Thread by @SeemaChandwani

THREAD: I’m doing this for cathartic reasons. The 2010 election sent me into depression but I’m now part of a movement that will turn this frustration into determination.

Firstly I have full faith in the policies Corbyn espoused, they weren’t his - they were and are ours.

The reason Jeremy and John created such a following was not just because they had policies which aimed to improve the lives of working class people but because they genuinely believed in them and had a track record that gave us assurances they were going to carry them off.

Of course to carry them off we need to be in power. I think we all get that, I don’t have a knee injury and a cold because I was trampolining naked in the rain yesterday... 🙄

I like many burned ourselves out knocking on doors for weeks, months, years to get a Labour victory.

The first thing I want to discuss was the combined pressure we placed on Jeremy and John. Not only did we want them to lead us into a Labour government but we expected them to transform our party.

The latter was our job, not theirs. We were meant to have a team to do the latter

I’ve met some amazing people in the left movement, strategists and organisers. We had a level of organising already, Jeremy winning was not a miracle there were people who organised the left for that victory.

But after we won, we lost focus. Many of us caught up in power battles

It’s not my place to disclose the nature of those fights. But most were played out publicly.

I personally found it exhausting. The NCC slate is a good example of how I lost hours/days of my life negotiating between the left command to agree one slate.

Of course every family has it’s ups and downs, but in this scenario I was a child, I expected the parents to guide us through, instead many of children had to play the adult.

And caught up within that was a generation of younger people who were being badly trained.

To those younger people I want to say this. Solidarity is important and we are not a movement if we start calling people on the left ‘cranks’ or dog-pile when one of us screws up.

Competition against each other has no winners - a victory that leads to division is always a loss.

Anyway we move on. Next: I still have no idea what our plan is to win back Scotland. It’s been 4.5years since we lost it. We cannot win power without at least some of it.

Scotland already has some of our policies being enacted. ‘Elephant in the room’ - no, the room is empty!

Whoever the next Leader is, cannot have an empty room for how we win back ‘the north’. It needs investment and strategy. It doesn’t need blame.

We’ve known since the EU Referendum we had problems there. People there didn’t vote to Leave because Jeremy campaigning levels!

People in ‘the north’ made up their minds to Leave the EU years before the referendum was called.

No amount of campaigning for the referendum was going to change that. And when they won that referendum it gave them a sense of power that was threatened by the People’s Vote.

It was frustrating to watch Jeremy wrangling with how he had to bridge the Leavers and Remainers to get a Labour majority.

It was not a 52%\48% divide when broken into MP seats.

I cannot imagine the pressure on Jeremy that led him to agree to the People’s Vote.

Do I think we would’ve won if we were firmer about Leave? No, I think we would’ve suffered in seats we retained last night.

Our party needed a strategy to seize both. Instead we were pulled to make a firm decision by MPs from both sides that should’ve known better.

It can’t be ignored that some of Labour’s biggest opposition came from inside the Labour Party. Even when we had Ed ‘ed-stone’ Miliband who was a complete doofus, there was some restraint.

But for Jeremy, it was a brutal vicious attack. Relentless from the minute he stood

WTF were these people doing? Could they not see working class people were being crushed and destroyed by austerity. Why were they attacking our party, the only chance people had?

We got caught in a war of attack and protection. And it fed the narrative we weren’t ready.

It was shocking to me, as someone who grew up in poverty, real poverty that Labour MPs would sabotage an opportunity to stop that misery.

That there was a child who like me under Thatcher lived in a cold damp room, hungry and instead of helping, MPs were on TV slagging off JC.

Until you feel the pain of poverty, where your lungs hurt breathing in cold air in your corridor because you can only afford to heat one room.

Until you walk a mile and back to the supermarket in the rain just before it closed to get near gone off food to eat.

Until you have to boil a kettle for hot water to bathe as you have no working boiler.

Until you cannot sleep because of the sound of wind blowing through your window or the smell of mould.

You can never understand how slagging off our party daily was the ultimate betrayal

The policies we stood on during this election did not differ much to the policies that pulled me out of poverty.

I am where I am because of a Labour government. What we do to change people’s lives is truly amazing.

EMAs, Sure Start, Living Wage...

After the shit-show from Miliband with those ‘Cooper immigration mugs’ and the ‘tougher than tories on welfare’ what did you hate about our ambition for a progressive society?

It is unforgivable how many Labour MPs robbed this opportunity from our communities. For what?

And today, rather than reflect and show some regret that your actions have consequences. You’re on the airwaves slagging us off even harder. Our party.

As for the ‘blue tick lefties’. Stop now. You’ve spoken for yourself at the expense of our voice for too long.

You used your privileged exposure to talk about your own opinion. Often selling many of us out.

I don’t know what will happen next in our party. But we must not make mistakes of the past with division and being pulled by others in directions we’re not OK with.