Operation Ice Pick

From 'Global Research' by Kerry-anne Mendoza

"In a purge being referred to internally as ‘Operation: Ice Pick’, Labour HQ is purging the party of suspected ‘entryists’. The name is a particularly sick joke, referencing the weapon of choice in the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalinists. Supporters of Corbyn have been consistently derided as ‘Trots’ throughout the campaign.

Comedians Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy, along with renowned author Marcus Chown and ‘Spirit of ’45’ director Ken Loach – all have been banned from voting in the Labour purge. Why? Marcus Chown joined the executive of the National Health Action Party in the 2015 election because his priority was saving the NHS, and he felt that was the best way to highlight the issue. Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel have supported fundraisers for the Green Party in the past. Ken Loach was once a member of the now-defunct Socialist Alliance. As Mark Steel so aptly puts it: ‘Labour – you can’t join as a new member unless you’re already a member.’"


Full Article:

Now Jeremy Hardy is Banned

Radio 4 Comedian Jeremy Hardy
Following on from the ban on Mark Steel Voting in the Labour Party leadership election, now they have banned Jeremy Hardy.

It is rigging the election to stop Corbyn,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday. “They are wishing to change the rules of the game during an election.

Hardy said he would formally apply to see the information used to justify his removal, but warned that the party could seek to exploit complaints to halt the election process.

The Labour party might be trying to invite a legal challenge so that they can say ‘let’s just scrap the election’. They are so desperate that I wouldn’t be surprised.

When it comes to a General Election are they going to ban celebrity supporters too? Are Radio 4 comedians too left wing for the Party?

Amidst reports that one supporter was banned within 5 hours of voting for Jeremy Corbyn, £3 supporters are considering delaying sending in their vote until the last minute, if it is for Corbyn.

Previous story Labour Party Bureaucracy Ban Mark Steel

Guardian Article by George Monbiot

George Monbiot
"On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates.

Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority.

The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.

In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers – as the SNP did in Scotland – could smash the political concrete.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.
"

Read the full article (in the Cooper supporting Guardian)

Mandelson Attempted Coup!

'We know best..'
The Daily Telegraph and Yvette Cooper's supporters are reporting that Peter Mandelson tried to arrange for Cooper, Burnham and Kendall all to pull out, in order to invalidate the process and stop the democratic election of Corbyn. Fortunately this text book cynicism was drowned at birth in the ambitions and arrogance the candidates, not to mention a legal opinion.

'get us in power, stuff the policies'
Meanwhile Brown paced up and down for an hour yesterday, not unlike an incarcerated bear, also attempting to influence Labour Party members' votes today.

What do Brown and Mandelson have in common?  They were never elected to any position in the Labour Party.  Brown became leader without a Labour party election He became Prime Minister without ever winning a General Election.  Mandelson was appointed to positions by Blair and Kinnock, as was Brown.

Mandelson
1985 Appointed Labour Party director of communications by Neil Kinnock.
1994 Secretly appointed by Blair to run Bliar's leadership campaign under the nom-de-guerre 'Bobby'.
1996 Appointed election campaign director by Blair.
1997 Appointed as a Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet Office by Blair.
1998 Appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry by Blair.
1998 Resigned after found haven received a secret interest-free loan of £373,000 from millionaire Geoffrey Robinson.
1999 Appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland by Bliar.
2001 Resigned after using his position to influence a passport application for millionaire Indian businessman Srichand Hinduja
2001 Appointed United Kingdom's European Commissioner by Blair.
2008 Appointed Business Secretary by Brown.  
2009 Appointed to the new made-up post of 'Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills' by Brown.
2010 Appointed appointed President of the international think tank 'Policy Network' by its Chair , one Tony Bliar.
2012 Appointed paid advisor to the illegal logging company 'Asia Pulp & Paper' by billionaire Eka Widjaja.
2103 Appointed to the post of 'High Steward of Hull', a post specially re-created for him by the Queen.

Gordon Brown
1985 Appointed spokesman on Trade and Industry by Kinnock.
1987 Appointed Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury by Kinnock.
1989 Appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry by Kinnock.
1992 Appointed Shadow Chancellor in 1992 by Blair.
1997 Appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Blair.
2007 Appointed Leader of the Labour Party by default (the only other candidate John McDonnell being denied 16 of the the required 45 nominations from MPs). 
2007 Appointed without election Prime Minister. Waited until 2010 to call a General Election (which he lost, badly).


Jez we can
Jeremy Corbyn promises to restore the election rather than appointment of Shadow Cabinet ministers in the Labour Party - the return of a bit of democracy back into the Party, rather than the secret patronage of the corrupt Blair era...

One big plus of internal democracy is that people whom the public would never, ever vote for, like Mandelson, Brown, Kinnock and E Milliband, would no longer get far within the party either.  

Maxwellisation of the Chilcot Inquiry

 'the bouncing Czech'
The report into the Iraq War is currently being held up by a process called “Maxwellisation”. The procedure is named after the pension thief and former Daily Mirror owner, Robert Maxwell.

Maxwell  was criticised in a government report in 1969 and promptly took the Department of Trade and Industry to court. Maxwell lost, once in the High Court and again at the Appeal Court.  

Nonetheless, because of some comments made by the judge in Maxwell's initial application for an injunction (which he also lost!), it seems inquiries can no longer criticise anyone (even war criminal suspects Blair and Jack Straw) without waiting 2 years for their response ('God made me').

Anyway, back to the present.

You might think all Labour MPs wanted an inquiry to take place.  Or at least that all the front runners in the current leadership election did. How wrong you are:

Maybe that's because they also Consistently voted for the Iraq war in the first place.  

Labour Party Bureaucracy Ban Mark Steel

The signs are there has been a wholesale purge of Left Labour party supporters in a desperate attempt at ABC - Anyone But Corbyn.   Listen to Mark Steel on Radio 4 talking about how the Labour Party banned him from voting in the leadership election.

New! sign the petition to re-enfranchise Mark

Big Farmer

In 2013/14 the average dairy farm received £113,100 in subsidies (see below).

Want to donate 10p on your milk to farmers? Read 'Farming subsidies: this is the most blatant transfer of cash to the rich' by George Monbiot first.

Or Revealed: how we pay our richest landowners millions in subsidies. (New Statesman)

"With the exception of Spain, there is no European country in which land is more unequally distributed than Britain, with 70 per cent of acreage held by just 0.28 per cent of the population, or 158,000 families."

The victory for the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) in a UK by-election last week has made it more likely that the UK is on course for a referendum which could force whichever political party in power after the May 2015 general election to take the country out of the European Union. 
Former UK agriculture secretary Owen Paterson also yesterday (November 24) urged Prime Minister David Cameron to give a commitment to invoking article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty giving formal notice of Britain’s intention to quit the EU before any negotiations on its continued membership begin.
Paterson wants the UK to withdraw politically from the EU and forge a trade deal giving access to the single market, like Norway has.
But what effect would such a move (or ‘Brexit’) have on the UK’s farming industry? The objective view would be that farmers will inevitably be worse off, although consumers will benefit.
The shape of UK agriculture policy in the aftermath of an EU exit is of course unclear, but it does seem likely that direct subsidisation, which currently forms a large part of average farm income, would be scaled back significantly and may even largely disappear.
British agriculture would also be subject to fiercer competition from imports than at present, and as a result it is likely that consumers (or the food industry) will gain from lower food prices.

EU subsidy effect

Under the 2007-2013 version of the CAP, EU subsidies to UK farmers totalled around €3.2 billion a year.
For individual farmers, these subsidies, amounting to around €200 per hectare, generally represent around 35-50% of total gross income. For a majority of farms, these subsidies represent the difference between profit and loss. Only super-efficient farmers ranking in the top 10% could survive without them.
The basic problem for the industry is that its costs are predicated on the assumption of this high level of subsidisation. This is most obviously true of land prices and rents – overblown by the promise of the EU subsidies attached to them.
The dire straits into which the UK farm industry would be plunged by removal of the direct aid payments which now form the backbone of the CAP can be judged by most recent farm income figures.
According to DEFRA’s latest Farm Business Accounts report, over a fifth of mixed and grazing livestock did not make a profit in 2013/14, while more than 20% of dairy farms had a net income of less than £25 000 (€31 738). Approximately 20% of cereal growing farms failed to make a profit in 2013/14 - compared with 9% in the previous year. In both cases, the SFP formed a major part of the farms’ gross income.

Cash income (average £ per farm at current prices)

2012/132013/14
Cereals104 60087 200
General cropping111 600102 200
Dairy88 400113 100
Grazing livestock (Lowland)27 80025 700
Grazing livestock (LFA)28 80027 100
Specialist pigs72 40088 100
Specialist poultry127 600198 100
Mixed62 40058 500
Horticulture44 10048 200
All types69 00067 200
SOURCE: DEFRA
Detailed farm income figures from DEFRA indicate the vulnerability of the majority of farms in a post EU farm policy, set by a national government.


Panic in the Labour Party Establishment

On the same day that Murdoch's Times publish a poll showing Corbyn will win outright, the Labour Party has sent out emails to all ex-Labour Party members:

Presumably the thinking is that if you left the Labour Party and favour Corbyn, you won't bother doing anything as he's marked down to win.  On the other hand if you were on the Right you might rejoin to stop him.

The arrogance of the Bliaritres is that they don't realise most people probably left the Labour Party because it had become Tory Lite, not because they wanted it to be Tory Lite.

You can still register to get a vote for £3 here by 12 noon tomorrow (Wednesday the 12th)

The Labour followed up their email with an apology:


We sent you an email earlier in error saying you needed to reactivate your membership in order to vote. As you are currently a supporter I can confirm that you do not need to do anything and you will receive a vote in the leadership election.

Of course if you would like to re-join the Labour Party as a full member you would be very welcome to, and it would be great to have you back! You can do this at join.labour.org.uk.

Thanks, and sorry for the confusion.

Ben Nolan

Membership team
The Labour Party







Corbyn Tops Labour Constituency Vote


Jeremy Corbyn is the most popular candidate for Labour leader among local Labour constituency parties, according to the latest party nomination figures.

He is backed by 152 constituency parties, with Andy Burnham in second place with 111, then Yvette Cooper with 106 and the one openly Bliarite, Liz Kendall, with an embarrassing 18.

You only need to look at how the constituencies voted compared to MP's nominations to see how out-of-touch our overpaid, opportunist and careerist MPs are ►

There's no point putting up a pie chart of which unions nominated whom. All the large unions nominated Jeremy Corbyn. The sad NUM, the despised USDAW and the corrupt UCATT differed. Not one union endorsed Kendall.


Kendall: Not even the Grave Diggers Union
New! The arrogance of Bliarite John McTernan: "If Corbyn wins the Labour leadership, he should be deposed immediately" and "who cares about the grassroots?"

New! See how constituencies voted

Previous story Corbyn Ahead No Thanks to McCluskey