Labour is standing firm over Falkirk, even though senior figures such as Johann Lamont and Alistair Darling are sufficiently worried by the allegations still emerging to call for a new investigation. This morning Caroline Flint was sent out in a stern mood to bat for the party, with the Shadow Energy Secretary telling Radio 4’s Today programme that the party wouldn’t publish its internal reports, but that it had already taken ‘firm action’. She said:
‘The current position is this: when reports were made to the party about concerns about the Falkirk selection, the party was suspended and put in special measures. Ms Murphy, who was one of the candidates at the heart of the process, withdrew her nomination from the process. All those people who were signed up under a union membership scheme are not allowed to take part in the selection and that union membership scheme has been shut down.
‘And we did investigate, but the issue here is – and we don’t publish internal documents in the Labour party – but the truth is that we took firm action to stop the selection, to put the local party into special measures, and to make sure that any abuses were not being carried out, and that’s why we will select a candidate on 8 December.’
Is this really enough? Clearly the party leadership is hoping that the row has become too complex for most people to bother following, with contradictory statements about whether one witness did or didn’t withdraw their allegations. But unfortunately for Ed Miliband and colleagues, there are enough voices who demand to be listened to speaking out on this, such as Darling, to keep this row alive, and this will mean that insisting that everything is fine and that the party doesn’t publish internal documents will get rather tiring.
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