“We urge you to lead the Party in a way that will allow it to devote its entire energies & resources to attacking & defeating this corrupt & incompetent Tory administration & to render it fit for the task of winning power and providing the capable & forward looking government the country is crying out for.”
Dear Keir,
During your successful campaign to win the leadership of the Labour Party, you were asked to mark Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership out of ten. You declined to do so and simply replied ‘Jeremy Corbyn is my friend’.
In that same campaign, you issued ten pledges in which you promised to continue and build on the socialist policies and principles of the Corbyn leadership. And you promised to restore the unity, integrity and authority of the Party.
Now, amid the turmoil afflicting the Party around the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn and of constituency officers and members up and down the country, we urge you to make good on those promises, promises that won you the leadership by a large margin.
The Corbyn project, of which you yourself were a prominent member, was always going to meet fierce resistance from the vested interests it challenged and hostile media working in support of (and often owned by) those vested interests.
But we believe the Party might well have faced down those interests in the 2017 election and would not have lost so heavily in 2019 had it not been for sustained and relentless attacks from within the Party itself.
Prominent Labour MPs, several of whom later abandoned the Party for lucrative jobs in the private sector and two of whom Boris Johnson elevated to the House of Lords, played a leading role in those attacks.
It is therefore distressing to see some Labour MPs continuing, under the new leadership, to drag the reputation of the Party through the mud and we now fear a repeat of the self-destructive behaviour that has cost the Party so dear in recent years.
We therefore call on you to make good on the promises that won you the leadership and to prove to the membership that they made the right choice.
We are proud of the achievements of the Corbyn leadership and of the policies and values it inspired. We worked incredibly hard to make that vision a reality and were hugely disappointed by last year’s election defeat.
Over 34,000 voters in Islington North placed their trust in Jeremy Corbyn as their Labour MP at that election, the sort of people whose interests the Labour Party was founded to fight for.
We now urge you, as Leader, along with the General Secretary, to bring together shadow cabinet members, Labour MPs, Party employees, the trade unions and the entire membership to build on the gains and to learn from the mistakes of the last five years.
We urge you to lead the Party in a way that will allow it to devote its entire energies and resources to attacking and defeating this corrupt and incompetent Tory administration and to render it fit for the task of winning power and providing the capable and forward looking government the country is crying out for.
- Signed by 27 Executive Committee members of Islington North Constituency Labour Party.
