Despite an ill-fated attempt by the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs to re-instate Rebecca Long Bailey, Starmer has no intention to. Instead Guido is told a new Shadow Education Secretary will be chosen in days. Here are the runners and riders…
- Emma Hardy – Currently a Shadow Education Minister, Hardy has been MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle since 2017. Before then she had worked as a primary school teacher but quit to work for the NUT. Her dad was even head teacher at her primary school. She’s also handily Starmer’s former PPS back when he was Shadow Brexit Secretary. Would fit right in…
- Toby Perkins – Shadow Minister for Apprenticeships and Lifelong Learning and Chesterfield MP since 2010. State educated. A member of Labour Friends of Israel, his sekectin would really annoy the Corbynistas. Although he is male so would shift the ShadCab gender balance awry…
- Tulip Siddiq – Privately educated at The Royal School, Hampstead, Sidiq is now Shadow Minister for Children and Early Years. She’ll know the brief…
- Lucy Powell – Currently Shadow BEIS, Powell held the Shadow Education brief for nine months under Corbyn until she resigned in the failed coup against his leadership in June 2016. A standard bearer of the soft left…
- Liz Kendall – Currently a shadow social care minister, state educated, and standard bearer for Labour centrism. Blairite Kendall is who to pick if Starmer wants to go nuclear on the hard left…
- Lord Adonis – Proper Blairite with radical views on education that Michael Gove continued. If Starmer cares about education results and not union blessings the architect of the incredibly successful London Challenge and Tony Blair’s academies policy is the man. Imagine the faces of the Corbynistas…
One member it definitely won’t be is Dawn Butler, who currently sits on the Education Select Committee. A colleague of hers on the committee tells Guido she has now missed seven meetings in a row…
A Labour MP’s trip to Paris was paid for by an Iranian exile group which has been described as the front organisation for a ‘bizarre cult’. Chesterfield MP Toby Perkins accepted £800 worth of accommodation, meals and transport from the France-based National Council for Resistance (NCRI) in Iran for a two-day trip in July. The NCRI is widely considered to be the political front for the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), who oppose the Khomeinist regime in Iran, and were a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK until 2008. Though the MEK has been praised for its opposition to Iranian theocracy, the methods and precise motives of the group have split Western opinion, with the US government describing it as a ‘cult’. Michael Axworthy, former head of the FCO’s Iran Section, said:
“[The MEK] is a bizarre organisation. As it is today, it resembles a kind of religious cult, brainwashing its adherents, taking their money and property, and separating them from partners and families… It originated in the 1960s as a violent Marxist-Islamic group opposed to the Shah; in the 1970s, it killed US servicemen in Iran, among others. It gave significant armed support to the revolution in 1979, but lost out to Khomeini’s supporters in a bloody power struggle thereafter, was forced into exile, and later was based in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Because it fought on Saddam’s side against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, it has since then been completely discredited with ordinary Iranians in Iran. No one with any claim to sound judgment, let alone high office, should have given [the MEK] their backing.”
Weird!
Looks like Labour MP Toby Perkins has been clicking on dodgy links…
UPDATE:
@GuidoFawkes My account got hacked, it's nothing to do with what I was looking at, thank you.
— Toby Perkins MP (@tobyperkinsmp) July 28, 2016
Toby Perkins leads an, er, rousing version of Jerusalem pic.twitter.com/rJN7Zrs0Tj
— James Tapsfield (@JamesTapsfield) January 27, 2016
Labour have given a rousing rendition of Jerusalem led by Toby Perkins, agitator in chief for an English National Anthem. Makes the heart soar…
Labour MP Toby Perkins has used a 10-minute rule motion to propose that the public should have the choice of a new national anthem, with MPs voting on the proposal at midday today. What would Guido readers’ preference be? The PM is backing Jerusalem…
After Yvette allies denied any wrongdoing this morning, Liz Kendall’s campaign manager Toby Perkins has piled in on the Daily Politics:
“I think the idea that you say because one of the candidates is a mother they’re the one you should back suggests a paucity of intellectual argument which the Labour Party really should have moved beyond. So I was disappointed with the specific piece.”
The Labour leadership race descends into a debate on whether you have to be a mother to be a good leader…
