Stalin Starmer ‘sanctions’ campaigners who don’t canvass hard enough!

Right, so if you thought that Keir Starmer’s authoritarianism only extended to purging rotten lefties or driving them away from the party in disgust like yours truly, along with rigging candidate selections to ensure only the right faction ever have a hope of standing to be an MP under his diktat, then boy have I got a wake up call for you because actually as this election campaign is showing, and in particular this latest revelation, not only is Starmer ensuring only his chosen ones ever get a shot at parliament, but if you aren’t campaigning hard enough for these candidate, you’ll actually get punished for it! Yes, Keir Stalin is very much back, actually coming down on his own campaigners like a ton of bricks, what few he still has, not now campaigning for other parties like the Greens, if they aren’t in the eyes of his red Tories, pulling their weight!
Right, so what’s the craic here then Damo? Well, when I first read this story I thought on one hand it is absolutely believable given the dictatorial streak Starmer has shown towards party members and the iron fist rule he’s instigated and on the other hand how few people he likely has physically out campaigning for the party, but that instead of encouraging more people and trying to get more members out campaigning for candidates they probably had no say in selecting, have had inflicted upon them, amongst them some truly awful people the Starmer regime thinks it can just get into parliament by dumping them in a safe seat, instead the approach has been to crack a whip it seems, to flog those who are still prepared to give up their time and volunteer for his party, and it actually gave me mental images of people with bunches of Labour leaflets in their hands in a Ben Hur style Roman galley, or trireme, chained at the oars with the likes of Luke Akehurst, or Keir Starmer or Morgan McSweeney or some other Blue Labour bod whipping them for not shoving them fast enough through people’s doors.
I’ve also had mental images of these self same people punching themselves in the face because what is reportedly happening is so self defeating, it beggars belief and genuinely makes me wonder if these people are right in the head.
You see, in order to campaign effectively in the Labour Party, they have access of course to collated data in their areas, their constituencies, their local patches and who to knock on who’s door, to most effectively get out the Labour vote, all of this is held on a system called Contact Creator and in order to get others mobilising and doing their bit too, there is another system called Organise, which is pretty self explanatory really isn’t it! Well Starmer’s regime is removing access to these tools if campaigners are not campaigning hard enough where they want them campaigning! They are literally barring their own people from being able to campaign effectively. Make it make sense Damo I can hear you cry. I’m not utterly unhinged sadly, but this is the apparent method to Starmer’s madness.
Where what few campaigners relatively speaking Starmer has left scattered about the country, he and his cabal at the top of the party want them deployed where they can be most effective and fundamentally the punishment of having Contact Creator and Organise access withdrawn from them, is where they are not going where the Labour regime wants them, which might not be in their own patches.
You see if the party considers a given constituency particularly safe, or a seat they have absolutely zero chance of winning, so thinly stretched are they now, having always been reliant on a ground game at elections, a ground game, thanks to Starmer’s machinations that has evidently been destroyed, that Labour are now at the point where they are literally punishing campaigners trying to get their local candidate elected, if that is deemed to be a waste of time and effort, where such time and effort might be better used in another seat where a given candidate is considered more vulnerable, because as regular viewers will know, especially in light of Labour’s position over Israel and Gaza, as much as polls say a massive majority is on the cards for Labour, the reality is, they are likely as we’ve seen in the last several local elections, Labour gaining some seats, but also losing seats they already hold. It’s those seats, Labour wants what is left of it’s boots on the ground campaign force operating in and are punishing anyone not doing it, or seen not to be campaigning enough elsewhere as the leadership demands. It’s a process the party has called twinning, where campaigners from a given constituency are paired up with another, more vulnerable constituency, where they are expected to campaign in both. Double the work and if you don’t do it, you lose access to campaign paraphernalia in your own constituency where a given campaigner I’m sure, would much rather be.
You can imagine, this is causing hell up and could easily backfire on the party.
On one hand you have campaigners wishing to see their perhaps incumbent Labour MP re-elected and wish to make sure of that as was always previously the case. Those seats where many local campaigners have deserted Labour, being more vulnerable now is where Labour want those people deployed instead. You can imagine, the reception they get in such seats might not be the friendliest these days, Labour’s failure to put a transformative agenda different from the Tories forward, it’s pro Israel position ongoing regarding Gaza all playing a part and taking its toll and if they knock on the doors of former Labour campaigners expelled or who left, you can imagine they’d get short shrift too! I don’t imagine it is much fun to campaign for Labour at all these days, but my sympathy in that regard does not stretch very far.
Of course by campaigning more strongly in some areas at the expense of others spreads Labour’s campaign capabilities all the more thinly and where Labour has decided for example that a given seat is safe enough that it doesn’t require campaigners and might actually be sanctioning them, by removing their communication and canvassing tools from them over that, that they might call that wrong and that gives others parties, other campaigns a boost in those areas. There’s a certain element of karma here in my mind, when I think back to the 2017 General Election and how Labour finances and resources were abused and how finances in particular were used to shore up right wingers, now we have a Labour so bereft of campaigners and arguably finance, certainly finance from ordinary working class people as the party enjoyed previously, now a party of donors again instead, they are having to effectively punish and coerce what campaigners they’ve got, arguably to shore up some of the same people who were recipients of more than their fair share before, simply because as right wingers, they were the favoured ones behind Corbyn’s back in 2017, but are amongst the most reviled candidates this time out amongst all of Labour’s offerings.
It's not just amongst the campaigners though that this is causing issues with, because many of those self same candidates who are seen to either not be worth investing in, or considered to be safe enough to not need a campaign per se, are angry too and that doesn’t bode well for a future Labour government, filled with backbenchers who, should they manage to be elected anyway, will feel they were not supported by Starmer, so is that setting Starmer up with a potentially healthy majority, but with a lot of people behind him, who will not be particularly fond of him and arguably eye him with as much distrust on the quiet as many of us do.
But as much as the process is being referred to as twinning, implying campaigners are only being stretched across two constituencies, it’s actually a whole lot worse than that, Labour’s ground game is so much weaker than even that will allow, as the parliamentary candidate put in charge of election co-ordination – as if the thought of having Rachel Reeves as chancellor wasn’t depressing enough, her younger sister Ellie Reeves is the election co-ordinator for Labour, it has been reportedly said that she has sent out an email saying:
‘Anyone who is making more than 500 contacts a week in their own seats will be required to attend five twinned seat campaigning sessions a week.’
In other words, if you’ve enough time on your hands that you can knock on 500 doors in your own constituency, you will be expected, required, to attend not one other, but FIVE other campaign sessions in other constituencies. Well that might be feasible in theory in a urban area with lots of small constituencies, but large rural, ones, that’d be impossible AND it assumes you have enough time on your hands to have that much time spare to give to the party, not volunteer it, this isn’t volunteering, this is demanding with an or else attached to the end of it if you don’t. Let’s consider as an example therefore according to Ellie Reeves’ diktat instruction my end of the country here in Cornwall. Labour are according to polling expected to win I think two of Cornwall’s six seats, but lets imagine they all were expected Labour wins. So if you were campaigning in Truro and Falmouth for example and had made 500 contacts, you’d be expected to campaign in every Cornish constituency, within the week, or presumably risk losing Contact Creator and Organise access. I hope you’ve got a decent car and can afford lots of fuel Cornish roads being what they are, but that could be the picture in more rural areas. Of course Labour tends to be stronger in more urban areas so perhaps this is an unlikely example, but no differentiation is mentioned. In some instances, people have even now been stopped from printing more election materials, for the sake of not campaigning elsewhere as Labour HQ is demanding.
Labour’s ground game is in absolute dire straits and deservedly so, so if you can campaign and get out for other parties and have wondered whether it is worth it in doing so, given Starmer is still predicted to get a large majority, well the answer going by Labour’s own actions is clearly yes.
Making matters even worse for Labour campaigners though, is that their candidates, be they formerly MPs or newbies are across the country, avoiding the very people who’s votes they want. Perhaps they are being forced to campaign elsewhere too and that is why they fail to turn up to hustings? Certainly doesn’t explain why they run from people asking questions in the street, though perhaps they are running late for a twinning session themselves? Whatever the case, this video recommendation here will tell you all about some of the Labour wannabe MPs running away from their own voters and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.