Another day, another Labour resignation

Two political parties in Britain seem to have been struck by a spate of resignations: UKIP are completely coming apart at the seams while Labour are losing their moderates.

On Sunday an activist called Nora Mulready resigned from the Labour party and I published the reasons she gave for resigning here.

A day or two later Labour's "most senior woman in local government," the leader of Haringey council, Cllr Claire Kober, announced that she would not seek re-election to the council, saying that she had been driven out by sexism and bullying from Momentum supporters.

Her announcement cane a week after the new "Momentum" majority on Labour's NEC took it on themselves to instruct Haringey council to drop a planned development proposal - an action which was condemned in the strongest terms by 71 of Labour's 123 council leaders in England and Wales, who called the NEC vote

"an affront to the basic principles of democracy"

and a

"dangerous and alarming precedent."


Any comment which I might make about the infighting in the Labour party might be called out as MRDA (Mandy-Rice Davies applies, e.g. I would say that wouldn't I.)

So instead of commenting myself, I will link to an interview of Claire Kober in the Guardian which makes a valiant effort to cover all sides of the issue and can be read here, and to an article in the New Statesman by Labour councillor and former leader of Camden Council Sarah Hayward, which you can read here. She argues that Kober's resignation "should shame Labour's NEC" and also points out that Haringey's council's officers, quote

"can’t take instructions from another organ of a political party, and they can’t take instructions from candidates who aren’t yet elected. In fact, they have legal duties not to. The NEC process effectively sought to overrule 2014’s local government elections, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it did so without any viable alternative way of running Haringey. It is appalling and unfathomable that the NEC would put itself in this position."

Another day, another Labour resignation statement. John Clempner, who was Labour Leader of Harlow council in Essex until he resigned as leader of the council and as a councillor on 11th January, also issued a statement in the past 48 hours to the effect that he had to resign because of an "active campaign." He has wrote about this yesterday on his blog here.

John Clempner wrote that, quote,

"I did not react well to an active campaign against my leadership by a local Momentum organiser (which this individual denies, despite several independent witnesses), being called a neo-Nazi by some Corbyn t-shirt wearing person outside the Labour Party Conference, and events at a national level targeting Labour Councillors and Labour Councils that do not conform to the particular form of ideological purity that seems to have taken a grip of the party, and that will shortly culminate in the output of a party ‘democracy review’ to make Councillors more accountable to a small group of party members (and less to the actual electorate presumably)." 

If there is no place for people like John Clempner or Claire Kober in local government as Labour councillors. that has implications which anyone who votes Labour or might consider doing so in the future should think about.

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