Former Labour General Secretary burns Starmer by backing Greens!

Right, so nothing drops like a lead weight on a political party quite like the person who used to literally run it deciding to take their vote elsewhere, but that is exactly what has happened with Starmer’s Labour, as the former General Secretary of the Party, Jennie Formby, has publicly announced that she is going to vote for the Green Party instead.
The comment, coming in response to a Guardian article comment she’d made that someone else had picked up on, should, for those people still wavering over whether we need to vote Labour to get the Tories out, particularly those of us on the left, send a message that actually that really isn’t true. Not only is Labour set to form the next government anyway, but the Tories are going down hard. But if Labour’s former General Secretary is refusing to back the party she once ran and is taking her vote elsewhere, so should more of us take a leaf out of her book, and not reward Starmer with a massive majority, where he can fail the country unchallenged for the next five years either. Surely if anyone knows the truth of that, surely Jennie Formby does?
Right, so here’s a turn up for the books isn’t it? Though perhaps not, with the number of people walking away from Starmer’s Labour in disgust at not only how he has run the party, but the pathetic offer he has presented to it, a 132 page manifesto containing nothing that hadn’t already been announced, replete with as many images of Keith himself as they could ram in, but for somebody as high profile in the party as a former General Secretary like Jennie Formby, the person in charge of the day to day running of the party, publicly saying she was taking her vote elsewhere and was backing the Green Party instead, that’s still one heck of a burn for Starmer and Co, not that he’d ever admit it.
All of this has come out off the back of a tweet that Fromby had made in response to a recent Guardian article by Aditya Chakrabortty, one of the very few Guardian journos I rate, entitled ‘Drill into the policy, ignore the puffery: this is a Starmer manifesto more than a Labour one’ and he didn’t hold back in his condemnation of Labour’s manifesto, where the word business is mentioned 60 times and the word inequality only once, in all 132 pages, all in all surmising that Starmer is basically the former Tory Prime Minister Ted Health, rather than any other Labour leader or Prime Minister going and that the impression given implies that his changed Labour is therefore, as so many of us have spoken out on, just another Tory Party, it isn’t Labour at all and with rumours swirling that at Labour Conference later this year Starmer plans to remove the ability to choose the party leader from the party membership and make it the choice of Labour MPs only, after his factional rigging of parliamentary selections, Labour will be functionally dead, with only Starmerroids ever able to become leader after he finally goes. There’s also a degree of vanity, with Starmer literally being on the front cover of the manifesto and with more than 30 photographs of him inside, padding it out presumably for the lack of anything substantive.
To Chakrabortty’s article, Jennie Formby wrote:
‘V interesting, if depressing, analysis of Labour’s manifesto from
Chakrabortty. With such a hunger for real change and the Tories a done deal, what a wasted opportunity to make the radical changes that would create a fairer, more equal society with thriving public services.’
Of course she’s absolutely right there, but Starmer doesn’t want change from what we have now, the change he means is changing Labour from one of serving the public, to serving the establishment, lying to people to their faces has been Starmer’s defining trait after all and I’m certainly not the only person feeling that way, as a chap called Adrian Litvinoff replied to Formby’s tweet saying:
‘The disappointment of the broad left in Blairism will be as nothing compared to the betrayal of those who vote for Starmer expecting greater social equality, a reassertion of the role of public services, let alone any improvement in foreign policy. So don’t.’
I fear Litvinoff is right, I think we can at Blair and how he conducted himself, PFI’s for the NHS lumbering that service with chronic debt for instance, hugging up to Thatcher and saying he saw his role as building on her legacy, which is just rancid coming from Labour, but then he wasn’t really Labour, he was part of the Tory lite rot creeping in. Starmer is likely to finish the job and finish Labour as an alternative and sadly it is likely to take 5 years of continued Tory austerity under Rachel Reeves, a George Osborne wannabe in a skirt, for many people to realise this.
Formby answered Litvinoff’s assertion herself with what has proven to be quite the admission though:
‘I’m voting Green, not perfect but much more transformative agenda. And people can’t just keep voting Labour ‘because we’ve got to get the Tories out’. They’re out anyway so we should vote for parties that genuinely represent what we believe in - which may well be Independents.’
Now I’d argue there is no such thing as a perfect manifesto, there are bits we all look out for and bits we largely don’t care about and as a Green I might feel a tad defensive over that, but I think Formby thinks the same way, for example she had also retweeted a tweet by Caroline Lucas’ hopeful successor as MP for Brighton Pavilion Sian Berry, where the BBC Verify service had found plans for a wealth tax on the super rich to pay to fix our public services was economically credible, which should beg the question of why Labour won’t do that, when it should be the sort of policy they are championing. The question of why Labour won’t tax the super rich when Green plans to do so are seen as economically credible, should be put to every Labour candidate in every interview they do, because there is no excuse for Labour not to do this. Who’s side are they really on which case? Answer: not ours and not the side of the services we all need, but on the side of the rich, who might become donors to their party. Every time Starmer says country before party, he’s lying. Actions speak louder than words.
Speaking of actions, there’s a reason why people should take proper notice of what Formby has said here, and I’m not saying that just as a rotten leftie, Corbyn supporting former Labour member, Formby of course being Corbyn’s General Secretary and I’m not saying that is the reason she should be taken heed of, she’s far more than just having been Corbyn’s Gen Sec.
Formby was the General Secretary who set about commissioning the now infamous Labour Leaks report into bullying and harassment within the Labour Party, so called because it got leaked after Starmer blocked it’s publication, supporters of his faction implicated in that abuse, it’s leak forcing him to later commission the Forde Report, which itself was delayed from being released because it agreed with the findings of that earlier report. Abuses her predecessor in the Gen Sec role, Iain McNicol had sat on, he who then got rewarded by Starmer for services rendered with a seat in the House of Lords.
The antisemitism scam that was firmly placed on Corbyn by vested interests within the Labour Party and the mainstream media, the backlog in cases Labour had not dealt with, was dealt with by Formby, who put in place new measures to do so, brought more people in as case handlers and this backlog again had built up under McNicol, introduced a disciplinary process to action valid complaints that McNicol in his seven years as Gen Sec hadn’t bothered to do, all of it undermining the party from within, swept under the carpet as these issues and complaints had been, but such is the factional, control freakery of the Labour right, that they’d wreck their own party’s reputation because those pesky members dared choose a socialist to lead a democratic socialist party, having trashed Labour’s complaints process for years. Now it seems they’re ensuring the members never get that much say in how the party is run ever again.
Throughout much of this, repairing the damage done, Formby was battling cancer too, so my respect for that lady’s tireless efforts are limitless and this is somebody it should be noted, didn’t come from politics, but came from the trade union movement, she’s stood up for ordinary people, the likes of you and I all her life and didn’t stop when she took up Corbyn’s offer of the Gen Sec role. She’s still doing it now, she’s taken her vote elsewhere, she’s said exactly why that is entirely valid and pointed out why so many of us should do likewise too. Vote Green like Jennie is, like I will be, or perhaps you’ve got another candidate from another anti establishment party – not Reform obviously, before the inevitable bots chip in – or perhaps there is an independent with a strong campaign to swing behind. Whatever is best fit for you, that is the real tactical vote in this election.
Meanwhile of course, Labour figures are mounting disgusting attacks on Green candidates, knowing that they have no answers to those arguments coming from the left, one of the most shameless came courtesy of Starmerroid Lisa Nandy on Birkenhead Green candidate Jo Bird just the other day, to no surprise at all playing out on the BBC. Labour are truly giving the Tories a run for their money these days into who can best be described as the nasty party now. Get the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.