Internationally renowned director Ken Loach

• WE were shocked that our comrade Pete Firmin is about to be expelled from the Labour Party, (Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour appalls me, August 19).

Pete, a lifelong trade unionist, anti-racist, and campaigner for social justice, nationally and internationally, remains active in his local trades council and continues to fight alongside his many Jewish comrades against Israeli apartheid and for a free Palestine.

Locally he has helped lead the struggle in Kilburn for decent housing and against regeneration schemes which aim to build luxury flats while poor people are thrown out of their homes.

MP Tulip Siddiq called on him personally more than once to help her re-election, but so far is silent on his expulsion.

As chair of the Hampstead & Kilburn CLP he allowed members to discuss and vote on a trade union motion, against the wishes of the one-party state of Labour, and was suspended.

Pete is in good company joining expelled Ken Loach, internationally renowned director of such masterpieces about working class life and rebellion as Cathy Come Home (which launched a movement against homelessness); The Wind that Shakes the Barley (the fight for a united socialist Ireland); Land and Freedom (the Spanish revolution and the Stalinist murder of it); Bread and Roses (undocumented workers in the US); I, Daniel Blake (zero-hour contracts, benefit cuts and destitution of young and old) and The Spirit of ’45 (what a Labour government accomplished against Tory Britain). Ken Loach depicts the social outrages Labour wishes to run more competently than the Tories.

Labour now want to return to being the party of law and order as it was under Tony Blair of Afghanistan and Iraq fame.

Many others are being expelled (including many pro-Palestinian Jewish members), and more than 120,000 have resigned, like ourselves, refusing to be associated with what Labour now stands for. The Bakers’ Union, a founding affiliate, is also contemplating disaffiliation.

Meanwhile Trevor Phillips is readmitted to the party after his suspension for alleged Islamophobia. Who needs Boris Johnson’s Tories?

MICHAEL KALMANOVITZ & SAM WEINSTEIN
Addresses supplied