Labour colludes with Tories and hard right to freeze out popular Greens – SKWAWKBOX

Yet more disgrace as Labour right continues to corrupt shell of party

Labour has colluded with the Tories – and even a far-right Reform UK councillor – to grab power and freeze out popular Green councillors in at least three different local authorities this week.

Shamefully, Labour in Wirral on Merseyside – where right-winger Paul Stuart, who helped smear Wallasey Labour members in the borough to protect Angela Eagle, had already bribed Tories with senior positions to get himself installed as the new council leader – again teamed up with their soulmates in blue rosettes to prevent the thirteen Green councillors from getting committee chairships, despite the party winning 22% of the vote in the borough and .

Green councillor Jo Bird, who smashed Labour’s attempts to defeat her in her ward this month, told Skwawkbox:

This is about democracy, fairness, power and honesty. Over 80,000 people who live in Wirral voted for 66 local councillors in democratic elections just two weeks ago. 41% voted Labour, 22% voted Green, double the LibDem vote. Following usual practices, from Wirral Council’s 6 important decision-making policy committees and 5 regulatory committees, including Constitution & Standards committee the Greens should be chairing 2 of the 11 committees.

Labour’s manoeuvres at the Council meeting were unfair, disproportionate and disrespectful to Wirral voters. Labour and Conservatives supported each other in an unholy alliance. Voters want honesty and fairness from their elected politicians, not this kind of dirty backroom dealing.

What you get with Labour is not what’s on the tin. Their election leaflets claimed that if you peel back a Green you get a Conservative underneath, yet it’s perfectly clear now that if you vote Labour, you get Tories.

Labour also colluded with Tories to grab power in Banbury in Oxfordshire – again to freeze out the Greens, whose relative performance in the recent local elections far outstripped Labour’s vote-share standstill, where the Green group leader on the council echoed Jo Bird’s ‘vote Labour, get Tory’:

And in the Sussex borough of Hastings, Labour teamed up with the hard right, in the form of a former Tory councillor who now represents Reform UK, to grab the council’s senior positions despite its poor electoral performance leading to a minority position on the council – and even with the right-winger’s support, Labour still needed the Labour mayor’s casting vote to scrape through in some votes

Green leader Julia Hilton said:

[Council leader Paul] Barnett talked about how all 32 councillors should be working together and yet they’ve just acted to remove all the chairs and vice-chairs and in fact to not really care about the opinions or skills of the non-Labour members of this council. So we’ve gone back to the old ways of working within your Labour cabal.

It seems a pretty short-sighted move to abandon all committees to shared working because now you feel you can rely on the support of a councillor who sits as a member of the Reform party… and the casting vote of the mayor.

Such collusions, like Labour’s failure to gain vote-share in the local elections despite the collapse of the Tories, are a sign of the rot and red-Toryism of Starmer’s party. But of course, even without such examples it’s clear that voting Labour means getting Tory – Starmer has boasted that ‘his’ party are the ‘real Conservatives’. The only question is what colour rosette they’ll be wearing.

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