Up until a few weeks before the local elections in May, I was the candidate for Cotham ward in Bristol. The Party had held the threat of suspension over me for almost 5 months. In November 2020, I was alerted that I was being investigated for a Facebook comment screenshotted in 2017. As in many cases, I was given a week to reply; I didn’t receive an update for half a year (leaving members in limbo is an easy way to keep them in line). In March, instead of a decision, they sent me a new investigation – this time with bonus screenshots, mostly showing retweets of factual criticisms about the Party leadership on issues such as drug criminalisation and foreign wars. This time, with the bureaucracy under pressure to replace troublesome candidates before May’s election, I was given 36 hours to reply and the decision was made days later.

A Candidate and CLP in Limbo

I wasn’t the only left-wing candidate to have been targeted; two others were investigated on similar but more spurious grounds, and permitted to stand (sometimes, intimidating people into line is enough). A fourth was banned from standing because they had criticised the Party for its failure to support deaf and disabled candidates – Unity and Integrity truly are the watchwords in Starmer’s Bristol.

This last-minute purging of socialists didn’t come as a surprise. My warning back in November arrived in the wake of 8 members being suspended: two for chairing a CLP meeting which heard a motion opposing Corbyn’s suspension, five for tweeting criticism of the Regional Director Phil Gaskin, and one for a vague “concern that he might have broken party rules”. These included two council candidates, who were swiftly replaced – one of whom wasn’t even a Labour member at the time!

These suspensions also included the Chair and both Secretaries of Bristol West, clearing the way for Regional Office’s coup de grace: suspending our November AGM with less than a week’s notice and delaying it until February. In February, a right-wing slate was ‘elected’ in an online meeting which lasted over 5 hours, and where 100 of the 500 attendees never received a ballot.

Fighting for Democratisation 

As members are denied a voice through official structures, we must find other ways to hold candidates and staff accountable. Many members who have spent years campaigning for Labour announced that they would refuse to vote for candidates who have treated members with contempt. Bristol Momentum also declared that they would withdraw their campaigning support and resources from every candidate who refused to stand up against these undemocratic stitch-ups.

Unsurprising Consequences 

In May, Bristol elected its 70 councillors and mayor. To say that Labour’s majority collapsed would be an understatement; 12 lost councillors directly to the Greens, though you wouldn’t think so on the evidence of the leadership’s response to the elections. In 2019, Bristol Labour was so inundated with support that we organised hundreds of our members to support campaigns from Cornwall, to Stroud, to Barry. In May, I saw several councillors around town knocking doors alone, and I wasn’t surprised.

Kieran Glasssmith is a Labour Party member and activist in Bristol

Image credit: “Fenestration” by Anthony O’Neil is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.O