Beeston's Pete Radcliff: A Labour Party injustice to a family member

I have known Pete Radcliff since c.1980 through the Labour Party in Nottingham and since the of 2014, here in Beeston. We have not been friends, but we have rubbed along and I have never doubted his loyalty and intent for one moment. For some us the Labour Party is family and Pete is a member of that family, so to receive an email from Broxtowe Constituency Labour Party telling me he had been expelled from the Party because of his links with Workers' Liberty (once better known as Socialist Organiser) came as a surprise.

Over the years he has worked his socks off for the Labour Party and I find it amazing that he can be expelled without a hearing. This is the nasty right-wing of the Party at work. History shows that it is the Party's right-wing that betrays it (remember 'The Gang of Four').

Back in 1970, I was on the receiving end of an attempt to expel me from the Labour Party whilst living in Mansfield. A long time ago, but I remember the experience well. After an appeal and support from others in the Party, I was banned from holding office in the Labour Party for five years, but that did not stop me becoming a Nottinghamshire Labour Party county councillor in 1981 and being an election agent in 1983.

In his blog Pete says that he intends to fight his expulsion and I will be one of many Labour Party members standing behind him, as will my wife, Susan Griffiths, who shares my disgust at what the Labour Party's right-wing machine has done. I am sure many other Party members in Broxtowe and elsewhere will be speaking on his behalf given the opportunity. 

The manner in which the Labour Party machine appears to be expelling members is undemocratic and centralist.

There will be a backlash from this and I hope it does not focus on Lilian Greenwood, who has to be in prime position to be selected as the Labour Party's prospective candidate for the new Nottingham South & Beeston constituency, assuming it is created in 2018. She is a critic of Jeremy Corbyn, but I know her, trust her and will support her of she does seek the nomination, even though at the time of her original selection in Nottingham South I actively worked for Christine Shawcroft, recently re-elected to the Labour Party National Executive Committee. I like Christine, but Lilian has earned my loyalty and you do not have to agree with people on everything to support them — which neatly brings me back to Pete Radcliff and where I began this post...

FOOTNOTE: See Pete's blog for his own thoughts and comments.


The title of Pete's blog is Observations from a Third Camp perspective and this link takes you to his home page.

Why Jeremy Corbyn reminds me of a former local politician and I want to hear it for RON

So Owen Smith, who has worked as a lobbyist and for a dodgy biotec firm is the 'unity' candidate and I find myself faced with no choice at all in the Labour Party leadership ballot. I have watched him on television already having to defend himself when quotes from his past are read to him. There will be weeks of this, so it will be interesting to see how Smith gets on.

I suspect that I am a 'normal' long-time individual Labour Party member insomuch as I voted remain, wanted a post-2008 strategy which took advantage of the situation to re-build Britain like the 1945 Labour Government did, who believes in local government and a unilateralist since the age of fourteen (I went on my first CND march in 1958), who accepts that Jeremy Corbyn has problems managing a team.

At this moment, logic says I stick with the devil I know (Jeremy Corbyn), but I suspect a good few Labour Party members would join me in wanting to see 'Re-open nominations' (RON) on the ballot paper. Better to take a few months more getting it right than spending years in opposition, which is what will happen if the present stalemate continues.

I am also persuaded by Lilian Greenwood's speech to Nottingham South CLP earlier this week, which you can read in full on her website (click on this link).

I trust Lilian, even though I do not share her views on a range of issues (HS2 for example).

Susan and I lived in Lenton, part of Nottingham South CLP, for thirty-five years until November 2014 and got to know Lilian well. We were not among her initial supporters when she sought the nomination to succeed Alan Simpson back in 2010, but we were impressed by her courtesy and openness from the first time we met her, when she came to visit us in our home at the start of her campaign and we gave her our 100% support the moment she was was selected. Before her selection, we did speak up for Lilian when it came to demands that she live in the constituency, given that she lived not far away.

I do not expect the individual I vote for in a selection meeting, be it a would-be councillor or MP, to have all the same views as me. I have always held the view that you give someone a job and let them get on with it. Quite clearly, Jeremy Corbyn did not give Lilian the support she deserved and other shadow cabinet members tell similar stories. Are they all liars and part of some conspiracy? Life tells me 'no'. 

However there are opportunists who take advantage and there have been plenty of them in recent weeks.

The stories I hear of Jeremy Corbyn remind me of Michael Cowan, a Labour Party councillor for many years on Nottinghamshire County Council and the City Council. Stories abound of the way Michael made decisions and how he treated colleagues. After a longstanding fight with the Labour leadership on the City Council he defected to the Conservative Party.

Michael also lived in Lenton and I got to know him in the 1970s because we were in the same APEX trade union branch. He could be a difficult person to deal with, but I always found him supportive, so my years on the county council chairing the airport and being the arts lead on leisure were enjoyable. Others were not so lucky and found him difficult to work with.

We continued to be friends after he joined the Conservatives and I shared his concerns about the way the Labour leadership managed the city and treated some communities with disdain, like Dunkirk and Lenton. These are well documented elsewhere, including my Parkviews blog, and our personal papers of these times went to the Nottinghamshire Archive a few months ago.

Michael did not have the skills to be a leader, despite his oratory and policy vision (not always right, as with his decision to sell East Midlands Airport to the private sector) and the talk I hear of Jeremy Corbyn reminds me of Michael in many ways.

Jeremy Corbyn's best act of leadership in recent weeks could have been actively seeking his own 'unity' candidate to succeed him. Instead we are left with no choice at all, so the stalemate/madness will continue.

FOOTNOTE: After writing this, I received my daily Labour List email with a news item about Crowdpac's Policy Matchmaker, which I have just done and find myself pretty close to Owen Smith. I am 70% liberty and 71% left. No questions about defence or local government.

Electrifying railways – Forward with Labour – inspired by Lilian

Back in the days when I was a Labour Party agent for local elections and then a councillor in Birmingham and Nottingham, I always used 'campaign' postcards. They were cheap and easy to produce in the days when colour was an impossible luxury. I could easily print fifty or two hundred at home for a specific street or event.

I got the idea from poll-cards. Once upon a time, these were not produced and distributed by local councils. You had to do your own if you wanted them. Party members would come together in Labour halls and clubs and use marked electoral rolls to write names and addresses onto poll-cards by hand. They were social occasions, when Party members got to know one another better over cake and refreshments. I remember writing up poll-cards (and 'Reading pads' for election day) with a big smile on my face.

People would take them into the polling station to use when marking their ballot papers (back then, just the names of the candidates were listed on the ballot paper. Descriptions and party logos were added in the 1970s if I remember correctly). As they left the polling station, they would hand the card to the Labour Party person standing there. The cards were then collected and taken back to the committee room. It was a quick and efficient way of working and a sign of good organisation.

In the mid-1980s, my Susan computerised the process and in all the elections I was the Party Agent for in the then Portland ward in Nottingham I continued to produce poll-cards. I still would. Anyway, it wasn't much of a leap to turn poll-cards into campaign postcards and I have been thinking about how the idea could still be used.

Well, today I got my answer, thanks to a snippet I heard on BBC East Midlands Today's lunchtime news about how Lilian Greenwood, now the Labour Party's Shadow Minister of Transport, was challenging the Conservatives to explain why they were not going ahead with railway electrification and the government minister responding said something like 'It will go ahead, it's just on pause',

'Pause' sums up almost perfectly what has happened to Britain under the Conservatives. Life has been on pause for most of us, and for a good few going backwards! None of it necessary and, ever since it was introduced as the answer to the economic crisis created by the banks and corporate capitalism, I have opposed 'austerity' as a policy. 

Giving banks trillions was a big big mistake. The money should have gone to investing in housing, transport and many other things we needed (and still need), so I am delighted to hear the Labour Party now saying these things.

At the beginning of the Labour Party Leadership contest Susan and I were with Andy Burnham. He was our choice in 2010, but we drifted away from him in the absence of his offering little that was new. In the end we both voted for Jeremy Corbyn and I was very pleased when Andy Burnham and Lilian Greenwood joined Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet. It is going to be hard for the next four years, but I really do believe it is possible to win in 2020, despite the Parliamentary boundary changes and the mountain Labour has to climb in Scotland.

From the news item about Lilian and railway electrification has come these four 'campaign postcards' 2015 style in this post. I think postcards could be used in Beeston and Broxtowe for local Labour campaigns. One final point, the reverse side can be used for punchy text and the name of the local area they are being delivered in.