Election
The Memory Hole
An empty bucket, a Zappos shoebox, potting soil, a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape, some synthetic firewood—the flotsam and jetsam of the half-forgotten years. These leftovers from past lives accumulate in suburban garages as the people who once wanted them get older and older. Useless and unnoticed, they yet cling on doggedly until time does its work, their owners depart for good, and new people move in and take them to the dump.
But this particular jumble of detritus has been rescued from oblivion and given a new home in the eternal archives of US history. For it included another item: a damaged box containing classified documents relating to America’s failed war in Afghanistan. That box, like Pandora’s, contained a whole world of trouble. From it has emerged the reality that the Democrats have been trying to evade—the vulnerability created by Joe Biden’s senescence.
In the report of the special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s retention of official documents at his homes, there is a photograph taken in the garage of his residence in Wilmington, Delaware, by an FBI agent in December 2022. It shows a familiar chaos of discarded objects: the console of a treadmill, red drain rods and a blue ladder, dried white flowers drooping disconsolately from a basket—kept, presumably, because they once meant something. Among them is the open brown cardboard box, its left side tattered and dented, from which peep the blue and white tops of documents Biden used when he was vice-president and then forgot to return after he left office.
US Department of Justice
A photograph of Joe Biden’s Delaware garage reproduced in the special counsel’s report, December 21, 2022
Seen differently, it might all be a conceptual art installation, a mordant commentary on the way America’s longest war has already been consigned to the national garage as just another dust-gathering discard. Instead, it dramatizes a much more literal question of memory and forgetting. Hur used the opportunity of his report to characterize Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” In his disastrous press conference of January 8, responding to Hur’s report, Biden in turn made a verbal slip that seemed to contradict his insistence that “my memory is fine,” describing the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as “the president of Mexico, el-Sisi.”
The irony here is that Hur uses the location of the box of Afghanistan-related papers in the garage in Wilmington as evidence of Biden’s likely innocence of any crime:
A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy. Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.
Hur, in the body of his report, is actually quite good on the subject of forgetfulness. He recognizes that Biden, after he left office as vice-president, had such long experience of reading official documents that they might not be especially memorable to him: “Mr. Biden, after all, had seen classified documents nearly every day for the previous eight years.” In relation to the contentious documents that Biden retained, including a memo he wrote to then-president Barack Obama opposing a “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, Hur suggests that some members of a putative jury might “conclude that if Mr. Biden found the classified Afghanistan documents in the Virginia home, he forgot about them rather than willfully retaining them.” In other words, Biden’s forgetfulness was not pathological—it was merely the mundane operation of the human mind, which a jury would accept as normal and understandable.
This is surely right. It’s not just that the evidence related to the classified documents does not support any accusation that Biden deliberately withheld them from the archives. It’s also that it does not support the much more politically charged implication that the poor treatment of these documents is evidence of senility. Biden had these papers in his homes quite legitimately while he was vice-president. Some of them got shunted into the memory hole of an ordinary suburban garage. That he forgot about them is emphatically not evidence of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
The plain fact is that memory is always somewhat hazy, at any age. Indeed, as the White House noted in its rebuttal to the report, Hur references other instances of imprecise recall. Biden’s counsel Patrick Moore had the job of sorting Biden’s archives and searching for potentially missing documents that Biden should have handed over. Moore found documents in a small closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Hur reports that “When interviewed by FBI agents, Moore believed the small closet was initially locked and that a Penn Biden Center staff member provided a key to unlock it, but his memory was fuzzy on that point.” Equally, Hur reports of another of Biden’s lawyers, John McGrail, that his memory of certain events was inconsistent with contemporary written records but concedes sensibly that “McGrail’s memory of these events could well have faded over the course of more than six years.” Does this mean that Moore and McGrail had diminished faculties? Of course not—people forget things.
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The politically explosive part of Hur’s report, however, relates to a much more concentrated period of time: what Biden identified in his press conference as a five-hour grilling by the special counsel’s team over two days on October 8 and 9, 2023. This was in the immediate aftermath of the shock of Hamas’s atrocious assault on civilians in Israel. As Biden put it in his press conference, “it was in the middle of handling an international crisis.” In its rebuttal, appended to Hur’s report, the White House says that “in the lead up to the interview, the President was conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.” If Biden’s mind was elsewhere during the interviews with Hur, most of the world would surely agree that that’s exactly where it should have been.
Hur’s account of this meeting is nonetheless worrying:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013—when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
These lapses of memory are significant and they do provide a troubling glimpse of how Biden may sometimes function in private meetings in the White House. But Hur also performs a sleight-of-hand. He turns the evidence from these two meetings in October into a much more sweeping insinuation about Biden’s mental capacities by linking it back to his unremarkable amnesia about the storage of the documents. He does this by projecting himself into the minds of putative jury members who would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
How does he reach this surmise? He tells us explicitly: “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him” (my emphasis). What Hur does here is to fuse the events that would be the subject of such a trial—Biden’s failure to remember where some documents were stored, a failure Hur accepts as perfectly normal—with his own characterization of Biden’s demeanor at the two meetings in October. Thus the perfectly mundane imperfections of memory become part of an accusation of near-senility, the only evidence for which is in those two meetings on especially fraught days in October.
This is grossly unfair. Insofar as Hur has a legitimate concern with the operation of Biden’s memory, it relates to the actual subject of his investigation: the storage of the documents. He provides no evidence at all that there was anything remarkable about Biden’s forgetfulness in this regard. Instead of sticking to his brief, however, Hur then shapes a politically lethal phrase out of a judgment he is not qualified to make—the lawyer appointing himself both as a doctor making a cognitive assessment and as a dramatist inventing a scenario for how twelve members of an imaginary jury might perceive Biden’s imaginary appearance in a witness box. It would be naive to think that Hur was unaware of the potentially historic consequences of this leap from evidence to conjecture.
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This unfairness creates in turn a natural reaction among Democrats. If Biden is being treated so badly, the decent thing is to defend him and to dismiss the whole story as a politically motivated farrago. This is a serious mistake. Hur’s commentary on Biden’s cognitive abilities may be irrelevant to the job he was supposed to be doing. But it is not, alas, irrelevant to a presidential election that could shape American history for decades to come. For even if Hur’s is a low blow, it is a punch that someone was always going to land. Biden’s age is a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see.
The right seizes on and magnifies every gaffe that Biden makes, but the blunders are real and seem increasingly frequent. In the days before he mixed up Sisi and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, he also confused Helmut Kohl with Angela Merkel and François Mitterrand with Emmanuel Macron. Under the pressure of a vicious election campaign, these moments may well happen more often and attract more attention. Hur’s report feeds into a narrative that was already established—that Biden is losing it—and makes it unavoidable.
Four days before Biden’s disastrous press conference, Hage Geingob died in a hospital in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Geingob, who was eighty-two and the serving president of Namibia, was the only other octogenarian running a democracy. His death leaves Biden in a club of one. Biden really is exceptionally old for a working head of government. And there has been consistent polling evidence that this is one kind of exceptionalism that Americans don’t want to claim. As the New York Times’s chief political analyst Nate Cohn puts it, Biden’s age is “arguably the single most straightforward explanation” for why he is trailing Donald Trump. “It’s what voters are telling pollsters, whether in open-ended questioning about Mr. Biden or when specifically asked about his age, and they say it in overwhelming numbers.” Those numbers include a majority of Democrats.
It’s no good pointing out that Trump is almost as old and equally prone to verbal slips. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs. These things don’t change the facts that no one has ever run for a presidential term at the end of which he would be eighty-six, that Trump gets a free pass on almost everything, and that Biden, fairly or otherwise, is the lightning rod for deep generational discontents and widespread unhappiness at the persistence of an American gerontocracy. His age gives Biden an apolitical way to retire gracefully, standing by his considerable achievements in office while passing the problem of being too old to be president onto Trump.
Nikki Haley was probably not wrong when she suggested after Biden’s press conference that “the first party to retire its eighty-year-old candidate will win the White House.” But if Biden persists in running, there will in effect be only one candidate: Trump. He will be the Republican contender but he will also be, as the monster to be feared, the primary motivator for Democratic voters. The election will be a referendum not on the incumbent president but on his challenger. Since Biden is unable to shake off the perception that he is too old to be president, he cannot make his own case effectively. He will rely on the simple proposition that he is not Trump. In a deeply uncomfortable sense, Trump, having taken ownership of the Republicans, will own the Democrats too.
The post The Memory Hole appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Labour abandons hope
After what appears to have been an eternity of dithering today, Labour is finally announcing that it has abandoned its pledge to spend £28 billion a year on the climate transition that we know must take place if this country is to have any chance of meeting its own legally set obligation to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
This action on Labour's part is politically incomprehensible. Announcing this today, when the Tories are in complete mayhem after yesterday‘s debacle from Sunak at Prime Minister's Questions, is extraordinary.
Conceding this point the day after the Tories had civil servants prepare a report on this plan, suggesting it to be unaffordable in the Tories' opinion, is to imply that Labour has no clue what it is talking about, and that the Tories really are masters of this issue. That is a staggeringly politically incompetent thing to do.
And, let’s be clear, that abandoning this proposal is economically illiterate, as I suggested in the Guardian a few days ago. Not only would this plan pay for itself out of the economic multiplier effects that it would generate, which would give rise to significant further private sector investment and private spending, and so tax paid, it is also massively less than the expenditure that we know is actually required if net zero is to be achieved. Abandoning this commitment is, then, an act of gross irresponsibility that can only lead us to think that further similar acts on other issues should be what we must expect from a Labour government.
That has enormous political consequences. When Labour has said almost nothing about what it will do in office that is of any consequence, this was the one cause that Labour seemed to be championing that people might believe in. As far as I can see, after abandoning it, Labour now stands for nothing except more austerity. As electoral offerings go, that has to be about the most dismal that any party could present, yet that is what Labour wants to put to the people of this country.
The right-wing of Labour often likes to claim that the left-wing manifestos that it has, very rarely, presented to the public have been the longest suicide notes in its history. They have always been wrong to say so, but this abandonment of hope by Labour, which is what today’s announcement will represent, will undoubtedly be the shortest suicide note in its history.
Any party seeking power without a vision or plan and without any hint of hope being on offer does not deserve to be elected. That is where Starmer is putting Labour.
Politics rarely witnesses something quite as incompetent as this, unless it was Sunak's performance at PMQs yesterday.
First they came for Just Stop Oil
Occasionally I read something I think worth sharing in full on this blog. I did yesterday. It was on the blog of an old friend, Jonathon Porritt, who has spent a lifetime campaigning on environmental issues. With his permission, I share it in full here, having only edited some formatting:
First they came for Just Stop Oil; then they came for radical environmentalists; then they came for members of the National Trust, the RSPB, and WWF. But there was no one left to speak for them.
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the lack of concern/interest on the part of “mainstream environmentalists” as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest is still a basic human right. But you sure as hell wouldn’t know that here in the UK.
On January 23rd, Michel Forst (the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention) issued his interim report after his visit to the UK earlier in the month. It’s astonishing. In his own words:
- “As the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear, States have a duty to facilitate the right to protest, and private entities and broader society may be expected to accept some level of disruption as a result of the exercise of this right.”
- “Peaceful protesters are being prosecuted and convicted under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for the criminal offence of “Public Nuisance”, which is punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment. I was also informed that the Public Order Act 2023 is being used to further criminalise peaceful protest.”
- “In some recent cases, presiding judges have forbidden environmental defenders from explaining to the jury their motivation for participating in a given protest or from mentioning climate change at all”.
- “I am deeply troubled at the use of civil injunctions to ban protests in certain areas, including on public roadways. Anyone who breaches this injunctions is liable for up to two years imprisonment and an unlimited fine.”
- “Prior to these legislative developments, it had been almost unheard of since the 1930s for members of the public to be imprisoned for peaceful protest in the UK. I am therefore seriously concerned by these regressive new laws”.
Michel Forst is telling it as he sees it. But I’m not sure most mainstream environmentalists actually understand what is currently going on out there.
- Marcus Decker and Morgan Trowland got the longest sentences in UK modern history for protesting, given 2 years and 7 months, and 3 years respectively, after climbing the Queen Elizabeth II bridge over the Dartford Crossing with a Just Stop Oil banner.
- Defendants on trial for public nuisance, after a peaceful protest, were forbidden from saying the words climate change, fuel poverty and the civil rights movement.
- Steven Gingell was jailed for six months after pleading guilty to being in a peaceful protest march on a London Road. This sentence is thought to be the first jailing under the Public Order Act 2023, which has an offence of “interference with key national infrastructure”
- Tim Hughes, a 73-year-old clergyman, was arrested in November 2022, and charged with Conspiracy to Cause a Public Nuisance. He was on remand in Wandsworth Prison for 6 weeks, then released on bail in January 2023, subject to wearing a tag. His trial is not scheduled until February 2025. Two years wearing a tag – without having been convicted of any offence!
- Civil injunctions have been issued to hundreds of individuals. A breach could mean imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine.
- Trudi Warner, a retired Social Worker, is being prosecuted for Contempt of Court for holding up a sign outside of a court defending the right of juries to decide a case on conscience.
(My huge thanks to Sandra Laville at the Guardian, and to Anita Mureithi at OpenDemocracy, for providing these updates.)
Trudi Warner’s case has been taken up by Defend our Juries (@defendourjuries). On the 4th December, 600 people in 52 locations protested outside Crown Courts to defend the right of juries to decide a verdict on the basis of their conscience. (Their next Day of Action is on February 21st). As the Guardian recently pointed out: “A jury’s power to acquit had been seen for decades as a “constitutional safeguard” – insurance that the criminal law should conform to the ordinary person’s idea of what is fair that notion is held in contempt, evidently, by ministers”.
So here’s my request – to help ward off despair. Or rather, two requests:
- Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, from any of the mainstream environmental organisations, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?
- Can anybody send me chapter and verse, in the public domain, of anyone in the Labour Shadow Cabinet, condemning any of this in the same terms as Michel Forst?
These are genuine requests for information – to dispel my worst fears about gutless mainstream NGOs and equally gutless Labour politicians.
January 15th was Martin Luther King day in the USA. Ben Philips, Director of Communications for UNAID, wrote an excellent blog to mark the day:
“When Dr King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, he didn’t mean this process is automatic; as he noted, “social progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people.” Justice, Dr King taught, is never given, it is only ever won. This always involves having the courage to confront power. Indeed, he noted, the greatest stumbling block to progress is not the implacable opponent, but those who claim to support change but are “more devoted to order than justice”. As he put it, “frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action movement that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly. This “wait!” has almost always meant “never”.
Please think of those words every time you leap to condemn the tactics of young climate campaigners here in the UK, even as our police state closes down on them more and more repressively.
And if you need any confirmation of what’s going on here, please read George Monbiot’s brilliant article in the Guardian on Saturday 3rd February (“It’s a Plutocrat’s World – and all Dissenters are Swiftly Crushed”):
“Why, in the UK, can you now potentially receive a longer sentence for “public nuisance” – non-violent civil disobedience – than for rape or manslaughter? Peaceful environmental campaigners are being held on bail for up to 2 years, subjected to electronic tags, GPS tracking and curfews. Even before you’ve been tried, let alone found guilty, your life is shredded.”
And he tellingly adds exactly why these deep injustices are now becoming common place:
“Why is all this happening? Because the UK, the US and many other nations have become closed shops run by the Plutocrats’ Trade Union. Inequality demands oppression. The more concentrated wealth and power become, the more those who challenge the rich and powerful must be hounded and crushed”.
And isn’t that the truth of it?
TSSA rocked by #MeTU allegations of ‘new abuse’
Women’s group who exposed sexual harassment and toppled Cortes regime ‘summarily de-recognised’ by union, claims a ‘continuing culture of intimidation and bullying… and cronyism’ has led to dispute
The ‘MeTU’ group, which campaigns against harassment and bullying of women union members across the union movement, have alleged that the union is still riddled with abuse and is failing to follow the recommendations of the Kennedy Report that exposed widespread bullying and sexual harassment under the regime of now-former general secretary Manuel Cortes. The group also says that TSSA’s management has ‘summarily de-recognised’ the staff’s women’s group and replaced it with an ‘approved’ one, while sacking the firm of whistleblowing specialists that TSSA engaged, as one of its actions to follow Helena Kennedy’s recommendations, to investigate abuse and run a helpline for staff.
TSSA staff, who are represented by the GMB union, are in dispute with TSSA and their union reps have issued a scathing open letter criticising Cortes’s successor. However, the MeTU group also has sharp words of criticism for the union representing them, which has also been mired in its own sexual harassment and bullying scandal.
A MeTU statement released last night reads:
MeTU are horrified to see that following the Kennedy Inquiry and Conley Report (Feb 23) on the extreme abuse, sexual harassment, bullying, and corruption in TSSA trade union, which led to the dismissal of the former General Secretary, Manuel Cortes and most of the senior leadership, staff and members are now facing new abuse.
Following an election, gerrymandered by an EC who were close to the old regime, the union workforce has been forced to declare a dispute with the new General Secretary barely 3 months in. They cite a continuing culture of intimidation and bullying and corner cutting and cronyism with hire and fire appointments without consultation or scrutiny.
On top of this, the TSSA Self Organised women’s group – Women in Focus – who helped uncover the rot and bring about the reports leading to the change – yet were never invited to take part in the change process – have been summarily ‘de-recognised’ by the EC and new General Secretary on a flimsy pretext.
A near-secret meeting of a new ‘self-organised group’ or rather an EC-organised women’s group was barely attended and populated mainly by the President, an EC member and former EC members. Some of whom are close to the former disgraced General Secretary, Manuel Cortes.
The EC has voted to dismiss the independent whistle-blowing organisation, Howlett Brown – against the recommendation of Baroness Helena Kennedy. Staff have been told that they can instead take grievances and complaints to the President of the TSSA.
We fully support TSSA staff in their dispute and are glad they now have the courage to contest undemocratic and bullying practices. This may be the first time union staff have gone into dispute following the exposure of structural sexual abuse and bullying to demand its genuine implementation. Solidarity.
GMB: new scandal following the Monaghan Inquiry
However, it is important to say that they are represented against their corrupt employer by another union, the GMB, who claim to be reformed when they are not. While we publish the body of the letter we cannot in conscience publish the names of the full time organisers who are themselves part of the problem. There are women being bullied out as we write.
The conclusion of the Monaghan report was that the GMB is institutionally sexist and therefore is an unsafe environment for women. We can see no evidence that the GMB has acted on the work done by KC Karon Monaghan during the investigation into their practices and has disbanded the task force that was set up to implement the 27 recommendations which were made.
Now a second report by McColgan which came about following the KC’s investigation into the behaviour of GMB officials at one of Brighton’s bin depots, details the perpetration of shocking abuse and threats of physical violence against women, the discovery of a ‘cache of weapons’, and further reports of the homophobic bullying of staff. The report also describes GMB Reps “Publicly saying that women managers ‘don’t have a fucking clue. They’re female. They don’t know what they’re doing’ and describing a woman manager as ‘a fucking bitch pulling the strings’”
The GMB response was defensive and thuggish and referred to the 70 plus whistleblower testimonies given to a KC Barrister as ‘anonymous and unsupported statements’. This claim was roundly challenged by council Chief Executive, Will Tuckley, who pointed out that ‘“Some of those who spoke to the report did so anonymously for fear of potential retaliation.”
Furthermore it was suggested that ‘evidence’ would be required before the GMB would be willing to take any action, suggesting that the brave individuals who took part in the investigation had not already supplied evidence beyond reasonable doubt that terrible abuse had occurred in their workplace. Women across all layers of the union have been and continue to be damaged purposefully.
Yesterday we saw a press ‘leaked’ letter sent by the current GMB General Secretary to their central executive council warning of a coup and a return to the bad old days. GMB sisters say that while there may have been piecemeal change in some areas, most of this assertion of change is mythical, with the reality that under the current leadership, things are much worse.
The message here is clear, in certain elements of these unions misogyny is rife and they have demonstrated that they are determined to continue with the damaging and abusive behaviour which led to all of these investigations. They are happy to allow one corrupt administration to inform the actions of the next and they continue to collectively gaslight us through their actions.
Our campaign against those who seek to do harm is very far from over. We will not allow our movement to destroy itself because some men and their many enablers refuse to stop abusing us as women. We will continue to find, expose and remove from the trade union and labour movement, perpetrators of bullying, misogyny, sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia and ableism to ensure our movement is truly inclusive.
We will continue to tell the truth and stand up for ourselves and each other at any cost. The world has changed and we are winning. Our movement needs to be fit for purpose, with true democracy and not the current structure of power hoarding we see.
To perpetrators and misogynists throughout our movement, stop, and stop now, or be exposed.
The GMB’s open letter to TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust says that the dispute has arisen because of members’ “total lack of confidence in the implementation of the Kennedy Report (Feb 2023) and the Conley Report (Feb 2023)“. It alleges:
Staff morale has shifted from improving (during the tenure of Peter Pendle), back to a place of low psychological safety. Amongst the staff, there is now an atmosphere of anxiety, hyper vigilance, and worry. The trust in the leadership…has completely collapsed and in general, staff are once again feeling demoralised, ignored, distrusted, and exhausted from the pressures and strains of working in this – what can only be described as – a toxic environment.
Baroness Kennedy was contacted by over fifty people when compiling her report. She described: “beyond specific instances, I have found a culture that is stuck, it seems, in a morass of staff upset and grievance – on matters relating… to the bullying, silencing and marginalising of staff.”
Sadly, we feel that this culture has returned under the new governance of the union. Kennedy commended the staff in her report: “I want to emphasise that I was impressed by the commitment and decency of the staff …I met some truly good people, with good intentions… I have experienced staff as fearful, anxious, and distressed. I have not experienced staff as vengeful, political, unkind, or lacking in decency”.
Kennedy’s analysis did not blame the staff; she praised them.
It goes on:
In addition, amongst other things, there has been an abject failure to follow agreed procedure and protocols regarding staff complaints made about bullying. Kennedy reported in February 2023: “I also heard evidence of failings in due process, natural justice and governance…In any organisation, policies and procedures are trumped by values and culture. No policy can make a healthy, productive organisation if its implementation is limited by poor values or a dysfunctional culture.”
The policy on Dignity at Work states clearly and unequivocally the procedures to follow when complaints have been raised. These procedures have not been followed.
With regards to staffing appointments, such as the (Interim) Assistant General Secretary Role, and ‘hiring’ of an HR Manager, proper procedure, and collective bargaining, including the practice of having an independent staff observer, are not being followed.
Kennedy warned about opaque practices amongst the recruitment of Senior Management Team in her report, where she described how a member of staff was being ‘groomed’ for General Secretary. She strongly criticised it as ‘opportunity hoarding’. We see it as cronyism which undermines the reputation of the union.
We are further concerned that the General Secretary will not meet with the Staff Reps every week to discuss issues, as the previous Interim General Secretary had agreed to do. We feel that this is a vital part of ensuring full transparency in the process of implementing sweeping culture change and a way of dealing with any staffing issues rapidly.
Former TSSA assistant general secretary Steve Coe described GMB’s allegations as ‘worrying’:
Worrying developments at TSSA. This follows the Executive's decision to disband TSSA Women in Focus, the group that called for the reports that exposed wrongdoing and abuse of power by past senior officials. pic.twitter.com/r7k1j8zzZZ
— Steve Coe (@stevecoe1057) January 20, 2024
Contacted for comment about the new MeTu statement, the TSSA press spokesman was dismissive about the press enquiry and claimed not to have seen it and that there are no links between current senior figures in the union and the disgraced former management, but declined to provide a formal comment and threatened legal action if its contents were related and the union was unhappy with what it said.
TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust has previously attacked Skwawkbox for scrutinising the claims about her record that she and her team made during last year’s election to choose the union’s new general secretary. Despite a lack of relevant experience in a senior union role and the candidacy of two experienced TSSA figures, the union’s executive opted to nominate her as its preferred candidate and pushed members hard to vote for her.
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Trump’s Chaos Agenda Donald Trump wants you to be...
Trump’s Chaos Agenda
Donald Trump wants you to be disgusted. He wants you to be cynical. And he definitely doesn’t want you to watch this video. Why? Because that’s how he wins in 2024. Let me explain.
The Republicans’ election strategy is built on chaos. The more chaos they create, the more pessimistic Americans feel about the capacities of our democracy to govern the nation. So we give up on democracy and turn to a so-called strongman.
Trump has been pushing his party to deny the 2020 election result, shut down the government, pardon insurrectionists, impeach President Biden, investigate Hunter Biden, stop funding Ukraine, and obstruct the criminal prosecutions Trump is facing. He’s stoking hatred, using fascist language by labeling his opponents “vermin” and claiming immigration is destroying the nation.
Trump wants voters to believe America is ungovernable, and that the only solution is an authoritarian like him taking over.
And he wants those who don’t support him to be so disgusted that they tune out — and not even bother to vote.
Trump’s chaos agenda is also drowning out news about how well we’re actually being governed under President Biden.
Rarely do we hear about how the economy continues to generate a record number of new jobs.
Not to mention billions of dollars being invested to fix the nation’s infrastructure and combat climate change. Medicare on the way to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Billions in student debt canceled, in spite of rulings from the right-wing Supreme Court. Corporate monopolies attacked. Workers’ rights to organize, defended.
Trump and his allies don’t want you to know about any of this. And sadly the media plays along by focusing mostly on chaos and dysfunction, with an inclination to blame both sides in the name of “balanced coverage.”
Folks, the political struggle of our time is no longer Left versus Right, Democrats versus Republicans. It’s now democracy versus fascism.
Be warned. And help spread the word about Trump’s chaos agenda by sharing this video.
TSSA staff fearful as new bullying complaints rock Eslamdoust
“Among the staff, there is now an atmosphere of anxiety, hypervigilance and worry. The trust in the leadership…has completely collapsed…staff are once again feeling demoralised, ignored, distrusted and exhausted…in this toxic environment” – GMB letter to new TSSA general secretary
Maryam Eslamdoust
TSSA general secretary Maryam Eslamdoust has been rocked by new allegations of bullying in the union after a letter from the GMB union – which represents TSSA staff – leaked to the media.
Eslamdoust was elected last year in what many considered an unfair election, after the TSSA executive asked union members to vote for her despite her being an outsider and two other experienced union candidates being in the frame – and despite Eslamdoust’s lack of relevant experience and a union background, which she attacked Skwawkbox for scrutinising. Eslamdoust had claimed in her campaign to be ‘an exceptional trade union professional’ with ‘high level trade union experience’ – yet her Linkedin profile indicated that she had never worked for a union or in an elected union role.
The election took place after former TSSA boss Manuel Cortes was removed over allegations of sexual harassment and bullying by him and other senior TSSA figures.
Now she has been accused, in a letter from GMB’s London organiser Andrew Harden, of presiding over a ‘toxic’ culture that has made staff fearful and led to them constantly looking over their shoulder:
Among the staff, there is now an atmosphere of anxiety, hypervigilance and worry. The trust in the leadership that was burgeoning has completely collapsed and in general, staff are once again feeling demoralised, ignored, distrusted and exhausted from the pressures and strains of working in this…toxic environment.
Harden’s letter also accuses Eslamdoust of ‘abject’ failure to put anti-bullying procedures into practice after the recommendations made by Baroness Kennedy, whose damning report toppled Cortes. The union told the press that all recommendations ‘have been completed or are being acted on’.
The letter was published in full by former assistant TSSA general secretary Steve Coe, who described the developments as ‘worrying’ and linked it to the union’s decision to disband a key women’s group:
Worrying developments at TSSA. This follows the Executive's decision to disband TSSA Women in Focus, the group that called for the reports that exposed wrongdoing and abuse of power by past senior officials. pic.twitter.com/r7k1j8zzZZ
— Steve Coe (@stevecoe1057) January 20, 2024
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Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You? Trump...
Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You?
Trump failed to deliver on his number one campaign promise:
President Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.
This is no fluke. America’s economy has almost always done worse under Republican presidents. A New York Times analysis found that since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.
Now Trump’s defenders claim it’s not his fault that the economy collapsed under his watch. It was the pandemic. But there are two big things wrong with this.
First, the pandemic recession was as bad as it was because of Trump. His failure to lead with any national strategy left America in chaos throughout 2020, long after other nations had developed coordinated testing, tracing, and social distancing plans that allowed them to reopen their economies.
But secondly, even before the pandemic, Trump failed to deliver on his economic promises. Job growth slowed under Trump.
America added more jobs in President Obama’s last three years than in Trump’s first three.
Even before the pandemic most middle-class American households saw their incomes go down under Trump.
Trump’s major economic policy was cutting taxes on the rich and big corporations. He promised it would result in $4,000 annual raises for workers. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?
Republicans keep claiming that if we just cut enough taxes on the rich, the wealth will “trickle down.” But it never works. Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down either.
These giveaways to the wealthy came at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care, making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.
They also exploded the debt and deficit. Reagan oversaw a 186% increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years. The Bush and Trump tax cuts, that mostly benefited corporations and the rich, are the main reasons why America’s debt is growing faster than the economy.
Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last century, and Democrats led us out of them.
Republicans talk about running the country like a business, but they want to run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while workers get shafted again and again. Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hard-working American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president ever again?
Tory claims on debt and Labour’s plan to tackle climate change with borrowed funds do not stack
Claire Coutinho MP, who was until recently Cheif Secretary to the Treasury but is now at Energy, posted this on Twitter yesterday:
In response, I had this to say:
The Tory claims on debt and Labour's plan to tackle climate change with borrowed funds simply do not stack.
If only Labour believed that was the case it would help.
Exclusive: smeared ex-Lab member Siddiqi ‘planning to stand vs Streeting’
Victim of repeated smears and even a discredited prosecution is planning a bid at the next Ilford North parliamentary election, say locals
Syed Siddiqi, the former Labour member repeatedly abused, harassed and smeared by right-wing Labour figures in Ilford in north London, is planning to stand against right-winger Wes Streeting in the next Ilford North parliamentary election, according to local sources.
Siddiqi has faced constant harassment by the party right, including a failed attempt to prosecute him that ended in all charges being dropped – reminiscent of the disgraced hatchet job against neighbouring left-wing Muslim MP Apsana Begum.
The party’s hounding of Siddiqi even went as low as suspending him for more than three years after he was the victim of a foul, late-night Islamophobic tirade by a local right-winger, despite the whole incident being recorded. His abuser was quickly reinstated so that he could stand for Labour in local elections.
Siddiqi was revealed to have been targeted by Streeting’s office and others, by the leaked party report into abuse by the party right:
Labour has a long and appalling record of Islamophobia and of protecting abusive right-wingers. Local council leader Jas Athwal was selected as the party’s candidate in Ilford South, after complaints of ‘serious sexual assault’ were dismissed by a committee of Labour national executive members – against the advice of the party’s barrister. He won the selection vote when six hundred postal votes ‘turned up’ late in proceedings, while supporters of his opponent, incumbent MP Sam Tarry, were denied entry to the selection meeting. Labour general secretary David Evans dismissed the evidence as ‘irrelevant to the result.
The party has reason to fear the challenge. Last year, Lutfur Rahman ousted Labour to win the executive mayor’s position in nearby Tower Hamlets last year and voters there kicked out Labour at the last local elections in a landslide for Rahman’s new Aspire party. In neighbouring East End borough Newham, Newham Independents leader Mehmood Mirza hammered an imposed Labour candidate in May – and his colleague Sophia Naqvi then trounced Labour in November’s by-election in Newham Plaistow North.
With discontent spreading in the area and Black councillor Shanell Johnson quitting Labour in Redbridge, which covers both Ilford seats, in disgust at the local and national party’s conduct, few would be surprised to see similar developments threatening Labour’s complacency there too; particularly with an incumbent MP as dislikeable as Streeting, Starmer’s pro-privatisation health spokesman who has accepted donations from private health interests and who triggered protests outside his office – and a boycott by students – for his part in Starmer’s support for Israeli war crimes.
In 2018, Streeting also launched a ‘disgraceful’ and ‘disgusting’ tirade in the face of Diane Abbott, Britain’s first Black woman MP, leaving Abbott ‘shell-shocked’. If he stands, Syed Siddiqi can expect considerable support from outraged former Labour supporters around the country who would be delighted to see Streeting ejected.
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Galloway re-elected as Workers GB party leader, will stand for London mayor
Former MP has more than the required nominations to enter contest
Former Labour and Respect MP George Galloway has been re-elected as leader by members of the Workers GB party – and has confirmed he will be standing for election as mayor of London.
Galloway told the party’s national conference today that he has double the required nominations to be able to stand.
Andy Hudd
Chris Williamson
Peter Ford
Former Labour MP Chris Williamson, former UK ambassador Peter Ford and the Aslef union’s Andy Hudd were elected as deputy leaders.
A Workers’ Party GB member present at the conference told Skwawkbox:
The party has had fully democratic elections for the twenty positions of the “national members Council”, open to all members. The positions of leader and deputy leader were unopposed. Contrary to the smears of its critics, WPGB is not the Galloway show and there is a full and democratic structure.
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