Emily Thornberry eliminated in Labour leadership race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn
Emily Thornberry has been eliminated from the Labour leadership contest after narrowly failing to secure the nominations she needed to make it into the final ballot of party members.
At the midnight Friday deadline, the shadow foreign secretary had 31 nominations from local constituency parties – two short of the 33 she required to go forward.
She did not get any nominations from Labour Party affiliates – the other route onto the ballot paper.
The three other candidates still in the contest – Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy – had already obtained the nominations they needed.
They now go through to the online and postal ballot of party members and registered supporters which opens on February 24.
Read on...
Following the confirmation of the result, Ms Thornberry said it was a “shame” she had not gone through, but praised her “brilliant” campaign team.
“We had a standing start after the election, and operated on a shoe string, but we gave it everything,” she said in a statement.
She paid tribute to the party supporters determined to fight back after December’s general election defeat at the hands of the Tories.
It’s a shame to miss out on the rest of the race, but good luck to the three superb remaining candidates. Huge thanks to members from all corners of the UK who supported me, and to my brilliant campaign team. It wasn’t to be, but we gave it everything. My full statement is here. pic.twitter.com/hWhfWcT9Tg
— Emily Thornberry (@EmilyThornberry) February 15, 2020
“It was on their behalf that I stood for the leadership, because I’ve always believed we are at out best when – from the dispatch box to the doorstep – we are one, united fighting force, taking on the Tories and standing up for the communities we represent.”
Ms Thornberry had struggled for support throughout the contest.
She only scraped through the first round of nominations by Labour MPs and MEPs with 23 votes – one more than the 22 required – after Clive Lewis dropped out.
In part of a last-ditch effort to remain in the contest, she announced she would bring in public sector pension reforms if she took Labour into Downing Street.
The opposition frontbencher told Politics Home she planned to give workers access to their pension pots before they retire in a move designed to ease Government debt and boost the economy.
She admitted she had suffered from a “squeeze” by the “monolithic” campaigns of Sir Keir and Ms Long-Bailey.
The final result of the election will be announced at a special conference in London on April 4.
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Which leaves three stooges who have signed up to 10 despicable, totalitarian pledges advanced by the British Board of Deputies, which represents a minority of the small UK Jewish population (400,000 at most) and is an apologist for Zionist racism, the oppression of the Palestinians and Donald Trump. Not only that, but two of them describe themselves as Zionists and the other says he’s a Zionist sympathiser. That is no better than saying they support or sympathise with the apartheid regime which once ran South Africa. Remember, Mandela said the South Africans would not be free till the Palestinians were free. Zionism has been a racist creed since its outset. Here is Theodore Herzl, its founder, writing in Die Welt on 15th October 1897: “The Yid is a hideous distortion of the human character, something unspeakably low and repulsive…we will breath more easily having rid ourselves once and for all of these people who, with furtive shame we were obliged to treat as our fellow tribesmen.” What does Herzl mean? This: that the Jew as Jew is despicable. Only be becoming a Zionist, that is it by asserting the superior status of The Chosen People and by securing an exclusively Jewish homeland (at the time Palestine had not been earmarked) does the Jew redeem himself/herself from despicableness. That is anti-Semitism in a pure and vile form. What does the B o D have to say? Mrs Hodge? Mrs Ellman? The CST? LFI? Here is Chaim Weizmann, hardly a minor figure in the history of either Zionism or Israel: “There is a qualitative difference between a Jew and an Arab.” By aligning themselves with Zionism, that is the racism the trio of dupes trying to be Labour leader have adopted. And here is Golda Meir: “The borers of Israel are where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map.” That is a lunatic conception. It means the UK is Israel, France is Israel, the USA is Israel, Russia is Israel, Australia is Israel. In fact, the entire globe is Israel except perhaps for the north and south poles. Zionism is not a rational set of ideas. It is a demented belief in the racial superiority of Jews. Notwithstanding that 5.1 million Jews were slaughtered by a regime founded on the unhinged notion of racial superiority, the Zionists have adopted the same irrationality. Meir also said that the Palestinians did not exist and that madness is now resurfacing. The Palestinians are non-people, just like the Jews were to the Nazis. Ask a Zionist, any Zionist if he or she thinks Arabs are the equals of Jews. This wayward view, founded on the miserable nonsense that there is such a thing as the “Jewish race” (when Weizmann helped finesse the Balfour Declaration he wanted the term “the Jewish people replaced by “the Jewish race”) is what the three Candides seeking to be Labour leader and PM have just signed up to. They have declared the Labour Party a resolutely and openly racist party. They have done so out of pure cowardice. They are too frit to tell the truth: Zionism is not Judaism; a Jew is not a Zionist; Zionism includes the belief that the whole of Palestine should be a Jewish State. It is therefore inescapably racist. So are the three puppets bidding to succeed Corbyn. The membership should revolt against this and insist all three renounce racism in all its forms, including Zionism, declare their support for an autonomous Palestinian State, and vow to stand up to both the Israeli State and the USA because their current policies towards the Palestinians are racist. If their adherence to Zionism is permitted to stand, the Labour Party will lose its soul. It will be dragged down into a miasma of racist oppression which will kill for good its claim to stand for equality for all.