ZARAH: The working class needs leaders like you...but not as a member of the Labour Party

An open letter calling on MP Zarah Sultana to resign from Keir Starmer's Tory-lite party of capitalist managers and Netanyahu apologists

An open letter to MP Zarah Sultana

14 May 2024

Dear Zarah:

Cc: zarah.sultana.mp@parliament.uk

Last evening I emailed a mate about the topic I intended to cover in this open letter to you today.

“Good idea,” he replied, adding, “perhaps quote her principled stances and point out that this is impossible in the Labour Party and that she would be better to make a planned exit.”

“Good idea,” I emailed him back. And so I will.

I think I speak for a lot of people on the left, Zarah, when I ask you:

“Why are you wasting your time and talents hanging around in the whacked-out and downright dangerous Labour Party?”

“Why not leave soon on your own terms rather than wait for Starmer to give you the boot and bar you from standing again as the Labour candidate at the next election?”

And can I add one more thought:

Consider this an invitation to join the growing movement to launch and build a mass socialist party. Your opposition to Starmer’s policy’s - and that of thousands of others -- could gain significant momentum when bolstered by allies united in a common cause. (More on this in a minute).

I read HERE that you joined Labour in 2011 and most of us know you were first elected as a Labour MP for Coventry South in 2019. The national party bosses tried to block you from standing again, but you fought back and triumphed over the Tory candidate in July 2024 by more than 10,000 votes.

Now sitting as an independent MP, you've been in the news a lot in the past 48 hours due to the Facebook and X/ Twitter message below:

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The Prime Minister imitating Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech is sickening.

That speech fuelled decades of racism and division. Echoing it today is a disgrace. It adds to anti-migrant rhetoric that puts lives at risk.

Shame on you, Keir Starmer.

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Let’s look at this closer. When the PM said in his anti-immigrant broadside on Monday that “we risk becoming an island of strangers", he was lifting words and a message straight from racist Tory MP and cabinet minister Enoch Powell in 1968.

Denouncing an increase in the number of migrants to the UK and speaking against an anti-discrimination bill at the time, Powell said in his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech that “the existing population” had “found themselves made strangers in their own country.”

(HERE, for younger readers, is the text of Powell’s inflammatory 1968 diatribe; for some context, see HERE).

Tory MP Enoch Powell ( 1912 to 1998)

Starmer’s speech followed a pattern of trying to “out-Reform Reform” and beat Nigel Farage at his own racist scapegoating game. Most serious progressives recognise this as a grave mistake; it merely serves to make racist attacks on immigrants and refugees more acceptable, leading to more DAILY MAIL headlines, leading to…

Moreover, it is also a losing political tactic. As an academic explained clearly this week, “Keir Starmer’s immigration plans: research shows you don’t beat the far right by becoming them.” Or as former French far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen used to say, “voters generally prefer the original to the copy.”

A SECOND MESSAGE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

This week, Zarah, you posted a second message on social media, in addition to an excellent one denouncing the Starmer government for allowing fighter aircraft partially built in Britain to kill Palestinians in the Israeli genocide.

Your second message read:

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I voted to scrap the two-child benefit cap — and lost the Labour whip.

I voted against cuts to winter fuel payments.

And I’ll vote against any cuts to disability benefits.

I didn’t enter politics to toe the line. I’m here to fight for the working class.

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This gets to the crux of the matter.

Why remain a member of a party which, day in and day out, is fighting AGAINST the working class?

You've been expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party. What would compel you to rejoin it, even if an offer were extended by Starmer?

As for the party itself, it is led by politicians who are actively participating in Israel's genocide (David Lamey is a disgrace!), who are attacking poor people, pensioners and the disabled (ditto for Rachel Reeves), who are undermining the fight for climate justice, and who are locking up campaigners against its policies in what soon may be record numbers.

MANY THOUSANDS HAVE ALREADY QUIT LABOUR

After being a member of the Labour Party for 14 years, we can appreciate that it would not be easy to resign. But hundreds of thousands of others have done so. Your resignation would send a particularly strong headline-making message.

Let's face it. Backbench members of the Labour Party on the left are virtually powerless to make any progressive changes to Keir Starmer’s party or government.

Norwich South Labour MP Clive Lewis

My own MP, Norwich South’s Clive Lewis, faces the same situation as you do. Back at the end of March, he had a chance to put forward a private member's bill calling for the desperately needed reprivatization of our fresh- and waste- water utilities. Not a single cabinet minister even attended the debate. By day’s end, Starmer’s government had binned Clive’s bill.

This weekend, he is speaking at a rally here in Norwich to protest the scandalous cutbacks to PIP payments brought in by the very government he helped to elect. Talk about embarrassing.

WE ALL NEED ORGANISATION

I am sure, Zarah, that you and I agree on one thing. Without organisation, the working class are without weapons to take on employers who force workers to strike. The same is true for disabled people. I was told last night that a relatively new group, CRIPS AGAINST CUTS, is making good strides. So is DPAC.

Socialists of different stripes also face the same problem. Without our own mass socialist party, we are without weapons to take on right wing social democracy which, as we can see from the recent elections in Germany, is a dying and stagnating trend.

In the UK, the Labour Party is not worth trying to rehabilitate.

Instead, we need to build an alternative to Labour which will have the same mission you say you have: “to fight for the working class.”

It would be naïve to suggest the campaign for a mass socialist party is already in high gear in the UK. It is not. The movement is uneven and has real weaknesses on questions of transparency and tactics and on formulating a popular socialist platform.

MPs such as yourself should not assume that they would necessarily become the leaders of a mass socialist party. But enthusiastic champions of a new radically changed social, political, and economic order are badly needed. Lots of us see you, Zarah, as one.

What is the alternative? Nigel Farage as Prime Minister? Or Wes Streeting as the next Labour leader? More and more us want a mass socialist party.

Alan Story

THE LEFT LANE

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ONE MORE REMINDER…

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