets they were completely avoidable.
Ironically as well the turkeys in control have not voted for Christmas in renewing their party as a true “new generation”, yet Christmas is coming anyway.
The Blair path was a path that the Labour Party leadership were excited about, but locked away in their little worlds did not really understand. They did not understand what it was about Blairism that the people wanted. Oh they recognized in part and they spun a good yarn, but even back then the cracks started appearing.
The polar paths as some old Blairites and old Lefties though are unified by one man, Orwell. It would only take the observations of one man to highlight Labours weakest point and the vulnerability that will now result in its fundamental end. Envy.
The Blairites can no longer be “modern” or “progressive” and pretend to be new and cool because the hereditary principle, the make-up and undemocratic nature of the IPPR and the decline in democracy prevents it utterly.
By the same token people who control Labour cannot take a Lefty position on any credible, meaningful issue because they have separated themselves physically, materially from the land of working and unemployed human beings (though they have more in common with the unemployed who do not wish to work) and the “negotiations” of many of the Unions are as much against the work force as for it. I’ve sat in a room with enough victims of Union bullying to know it.
So the position is increasingly narrow, no Left, no progressive center, no democracy and an outside dictated policy mandate by a bank sponsored body from without the party, from a private place, behind closed doors.
Cruddas you could not have done a better job 🙂 which was fully expected. The final funeral rites 🙂
The choice for Labour activists is simple, they must now choose because they are the victims along with the public they have to face. Then there is UKIP who will certainly seize on Labours war on its members and the public, of not trusting the very agents they rely on to get them elected, the very agents who will never be MPs and who will never be able to give license to the concerns, hopes. dreams, to allay the fears and worries of those they seek in a place where such things need to be heard, in a Parliament. Such powerful activists the people who have been keeping the dead zombie of Labour alive who underestimate their own importance because they are good valuable people will be used, abused and discarded and worse, made a mockery of by newer more democratic parties such as UKIP. that such a party can outdo Labour in method and practice shows how backwards Labour has truly gone, and Conservatives, my home as a member is also waking up and changing…..we are leaving Labour and the Lib Dems behind, in the past to decompose. But never forget that once there was an exciting Party, one of hope one that offered a difference and now it has been abandoned by its very leaders who even when they make policy will not do so in its name, IPPR and banks instead. At least that is one mercy for the memory of Hardie, Bevan and Attlee may they all rest in peace.