Deputy leader contest was an embarrassment for the Labour left

The TSSA union has been forced to put out a humiliating message acknowledging the failure of Bell Ribeiro-Addy to achieve the nominations needed to be on the ballot in Labour Party’s deputy leader contest, and essentially begging right-wing candidates not to ignore left ideas completely. It read:

TSSA regrets that Bell Ribeiro Addy has not met the nominations threshold among MPs for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

We supported her attempt to get on the ballot because she best aligned with our values on a range of issues: a
massive expansion of workers’ rights through full implementation of the New Deal for Workers; public ownership of the railways, from TOCs and Open Access, to freight and the ROSCOs; a vocal opponent of disability cuts, the two child benefit cap, and ending universal winter fuel payments; she has taken a clear position on the most pressing international issue of the day- calling for the UK to stop arming the genocide in Gaza.

While she has not been nominated by the requisite number of MPs, these views are backed by our members, and we believe most Labour members, too.

They should be represented in the debate, and we call on the candidates who have reached the nominations
threshold to ensure that they are.

Labour: dead in the water after deputy leader contest

The Thatcherite faction of Keir Starmer wasted no time in raising nomination thresholds and walling up the loopholes that allowed Jeremy Corbyn onto the ballot in 2015 – humiliating the right by showing the mass popularity of left-wing ideas and policies and achieving more votes in 2017 and 2019 than Starmer managed in 2024.

In reality, there was never any way that Starmer would allow a left-winger into the contest, let alone to win, prompting one wag to observe that:

I’m surprised Labour hasn’t announced the winner yet.

But the stark fact is that Ribeiro-Addy wouldn’t even have come close to reaching the threshold even under the old rules: only 6.5% of the parliamentary party – which Starmer and his cronies have spent more than four years packing with Brylcreem-oozing miniatures of himself – voted for the left’s candidate.

The lesson of the stark fact is clear: Labour is as dead as the former Tory monster it is now modelled on and the future of the movement lies not only outside it, but as far away from it as it’s possible to get.

This truth was recognised in various quarters. Responding to the failure, former Labour MP Claudia Webbe pointed out that:

There is no Labour Left even to contest the fact that there is no “BAME” candidate.

Called it

Zarah Sultana, who co-founded the new ‘Your Party’ with Jeremy Corbyn – which now has approaching a million members before it even properly incorporates – called it days before the result, when she told an audience in the north-east that:

Labour is dead.

And left activist Eoin Clarke, who left Labour long ago and is now a Green party member, nailed it (and the coffin shut):

If the left in Labour cannot get a lefty on the ballot for deputy leader, the left in Labour cannot get a lefty on the ballot for full leader.

By basic logic we are able to conclude that the Labour Left is over. Done. Finished. Defeated.

It’s time for lefties to leave Labour.

Labour is not only dead under Keir Starmer; it has been dead so long – politically, morally, intellectually and spiritually – that it’s corpse is nothing more than a hollowed-out, rotted husk whose stench is an offence to the nostrils and a danger to the weaker parts of our society.

Time for it to be buried so deep it is beyond the reach of tectonic plate movement – or politically cremated and its ashes scattered beyond memory, for the sake of all of us and especially poor and vulnerable people.

Featured image via the Canary