It’s not often that a couple of councillors resigning should cause much
comment, but when two Labour council leaders resign within the space of two weeks citing bullying and racist abuse, then we should take notice.
Now I know very little about internal Labour politics, so I’ll simply
quote directly what these two Labour Council Leaders said on resigning.
First, Claire Kober, led Haringey Council in London for 10 years and was
Labour’s most senior woman in Local Government.
She resigned after Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) intervened with
a clear message that a major Regeneration Programme agreed by the local council
should be re-thought. She went on to say
that she wasn't consulted over the NEC's ruling which she says was handled
"very badly".
Worrying she then added, "The
sexism, bullying, undemocratic behaviour, and outright personal attacks on me,
as the most senior woman in Labour local government, has left me disappointed
and disillusioned."
Ms Kober said she "didn't
want to go over details" of her claims, but added she was "in no doubt that the behaviour and
actions of certain individuals at certain times met the test of both sexism and
bullying and politically intimidating behaviour". She is resigning as a councillor as well.
The decision of the Labour NEC to intervene in Haringey has been publically criticised by 15 other Labour London council leaders.
Then today, it became clearer why the Labour Leader of Harlow Council,
Jon Clempner, resigned as both Council Leader and councillor a couple of weeks
ago. He said:
“There has been a lot of speculation about why I resigned as Leader
of Harlow Council, as a Councillor, and subsequently as a member of the Labour
Party…
Those who follow my personal social media will know 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). Councillors, unless formally endorsed by the privately owned company Momentum, seem to have replaced the Parliamentary Labour Party as the focus of the hard left’s ire…
He went on: “the Labour Party was becoming a deeply unpleasant
place, I resigned from the Labour Party shortly after”.
What appears to be happening in Labour is that the national party is
telling local councillors elected on local manifestos what they can and cannot
do. It’s a one size fits all approach
and a direct threat to the general view of local democracy that local
councillors should be free to respond to the needs and requirements of their
area and residents.
If this trend continues, then
local residents in West Lancashire can have no confidence that if they vote for
a Labour councillor in May that that person won’t simply have to march, not to
the local party whip, which might be bad enough but to a centrally imposed agenda
set 200 miles away in London by people who weren’t even in the Labour party 3
years ago.
