Thursday 28 July 2016

The legal challenge to stop Jeremy Corbyn defending his leadership has been thrown out of court


The Anyone But Corbyn faction of the Labour party have already demonstrated that they're an anti-democratic bunch who resent the interference of Labour Party members in an organisation that they consider to be theirs.

Launching their highly damaging, ineptly conducted, and staggeringly ill-timed coup attempt just when the Tories were at their weakest moment since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010 was a sign of their contempt for the party membership. Just when Labour Party supporters (and anyone else who opposes the Tories) needed the opposition to speak with a unified voice, the right-wing of the party launched their damaging pre-planned attempt to bully the elected leader of the party into resignation.

When Jeremy Corbyn refused to cave in to their bullying tactics the coup-plotters realised that they'd over-played their hand. They had to come up with an Anyone But Corbyn candidate to beat him in a democratic election after he'd more than doubled the party membership by inspiring over 300,000+ people so much that they decided to cough up membership fees.

The right-wing of the Labour Party realised that the only way that their Anyone But Corbyn candidate could possibly win was by rigging the leadership election in their favour.

They did this by arbitrarily excluding over 130,000 recent Labour Party members from participating in the leadership election whilst simultaneously offering the right to participate for a fee of £25.

The Anyone But Corbyn camp were hoping that by excluding the 130,000+ mainly left-wing members from voting, and putting a ridiculous £25 surcharge on participation they would rebalance the Labour electorate away from left-wing people and towards the kind of well-to-do people who can easily afford to blast £25 on a single vote, and might be a bit more likely to support a Blairite candidate.

This ploy failed spectacularly when an unprecedented surge of 183,000+ people coughed up the £25 surcharge over the space of just two days. This means that more people registered to vote in the Labour leadership contest in two days than there are members of the Tory party in total! Most of the people to pay the £25 surcharge were Corbyn supporters, and lots of them made significant sacrifices to scrape the money together to makes sure the efforts to disenfranchise them were unsuccessful.

Another assault on Labour Party democracy from the Labour Party establishment are their decisions to enforce a complete lockdown on local party democracy (to stop local parties from holding votes of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn or against their coup-plotter MPs) and disbanding several local parties entirely because they had already dared to support Corbyn or criticise their coup-plotter MP.

The failure of their coup and the failure of their efforts to rig the leadership election in Anyone But Corbyn's favour didn't deter the Labour Party right-wingers, and the Millionaire Labour Party donor Michael Foster decided to try to use the courts to block Jeremy Corbyn from participating in the leadership election.

The decision to appeal the National Executive Committee (NEC) decision to allow Corbyn to stand in the leadership election left the Labour Party in a bizarre state of limbo, with the entire future of the party hinging on the decision of a 67 year old judge called David Foskitt.

Had Foskitt decided to overturn the NEC decision to allow Jeremy Corbyn to stand, and effectively barred him from the leadership contest, he would have destroyed the reputation of the party. How could anyone have considered Owen Smith the rightful leader of the party when him and his backers were too cowardly to even allow Corbyn to stand against him in a democratic election?

Thankfully Justice Foskitt saw sense and declared that it was not his responsibility to rewrite the rules of the Labour leadership contest, so Corbyn gets to stand in the leadership election, and the Blairites who think that millionaire donors like Michael Foster should have more influence over the party than the party membership are left to eat sour grapes.


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