 |
| Labour's wilted rose |
The Labour Party and the unions were once honourable.
The Labour Party and the unions once stood up for working people.
The Labour Party and the unions fought for the rights of working people.
But they lost their way.
Southampton Independents are not anti-union. But we are against the unions not representing their members properly and deceiving members and the public about their motives.
The Labour Party and the unions are now frequently about sustaining the Labour Party and the unions. And not about what they are supposed to be.
The film Made in Dagenham shows how unions can behave very badly. The union officials in that film were about supporting themselves, not the members and not the women fighting for equal pay. That film was set in the early 1970s. Some of the unions haven't moved on since then.
You only need to look at the Southampton Fair Funding for All Schools (SFFAS) campaign to see how they have lost their way.
We have provided comment on this website and in the Daily Echo to show how parents feel misled by that campaign.
We have showed how the SFFAS poses as a parent-led campaign but is in fact a barely-concealed con.
It is a union and Labour campaign. They should be honest about that. Instead, they have drawn in parents by pretending they are something they are not.
When questioned by parents about the campaign's funding and who was behind it, at one of the public meetings, the SFFAS organisers withheld information about the fact that it is a union campaign and the fact that many of the parents at that meeting, and otherwise involved in the campaign, are also union activists.
Parents are going to be angry when they find out the truth.
And SFFAS is not politically neutral. It criticises the Tory Government, claiming that the Government claims are misleading, but it does not criticise the Labour Southampton City Council.
That is misleading. It is also not balanced.
The SFFAS campaign is another in a long line of Labour fronts.
They pretend to be for the people. Instead, they are about the Labour Party.
It is more Labour lies, used to deceive parents. That is unforgivable.
And this adds to the lies that the Labour council and Labour councillors about Southampton's bins. Year after year Labour councillors said they would "keep weekly bin collections".
Don't forget, in February 2017, they voted to make your bins collected fortnightly. They even tried to spin it as "Alternate Weekly Collections".
Labour lies to keep itself going, using its union-funded lie machine.
Labour put the party, not people, first.
We are publishing the truth about schools funding.
And we will try to be balanced, as Southampton Independents always try to be.