Since I made this post the following news story has been posted on The Guardian website about Clive Lewis, Jon Cruddas and other Labour Party members arguing that the Party needs to be part of a progressive alliance if it wants to defeat the Conservatives - not expelling members who do!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/07/labour-mps-revive-campaign-for-progressive-alliance?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
ORIGINAL POST BEGINS HERE:
The Labour Party in Broxtowe and nationally should look at the numbers from the BBC News website below and tremble. The Party floundered and nearby Derby encapsulated why. The Council has appeared disconnected from local people for a long time. Watching their councillors on East Midlands Today over the years it will not surprise me if Derby goes the way of Mansfield. Another good example of how bad Labour can be. We have to learn from these things.
I am the first to recognise and accept that broad sweeps such as I am making capture the good as well as the bad and indifferent; those Labour councillors who by sheer dint of effort keep voters loyal even in bad times; the Party members who are part of a wide spectrum of community groups and voluntary organisations. Right now such people appear exceptional when they are what we should all try to be - part of the community working alongside others regardless of politics, faith, race, gender, age.
The results also contain the message that Labour is vulnerable to a Liberal resurgence. Soubry wants a soft Brexit and as it draws ever closer, so do a great many Labour Party members and supporters - and the Liberals are chasing the votes of Remainers/soft-Brexiteers and winning.
Soubry is astute. We all know, thanks to the numbers game played at Westminster, she is worth a dozen other MPs when it comes to Brexit and Broxtowe voters know this. Having an MP at Westminster who counts is attractive and MPs win because of this. Notoriety beats Party time and again across the political spectrum.
Soubry has learnt when to keep quiet. Labour lost in Broxtowe because it fell into a trap of its own making.
The Labour Party habitually plays to what it believes to be its core support, all that it needs to cross the finishing line first. So much of what the Party blames the Conservatives for can be tracked back to the Labour governments of Blair and Brown. The Liberals by getting into bed with Cameron cannot escape their role in the demise of meaningful democracy.
Be it housing, health, defence, border control, austerity, law and oder, student fees, community involvement, local democracy, Labour got there first. It spent it years in office brown-nosing big business and Little Englanders because it wanted to out-Tory the Tories. I’m sure you do not need me to list examples of these painful truths. Voters know this and, understandably, reject the copy in favour of the real deal.
During the 3 plus years I have lived in Beeston I cannot recall one example of community engagement by the Labour Party. There is talk of what the Party wants to do FOR people, but never of what it wants to do WITH local residents and groups.
I am mindful and critical because I believe Labour Party members should be active in their neighbourhoods and communities. Canvassing is not the same as being involved. Party members who give their time freely are as much community volunteers as others in faith, age or gender based groups, yet they accept being set apart. In my experience councils for/of voluntary service behave like an alternative establishment and are self-serving.
Last Tuesday, 1st May, I attended a remembrance gathering in Lenton for Mairi Yuill, a lifelong Labour Party member and community activist, a peace campaigner, a former city and county councillor loved and respected across Lenton. I was one of three people asked by her family to say a few words. I spoke about her community involvement, having spent some 35 years working alongside her. A close friend and ex-neighbour (Chris Richardson) spoke about her Labour Party work. Mairi died aged 95 in a Beeston nursing home, where she spent her last few months. I saw not long before she passed on, having promised her tea and cake in the Local not Global Deli. It was not to be.
Mairi at work in The Lenton Centre Office,
March 2008
My eulogy for Mairi on 1st May was as follows:
I am extremely touched by Deborah’s invitation to say a few words in remembrance of Mairi.
For a good few of us here today this is a familiar place when it comes to remembering Mairi, because this where she held her 70th and 80th birthday parties. Was there a 60th? I wish I could remember.
Deborah told me ‘The biggest thing I learned from my mum is that I personally can make a difference, and never to accept the status quo if it is unfair’.
I found a reference to Mairi the Nottingham News No.75, dated October 1975 (which was published by striking NUJ members involed in a year long dispute with the Nottingham Post), describing Mairi and the late Peter Price as anti-establishment councillors.
Unsigned as it is, knowing Mairi and Peter from all those years ago, I do not doubt its veracity.
When Susan and I arrived in Lenton in 1980 and started going to Labour Party meetings Mairi quickly recruited me as a volunteer for the then Lenton Community Association, which managed Lenton Community Centre. The Centre opened in February 1979 and Mairi had been secretary of its founding steering committee. Over the years, we worked on many projects together, including the creation of the Dunkirk and Lenton Partnership Forum in 1996 and the first campaign to save the Lenton Leisure Centre in 1994. There was one more in 1999, then again in 2004 before, in early- 2006, the City Council sold the building to the Association for £10 and it became The Lenton Centre.
How many remember the community shop on Osmaston Street, where you could find Mairi most mornings during the 1990s.
From 1981–85 we were Labour Party county councillors together, both of us having previously been city councillors (Mairi in Nottingham, me in Birmingham). How could I not want to work alongside a person who believed to be a Labour Party member it was not enough to put up posters, knock on doors, deliver leaflets or run election campaigns, you had be part of the community as well and Mairi was certainly that.
After The Lenton Centre took over Mairi did not retire, as she could have reasonably done. After all she was 82. Instead she she joined the Board of Directors and took on a day job of sorts, going into the office most days of the week to help look after the accounts and membership records. It was where I usually got to chat with Mairi on the couple of day a week I visited the Centre and I took the photograph of Mairi I am proudest of — sitting at a desk working. She never stopped.
Mairi paid me and Susan the compliment of asking us to look after the records of Lenton Community Association when it transferred all its assets to The Lenton Centre. In 2016 we deposited all the files, together with our own, in Nottinghamshire Archives. At some time in the future when someone comes to write a new history of Lenton I’m sure Mairi will be there centre page, along with other Lenton heroes such as Lesley Fyffe and Jenny Hills. For my own part I can honestly say that whenever Mairi asked me to help in some way I did.
After we left Lenton for Beeston at the end of 2014 Susan and I saw very little of Mairi. Health problems took charge of our lives, but then we got some good news from Deborah; that Mairi was coming to live in Beeston within yards of our favourite cafe, so at the end of February just gone I called in at her new home and saw Mairi, promising to return, but before I could Mairi passed on. We never did have the tea and cake I promised her.
Mairi will be remembered with love and affection by all us, of that I am sure.
By their deeds you shall know them.
Robert Howard
1 May 2018.
Robert Howard
1 May 2018.
Mairi, 2nd left, at the first Lenton Centre Board of Directors meeting. Not everyone shown.
Mairi, June 2004, at the 25th anniversary celebrations for Lenton Community Centre, with Jenny Hills to her left and Dennis Jones, Lord mayor and a former Lenton resident, to her right.
Mairi working on Lenton Community Centre's stall in the Old Market Square sometime in the 1990s when all Nottingham's community centres game together to promote their activities. In 2002 there were 46(!) community centres in the City.
Mairi takes notes at a small meeting in the Lenton Community Centre Office in the 1980s. Derek in the middle lived in the flats and founded a very successful lunch club in the Centre which ran for many years. Sadly he passed on a good few years ago. Glenn Trickey was our City Council paid Warden for many years. Probably the best community worker I've known. He was with us on 1st May.
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