Open Letter to Kier Starmer
Dear Kier Starmer,
I am writing to inform you that I am resigning my Labour Party membership and to explain why.
It is a story with several parts, but I will be brief. Like many others – tens of thousands in fact – I re-joined the Party on the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. The opening chapter of my gradual disillusionment came when I was suspended from the Party to prevent me voting for Jeremy in the second leadership ballot, the one where you and others in the PLP tried so very hard to undermine and replace him with ‘one of yours’, Owen Smith. A Freedom of Information request subsequently informed me that I had been suspended for using the word ‘Blairite’ in a tweet. Enough said.
Chapter two was my voluntary detachment from the Dorking Branch of Mole Valley CLP after a year or more of trying to open local officials’ minds to a more democratic and less anti-Corbyn stance.
The third chapter ironically followed in the wake of the displacement of the person who had been our anti-Corbyn Secretary of both the Dorking Branch and of Mole Valley CLP by an inspiring socialist activist. Then, in the run-up to the General Election of 2019, and after our new Secretary had been re-elected as our parliamentary candidate (he stood in 2017), Labour Party HQ failed him on grounds of ‘due diligence’ and parachuted in an unknown candidate from outside the constituency. Our Secretary resigned, understandably. After many months of persisting, he was told that he had failed due diligence because of tweets that only someone with severe brain damage could interpret at anti-Semitic. Like Jeremy himself, he in fact has an enviable record of fighting all forms of racism.
The concluding chapter in this story of creeping disillusionment came when the remaining officials in Mole Valley CLP resisted any move to spark a public protest at the inane and unjust rejection of our then Secretary and elected parliamentary candidate, and chose instead to work with his replacement, who was about to land with his parachute. I resigned as a Vice Chair of the CLP at this point of disagreeable acquiescence.
So it was clear to me prior to your election as leader of the Labour Party that the Party itself had ossified, that its bureaucracy remained – despite the transition from McNicol to Formby (who has at least tried) – substantially unfit for purpose and amenable to manipulative factional abuse.
Like many other members of the Party I waited before resigning to see how you would respond. After all, you had presented rhetorically as a candidate seeking unity and, despite doing your utmost to destroy Jeremy early on, you had remained in the Shadow Cabinet. What has happened since seems to support the longstanding view of many left-leaning members, namely, that your overriding commitment has always been one of personal elevation. Two decisions stand out here. The first is your shameless plea to that unrepresentative segment of the Jewish population epitomised by the Board of Deputies to be ‘nice to you’, quite possibly in return for rowing back on criticisms of Israel and any imminent recognition of a Palestinian state.
The second is of course your appointments to the Shadow Cabinet, where you have cynically abandoned any attempt at unifying the Party (you will remember, incidentally, that Jeremy made several substantive attempts at Party unity). Rebecca Long-Bailey should have been made Chancellor of the Exchequer and places should have been found for Richard Burgon, Dawn Butler and Clive Lewis at the very least. Promoting the likes of the paradigmatically disloyal Wes Streeting and the vacuous Jess Philips was an insulting and sharply symbolic act.
So, in a nutshell, you have got what you have long wanted and in doing so have revealed your true colours. I cannot claim to be surprised, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt and you have thrown it back in my face. You have signed up to the insipid and very suspect formula of ‘centrist electability’. If Blair was Thatcher’s achievement, you, it seems, are Blair’s. No amount of rhetorical bluster will rescue you now: we are all of us what we do, not what we say we are.
I fully respect the decisions of those members who chose to remain in the Labour Party to continue the fight for socialist justice; but I am in my 70s and prefer to conduct that fight from outside a Tory-lite outfit like yours.
I am copying this to the Secretary of Mole Valley CLP and to Jennie Formby.
Sincerely,
Graham Scambler.