The Birmingham by-election was boring for both the Tories and Labour, on election night and the run-up. The only minor excitement leading up to last night was the prospect of the online commie left being humiliated again. This time their pet project was Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate Dave Nellist – a former militant Labour MP expelled in 1991. He was backed by both Chris Williamson and Thelma Walker, who co-conspirators might remember stood for the Northern Independence Party in Hartlepool.
Thelma predicted Nellist “could be the start of real change”; Williamson went to Erdington to campaign for Nellist, “the ONLY socialist on the ballot paper”. Williamson’s tweet got 370 likes. Nellist got 360 votes…
Nellist lost his deposit, the hard left is humiliated and have once again proved their ability to get retweets in certain pockets of Twitter are all they have left…
Dave Nellist of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has loudly called for a reunion with his former parliamentary comrade Jeremy Corbyn, even offering to merge the hard-left group with Labour. Corbyn’s own sympathies clearly lie with Nellist, the Labour leader said in February:
“Dave and I worked very well together in Parliament together in the past, I have a lot of respect for him as a good community-minded person and I hope that we will get support from him in all quarters in the future.”
What’s Nellist up to now? He’s just optimistically filed the TUSC application to the Electoral Commission for the official Leave campaign designation. The old Trot has stuck to his anti-Brussels guns:
“I was elected as a Labour MP in 1983 on a manifesto that committed the party to withdrawal from the then European Economic Community (EEC). There are millions of trade unionists, young people, anti-austerity campaigners and working class voters generally who, like TUSC, still oppose the EU from a completely different standpoint to that of Ukip and the Tory outers.”
Any other MPs elected in 1983 on an anti-EEC platform?
