Labour’s election agent for Brighton Pavilion last year is still getting hate mail across the country from people furious that she helped stand a candidate against Green MP Caroline Lucas.
Claire Wadey, who is secretary of the local party, acted as Labour candidate Solomon Curtis’s agent during last June’s election and as a result her address was printed on all canvassing material.
Yesterday, during a debate on whether local Labour parties should have the option to not stand a candidate as part of the Progressive Alliance, which aims to unseat Tory MPs, she said that she is still getting letters from up and down the UK, and argued strongly against the proposal.
Claire Wadey said: “We are in a special position in Brighton having, very unfortunately, a Green MP.
“I had the misfortune to be the 2017 election agent for Brighton Pavilion … I’m still receiving hate mail from people who said Labour shouldn’t stand because Caroline Lucas is such a great MP.
“This is now from Edinburgh, from Aberdeen, from Aberystwyth, from all over the country but not from Brighton, because in Brighton most people know that MP does nothing for our constituency.
“This is mail that was encouraged by the so-called Progressive Alliance which is endorsed by members of our party, and I’d like those members to reconsider their opinions.
“We have rules in our rulebook where if you sign a nomination paper for another party you’re expelled and automatically excluded.
“We have members of our party who supported the progressive alliance who called in our constituency that Labour shouldn’t stand a candidate, and somehow they find themselves in the shadow cabinet I would like to question that decision regardless of their abilities and regardless of their politics.
“We will always stand a candidate in Brighton Pavilion.”
The proposal was overwhelmingly voted down.
Ms Lucas declined to comment. However, in the past, she has enthusiastically backed the idea of a progressive alliance, and the Greens in neighbouring Brighton Kemptown did not stand a candidate, which helped boost Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle’s winning vote – although his majority ended up far larger than the number of votes the Greens had ever got there.
In 2015, Labour canvassers including Warren Morgan and Julie Cattell, who went on to become council leader and chair of the planning committee respectively, became involved in an altercation with Ms Lucas’s husband in the street as they canvassed Preston Park.
They said he criticised them for standing a candidate against his wife. However Ms Lucas’s team denied he had said that, but instead had been challenging them over aggressive online behaviour.
Claire Wadey is very low grade in her saying that Caroline Lucas does nothing for Brighton.
What we do have is a minority Labour administration which has done little in almost four years – except delay the Green administation’s initiatives and again attempt to close down Hove’s Carnegie Library.
I am surprised that Julie Cattell was made Chair of Planning after all her bizarre raging tweets during the Local Election.
I do not favour the so-called Progressive Alliance. We need a spread of views in so rapidly evolving a world. All parties have to be kept on their mettle by close-run results.
Everyone has a right to stand for public office and no one has the right to threaten them for doing so. We live in a democracy. We use that system to take violence and war out of our society. Anyone who threatens or uses violence as part of their politics must be prosecuted.
So ‘in Brighton most people know that MP does nothing for our constituency’ – Caroline Lucas clearly does enough to keep getting elected. Maybe Claire Wadey doesn’t get hate mail from Brighton because a) People don’t know she exists, b) Those who do regard her as an irrelevance or c) Nobody’s interested in the Labour Party’s infernal internal squabbles.
I don’t favour the Progressive Alliance either, and I have every sympathy for Claire Wadey but I can’t say I’m surprised at the tactics of these, presumably, Lucas supporters as two weeks ago, outside the LibDem conference in Brighton, when the Green contingent arrived from the Palace Pier to meet the LibDem contingent from the Peace Statue to call for a “Peoples’ Vote,” virtually all the “Green” marchers were adorned with “B*llocks To Brexit” stickers on their lapels, whereas only one LibDem person wore one. This particular organisation is positively the rudest, most thugish and down-right foul-mouthed mob that I have ever encountered, archetypal “Fascists of the Left,” and at last year’s Labour Party Conference, also held in Brighton, whilst I was speaking to John McDonell outside the Grand, a female of their barged between us and started hurling obscenites at him. He assured me that they had absolutely no connection with the Labour Party but, a policeman who was guarding him intervened to say that they were actually paid actors and actresses–paid by WHOMB, I wonder?
Poor Christopher Hawtree could have done much better as the Green Parliamentary Candidate for Hove in 2015, as could Phelim MacCafferty in 2017, if it were not for the fact that Caroline Lucas is said to have diverted all the Green activists into Brighton Pavilion in order for to retain her seat, which was never in any jeapordy to begi with–the very opposite tactic to that employed by her Party at the Loal Elections after Pete West became their first Councillor at the 1996 Shadow Elections to the emerging Brighton & Hove Council. In the 1999 Local Elections three Candidates, including Pete West were given equal support in The then, St. Peter’s Ward, and all three won.By carrying on with these tactics, the Party doubled their Councillors in every subsequent Election until, in 2011, they were running a minority administration!
I’m afraid that Caroline is only interested in Caroline and the sooner her Green Party colleagues wake up to this fact, the sooner the electorate might consider them to be a credible alternative.
She is not wdely known as “THE CARPET-BAGGER FROM BRUSSELS” for no good reason– just ask Keith Taylor MEP!