Keir Starmer's War On The Left Revealed - with Michael Crick and John McDonnell
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership contest with promises of party unity, a "broad church", and the right of Labour members to select their own candidates. All of these commitments have gone up in smoke - and Starmer's leadership has waged a remorseless war against the left.
We speak to former Channel 4 News journalist Michael Crick - who has been following Labour's selections closer than any other journalist - about the shocking revelations he has uncovered; and former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who has written to Starmer about the internal stitch-ups.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. Now, borrowing an almighty political upset admittedly, |
| 0:18.0 | we have had quite a few of those in recent years. Labour are almost certainly going to form |
| 0:22.6 | the next government when a disintegrating conservative political project finally collapses |
| 0:27.8 | in about two years' time. Now, no government in British democratic history, I would argue, |
| 0:32.4 | has so thoroughly self-immolated as the current administration. Now, in this time of crisis, |
| 0:37.6 | and let's be honest, pretty exhausting, relentless turmoil, what we're talking about today might |
| 0:43.4 | seem parochial, might seem parochial to you, might maybe even seem a bit obscure. The internal |
| 0:48.1 | machinations of a political party, you might think, why does this matter in the grand scheme of things, |
| 0:53.0 | not least given the manifest injustices that the current government, I think many of us would |
| 0:57.1 | agree are responsible for. But democracy is a precious thing. And if a party leadership shows |
| 1:04.3 | contempt for the democracy of its own party, it raises questions about how it will treat democracy |
| 1:12.4 | more widely and indeed its critics, not just internally, but externally. Now, three years ago, |
| 1:18.7 | Kirstama launched his bid for the party leadership, the leader, of course, of the Labour Party, |
| 1:24.8 | and after the trauma of the 2019 electoral cataclysm, his pitch really did hit, I think, |
| 1:30.9 | the sweet spot of a party membership, which was very traumatised, not just by the defeat, but |
| 1:37.3 | I'd say pretty tired by the Labour civil wars of the second half of the 2010s. Now, his promise |
| 1:44.3 | was to maintain the radical domestic political prospectus of his predecessor, but professionalise |
| 1:51.2 | it and bring about party unity. Labour would be a broad church, he promised. And crucially, |
| 1:56.7 | he said, Labour members would be able to freely choose their candidates without interference from |
| 2:02.3 | the party leadership. Now, no one can credibly or honestly say that Kirstama has kept to the letter, |
| 2:10.8 | or frankly, the spirit of his leadership campaign. Many of those who are often very eloquent, |
| 2:18.4 | rightly, about the dishonesty and the lack of integrity of the conservatives, are themselves, |
... |
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