Mandering the Gerry: Into the Labour Party Twilight Zone

17 min readJan 11, 2022

“These teams will adopt a product-mindset using agile ceremonies, be empowered to make decisions and encouraged to focus on rapid prototyping, deployment and iteration.”

Organise to win: Labour Party presentation to staff. [1]

“the US political establishment got so used to creating its own reality and imposing it through media and entertainment, upon its own citizens as well as on foreigners, that it simply doesn’t know what to do when confronted with people on whom this trick doesn’t work — in this case, the Taliban.

This sort of thinking was on display last week [2] when a prominent “security expert” advised her colleagues to look away from the images from Afghanistan to avoid getting triggered or traumatized — as if what was happening would somehow stop or vanish if they just averted their gaze.

Nebojsa Malic: RT op-ed. 16/08/2021. [3]

Contemplating the past five and a half years experience within the Labour Party I recall the odd occasion to relieve the barrack room boredom almost fifty years ago listening on someone’s multi band radio to Radio Moscow in the middle of a card game.

Rolling about slapping thigh and biting the lino as some Soviet functionary spent half an hour reading off his official auto cue the dry statistics of the tomato harvest from the Ukraine and the tonnage of steel produced that quarter from the mills in Magnetigorsk. wondering what it must be like to live in such a tick in a box society?

The answer to that question dawned shortly after Tony Blair’s ascension to head boy which coincided with the growing convergence of computer and communications technology opening up the space for the reintroduction of Frederick Taylor’s [4] Scientific Management with steroids across all sectors and levels of British society. Introducing a single approach based on private sector mores and values in both the public and voluntary sectors as well as across every sector of the workplace.

A create your own reality approach which not only produces a workplace culture of constant second by second surveillance to ensure only the chosen tick in a box criteria of correct work behaviours and attitudes are adhered to both inside and, increasingly, outside working hours but which also dictates how money is allocated and spent in the public, voluntary and other sectors.

Creating simplistic bureaucratically managed quantitative outcomes, for example, in which despite billions of pounds of European regeneration funding having been spent as the new century dawned the subsequent decade saw UK sub regions in receipt of that funding, such as the West Midlands and South Yorkshire, register a GDP less than that of Greece until the onset of the Greek economic crisis.

Or the promise of an integrated UK broadband network of the future made by the incoming Blair Government at the Labour Party Conference of 1996 being squandered as the initial twenty billion pound investment cost was siphoned off via the one off utilities tax and the 3G auction in an effort to appease the balance the books from day one ideology.

Resulting in a lengthy fragmented piecemeal and stalled roll out where even half way through the second term of Blair’s New Labour the principle network operator (British Telecom) were briefing its own staff, of which I was one, that the network of the future was already in the ground. This being the legacy copper and aluminium network of the twentieth century using ADSL technology to squeeze a bit more out of that legacy network.

Apart from the obvious — which anybody currently is or who has ever been at the sharp end of this in their daily work grind will attest — a number of other problems are thrown up as a result of those, who epitomise the Peter Principle of having been promoted to the level of their own incompetence.

One being an emasculation of the organisation as managers who do know their arse from a hole in the ground — more accurately known as leaders — are systematically removed from the organisation, followed swiftly by anyone who has reached a certain age related level of real world experience and replaced by people from the bus stop, preferably younger and more malleable, who have not got a clue but are chosen for their gullibility in being assimilated into this malice in blunderland mindset.

Producing an organisation of coper’s (to cope means to manage) rather than leaders who know how to interface with real people and the real world.

An experience increasingly encountered by Labour Party volunteer members.

And what you end up with is an approach in which the key feature is to work towards an objective of doing more and more with less and less in a drive to do everything with nothing. Though it also has stellar levels of corruption as the example of the last twenty years of US involvement in Afghanistan and elsewhere demonstrates.

The irony being that it was the West which exported Taylor’s by then outdated autocratic methods a century ago to a Lenin eager to industrialise the backward Russian State the Soviet’s had inherited from the Tsars [5]. At a time when the West was replacing that approach to its own industrial workplace development via what at the time was known as ‘Human Resources’. The reversal, in which the West has now re-imported Taylors methods, is both humorous and tragic at the same time.

In the early days of the old Soviet Union, on the back of this approach and its methods, Stalin had boasted that two plus two really did equal five [6] as the targets for one of the early five year plans were met in four years. Echoing a feature of both natural and created systems in which emergent properties create outcomes where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

A feature accidentally and comically brought into sharp contrast shortly before I retired in yet another compulsory Powerpoint Team Briefing by a management functionary (‘affectionately’ referred to as ‘Pol Pot’ arising from their Year Zero Management style) performing the same role as their former Soviet Counterpart. In this instance the unwitting use of the equation two plus two equals three succinctly encapsulating everything wrong with a system and its underlying Philistine philosophy whose outcomes are always less than the sum its parts. Producing the same mirth filled reaction enacted in that barrack room all those years ago.

“If only the facts matter, it shouldn’t matter where they come from. That undercuts the traditional justification for hierarchy: that the boss knows best. Facts force the boss to choose between being ‘in control’ and being right. Many choose the former.

All this sets up a bizarre corporate amnesia — a kind of conspiracy not to learn in which organisations find new ways of repeating mistakes in an endless loop. They are suckers for half-truths — more dangerous than total nonsense because they are not entirely wrong, except when treated as whole truths, in which case they become total bollocks”

Simon Caulkin: Bosses in love with claptrap and blinded by ideologies. Guardian: 12/03/2006 [7]

Retirement seemed to at least provide an opportunity to escape this Coasian Hell [8] of managerialist bullshit where subjective fantasy narrative rules and reality is safely confined to a TV show.

That rose tinted view survived all of about three weeks contact with the Labour Party as shortly after signing up the management hierarchy and its local minders swung into inaction to shut down its own local democracy, cancelling local Branch and Constituency meetings, as part of a palace coup to remove an elected leader which failed miserably despite the deliberate widespread gerrymandering of inconvenient members out of a vote.

Lest any unsuspecting reader considers that to be an example of the depth of incompetence levels subsequent experiences over the following several years relegate that to a mere hors d’oeuvre in a catalogue of experiences familiar from pre-retirement times which would stretch the imagination of Heath Robinson [9] to adequately caricature.

Demonstrating the level of institutional and organisational capture across the the UK and the West in general of the blinkered dead end ideology identified in the above quote from Caulkin’s 2006 Guardian piece as a political party supposed to be the opposition and led by a member of the Trilateral Commission [10] has now gone full Walter Mitty in adopting communication strategies whose sentence construction are based on buzzword bingo.

The 2017 General Election campaign turned out to be just an appetiser for levels of incompetent malevolence borne of the same arrogant and ignorant attitudes and mindsets one normally associates with the over-privileged and careerist pips on shoulder merchants which have increasingly infested the Western workplace and institutional culture over the past four decades.

No input from outside the control of the local fiefdom was permitted. With the official Constituency Party objective to ‘campaign for a Labour Government’ rapidly relegated to holding the seat to enable ‘a strong presence in the House of Commons.’ to ‘hold the (eagerly anticipated re-elected Tory) Government to account’ as part of a message clear to a blind man on a galloping horse of a separate campaign with the objective of losing heavily but keeping the seats of those intent on another palace coup.

The MP’s agent and husband, without even a Tinge of regret, even bullied local members to scrap a previously scheduled showing of the Ken Loach classic “I’ Daniel Blake.”

In the space of a year, after being elected and subsequently being forced to resign as agent for a local election campaign;

- I was put at potential legal risk by the initial insistence of a well paid City organiser who saw nothing either wrong or problematic in publishing election literature with my name on it containing a copyrighted corporate logo. An example of ignorant and arrogant incompetence exacerbated by the fact he had already printed three thousand copies which subsequently had to be scrapped.

- Systematically undermined by the candidate in conjunction with the local constituency office and the paid organiser attempting to by pass local democratic input into the campaign from the Ward members and their elected representatives. An activity which, in a further act demonstrating zen levels of either incompetence or arrogance, the Party at National level actually provided me written evidence of same some two years later in a response to a long standing complaint arising from that experience.

- Smeared by the paid organiser following being surreptitiously and illegally recorded by the supposedly ‘left wing’ candidate at a Ward Branch meeting seemingly as part of a complaint against another member which was inexplicably fast tracked up the system within twenty four hours.

Subsequent complaints relating to this illegal behaviour by someone who is still a publicly elected representative took two months to be submitted and were conveniently lost on three occasions by those who made sure they dealt with the related fast tracked complaint. These being the same dissembling functionaries who trashed the Labour Party on a BBC Panorama programme [11] and sabotaged elections [12].

- Put at further legal risk ten months later by the incompetence of another local candidate illegally misusing members data I had provided and for which I was legally responsible. Again, all this was swept under the carpet as a non-event by a bureaucracy and hierarchy which saw no problem in playing fast and loose with the legal liabilities of volunteer members.

An attitude exacerbated in the 2019 General Election campaign in which the constituency candidate — the same individual who illegally recorded myself and other members in front of witnesses at a Ward Branch meeting — went through three agents in rapid succession in almost as many days with the final departing unpaid volunteer agents name left on the election literature for the sake of convenience subsequently finding themselves at potential legal risk when the local campaign overspent against levels laid down in statutory election legislation.

Other everyday basic level examples also raise alarm bells. Most local notices of meetings, campaign events etc are sent by email to members by locally elected volunteers via a national database. Despite repeated requests to technical support in over five years I’ve never received any local literature for meetings etc via this platform. Relying instead on having them forwarded to me by other local members after having long accepted the reality of institutional wide incompetence.

Or the last European Parliamentary elections in which I was surprised to receive an email at the onset of the campaign from a well paid regional functionary advising me of two thousand election campaign leaflets available for collection and distribution. Apparently, the system had incorrectly registered myself and another member as the two Constituency ‘Campaign Organisers’.

Whilst taking initial responsibility as an unpaid volunteer for collecting said literature from where it had been delivered I raised two questions with the well paid functionary. Firstly to get him to do his job by correcting the error on the system and secondly to determine whether the literature was for our local Ward (one of six in the Constituency) or for the whole Constituency?

I was advised that it was my responsibility, an unpaid volunteer, to sort out and correct the error rather than that of some well paid Rupert such as himself trained to carry out that kind of task and that two thousand leaflets which were barely sufficient to cover a single ward were in fact the allocation from the Regional Office for the entire Constituency. We were the only Ward in the whole of the Constituency to distribute any literature for the Euro elections. Little wonder the Party did not do very well in those elections.

The Conference I attended as an elected delegate also did not inspire confidence. Having regularly attended well organised Trade Union Conferences some years ago it was something of a culture shock to be part of an event which was so badly organised in a number of key ways. Poor timetabling with too much business squeezed into too little time; lengthy decision making reports distributed to delegates during rather than prior to the event; and, bizarrely, debates in which anything from seven or more different topics and subjects were debated on the floor at the same time!

Leaving an overwhelming sense that one was merely an extra in a choreographed media event run by management clones.

“One question I have for the Labour Party leadership is why would you expect people in this country to trust with government a Party that treats its own hard working, committed, volunteer members with such disdain?”

Leah Levane: co-Chair Jewish voice for Labour. [13]

Meanwhile, the management clones in the Party are continuing to purge members who don’t toe the management’s Overton Window. From suspending members for the heinous crime of circulating a resignation letter from a Constituency Party Chair [14] through suspending Constituency Party Executives and cancelling meetings [15] to fixing who can and cannot contest local candidate lists for external and internal elections [16].

Even at work we had some kind of recognisable due process for disciplinary cases. Involving an initial informal fact finding interview; informal and formal warnings; probationary periods etc in which the accused was entitled to put their case with Union representation. Though looking at most workplaces after four decades of this nonsense in which organisational managers operate like feudal Barons running their own individual fiefdoms it seems the Labour Party is the norm rather than the exception.

Whilst most members who have been targeted by a management bureaucracy and hierarchy as being the wrong kind of member — from those rejected for liking the Foo Fighters on social media [17] to members of the Jewish Community disciplined and expelled for being anti-Semitic [18] — will recognise the opaque gerrymandering of processes for sectarian political purposes the same experiences apply to those who instigate complaints.

Losing complaints once is bad enough. Losing them three times in the space of three months whilst managing to process a related complaint to suit convenience suggests either gerrymandering or a frightening level of organisational and institutional dysfunction for a political opposition which wishes to be taken seriously as a potential Government.

Though the efficacy of the ensuing process which took over twelve months to eventually be conveniently buried (see below) was severely undermined by two factors: the loss of staff along with the need to replace them and at a time when the entire focus of the complaints and grievance process was with anti-Semitism allegations — many of which were spurious and from a limited number of sources with their own agendas [19] .

As a result many non-AS related complaints were clearly put on the back burner and given little in the way of priority consideration.

Whatever process and structure one adopts as an organisation the efficacy of the outcome will always be dependent upon those who carry out the day to day functions. Particularly where, in the case of the Labour Party, the majority within the bureaucracy and hierarchy are committed to contrary objectives. A problem not confined to the self-proclaimed political ‘ moderate centre’.

The official monopoly left — Momentum under Jon Lansman — were just as willing to go down this road as their counterparts on the right. Particularly in the competition to place their own slate candidates as Constituency Prospective Parliamentary Candidates for the 2019 General Election.

Perhaps the most high profile example being Bassetlaw, where the candidate of what Tariq Ali has dubbed the ‘extreme center’ [20], Sally Gimson, was successful but subsequently and immediately deselected by the Party at national level on the basis of allegations which had not even been tested with evidence in a fair and reasonable due process procedure prior to the de-selection sentence being carried out. [21]

That the Labour Party was prepared to publicly jettison any kind of due process in favour of such summary ‘justice’ based on the principle of the mob in such a high profile case was bad enough and, no doubt, made a significant contribution to losing the Bassetlaw seat in the 2019 election.

However, Gimson was not the only case of suspicious gerrymandering. The alleged primary complainer in Gimson’s case, whilst being the partner of a senior figure in the Labour Party Complaints and Compliance Unit at the time [22] and Mayor of a London Borough, had also put their name forward for short listing as Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for four Constituencies. My own Constituency being top of their list.

The short listing panel which met in Wakefield in October 2019, where the head of Momentum, Jon Lansman, attended as an apparent replacement for someone else at the last minute, considered a short list of five candidates from an original long list. One of whom was found to not even meet the eligibility criteria for length of Party membership. Quite how they made it that far suggests either gross incompetence or gerrymandering.

Despite the Momentum candidate being the subject of two outstanding complaints alleging illegal acts which the Party had failed to process over eighteen months and the Panel being advised as such, that individual, along with the alleged primary complainer in the Gimson case, was selected on to the short list of three for a Constituency ballot.

At the Constituency selection meeting it was announced that the Partner of the senior figure in the Complaints and Compliance Unit and one of the alleged complainers in the Gimson case had withdrawn that afternoon. Providing the Momentum candidate with a convenient even chance in a two horse ballot. Pressure was placed on members that anyone attempting a Point of Order in regard to outstanding serious complaints of illegal acts against the Momentum candidate — in reality just another fellow traveller political careerist — would not be heard.

The very obvious fix was successful. The outstanding complaints were conveniently buried and rejected and despite over a year of correspondence the Party point blank refused to provide evidence of any investigation. Inevitably, the Party went on to lose the seat to the Conservatives. Indeed, at the announcement of the result in an act of characteristic puerile petulance I and other local Branch and Constituency members, among others, had become accustomed to our gerrymandered Labour candidate publicly refused to shake hands with the newly elected MP.

A newly elected MP who is yet another political careerist attaching themselves to any organisation who will provide them with a platform. Initially having approached the Lib-Dems and who only joined the Conservative Party after being rejected by them.

The situation was no better in a neighbouring Constituency in the South Yorkshire sub-region. In an area where the memory of systemic child sex abuse which the Labour run local authority fiefdom and its agencies had failed to deal with over many years was still raw the Party selected another problematic candidate [23] who also lost a ‘Red Wall’ seat to the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, two years on, the total absence of any recognisable due process principles or standards operating in the Party continues to emasculate any organisational efficacy.

The previous (above) quote from Jewish Voice for Labour co-Chair Leah Levane whilst being pertinent covers only part of what is problematic. The correspondence she has received, along with an unspecified number of other Labour Party members, espouses two legally dubious concepts:

- Retrospectively creating an offence after the event.

Specifically, that she attended a meeting of what is little more than an organised initiative — designed in essence to lobby for the proper application of due process protocols, principles and standards — before that organised initiative was proscribed by a majority of the Party National Executive Committee on July 20 2021 [24].

A decision which has been derided as the Labour Party Retrospective Offences Act 2021.

- Demanding that anyone subject to these allegations prove a negative.

ie. Reversing the standard due process protocols in which an accuser bringing an allegation has to prove the allegation by insisting the onus is on the accused to explain their conduct following an allegation already deemed to be proven.

This is far from an isolated case. With members of the Jewish Voice for Labour [25] submitting evidence of a systematic purge of their members on spurious anti-Semitism allegations.

Nor is this limited to members of the Jewish Community who are considered ‘the wrong kind of Jew.’ With members summarily suspended or expelled simply for having a different view from a leadership clique acting like a Third World Military Junta.

This is already producing tangible and inevitable negative results.

Apart from losing members disillusioned with the the corruption of values and the deliberate failure to do what it says on the tin the morale of many who have remained is dangerously low at a time when the Government is seen to be incompetent and corrupt.

It is no coincidence that the 2021 local elections and a string of subsequent by elections saw drops in the vote for a Labour Party [26] now living up to its billing as ‘The Loyal’ opposition. With many members, former members and activists voting with their feet and staying at home rather than campaign at elections. Resulting in insufficient boots on the ground to carry out the campaign donkey work during election periods.

“In Bristol West, following the suspension of key members of the Constituency Labour Party, activists went on campaign strike.”

A mirror image of many workplaces subject to the same kind of regime in which people simply work without enthusiasm.

In this context the question posed by JVL’s Leah Levane needs re-framing and amplifying:

“Would any voter trust a Party with power over them as citizens which plays so fast and loose with due process standards and principles?

The point being that most people witnessing someone constantly abusing their pet in the street would avoid such people like the plague on the grounds that such behaviour towards animals is one likely to be replicated in other relationships and interactions.

Similarly, the majority of reasonable people would be justified in considering the total disdain for due process norms, standards and principles towards its own volunteer members — which is endemic through the entire leadership, organisational echelon, and managerialist cadre of the Labour Party — would be replicated towards citizens and the electorate should they be elected to govern the country.

It is only a matter of time before the reality begins to dawn that the Official Loyal Opposition is just as authoritarian, anti-democratic, corrupt and incompetent as the traditional Party of Government.

This is not a problem which can be stuck in an individual silo labelled ‘political.’ Simply because the key features which produce such problematic results and outcomes have become embedded in the wider cultural DNA of Western society and its systems.

As with every other institution and organisation across what is considered the Western world the Labour Party has gone way beyond Kafka [27] into a Twilight Zone which attempts not simply to create its own reality but to impose it.

Sources:

[1] https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/labour-redundancy-staff-cuts-organise-to-win-presentation

[2] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/531994-afghanistan-disaster-look-away/

[3] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/532235-afghanistan-empire-narrative-collapse/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

[5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/257800

https://www.americanheritage.com/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine

[6]https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/7cxflp/225_arithmetic_of_a_counterplan_plus_the/

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/mar/12/theobserver.observerbusiness5

[8] https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/

[9] http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/robinson_william_heath.shtml

[10] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trilateral-Commission