Exclusive: The former party members, who will largely join Jeremy Corbyn’s new political outfit, accuse Labour of ‘abandoning’ its founding principles, reports Marco Marcelline
21 members of the Leyton and Wanstead Constituency Labour Party (CLP) have resigned, alleging in a letter that Labour’s leadership has “abandoned” the party’s founding principles.
The mass resignation letter, seen by the Echo, includes the signatures of former CLP chairs Ray Goodspeed and Lizzy Ali, alongside other senior ex-CLP members.
The members, some of whom have been in the party for several decades, state the party’s leadership is “dishonest”, and had done “next to nothing to address unprecedented levels of inequality and poverty” in the country.
The resignation letter goes on to rebuke the party’s handling of Israel’s devastating assault on the people of Gaza, describing it as “shameful inaction and active complicity”. The former members state: “The Labour government has limited itself to minimal, mainly symbolic actions, taken far too late, while continuing with weapon sales and military co-operation with the Israeli regime. This will be a permanent stain on its reputation.”
After it came to power, Labour suspended 30 out of around 350 arms export licences to Israel, and it has continued exporting parts for F-35 jets used by Israel. Meanwhile, RAF Shadow aircraft have run more than 600 flights over the Palestinian territory, purportedly to look for Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
The signatories also attack Labour’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group, which they say has led to the “shocking and absurd” arrests of peaceful demonstrators, and they criticise the “pandering to the poisonous anti-migrant rhetoric of Reform UK in a doomed attempt to win their voters”.
Speaking to the Echo, former CLP political education officer and branch chair Richard Price, said the majority of the signatories will join Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s yet to be named left-wing party, stating that 150 people had attended a recent “Your Party” meeting in Leytonstone.
Criticising the atmosphere within the party, he said: “Labour in its current form is a right-wing social democratic party; it’s very difficult to be a rank-and-file socialist in the party now. It’s become a party of middle managers, and they all remind me of the type of people I’d regularly have to negotiate with when I was a trade unionist.”
The letter comes on the penultimate day of the Labour Party conference, where leader Keir Starmer targeted Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, saying he “didn’t like Britain” and warned against the “politics of grievance”.
The resignation is the largest collective exodus of Labour Party members from a Waltham Forest CLP since over 50 people resigned from the Chingford and Woodford Green CLP last year over Faiza Shaheen’s deselection.
The letter continued: “We have remained members of the Labour Party, despite being told to leave by Keir Starmer, and in spite of many good socialists being expelled or leaving in disgust. We have done this out of party loyalty; to ensure the removal of the Tory government; for the sake of unity with the main organisations of the Labour movement; and because no viable alternative presented itself.
“But enough is enough. We now feel that we have no choice but to resign from the Labour Party and to help to build an alternative socialist party that we can be proud to be members of – one that can act in the interests of working class people and provide a real alternative to the ‘populist’ authoritarian far right.”
A London Labour spokesperson responded: “It is always disappointing to lose members of the party. However, Labour is fully focused on delivering our ambitious programme of national renewal for residents in Leyton and Wanstead, and for communities across the country.”
Waltham Forest Labour was contacted for comment.
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