Resignation from the British Labour Party.
Please accept my resignation from the Labour Party on receipt of this letter. I have thought long and hard about this decision. Here is a sample of my reasons for leaving:
- I joined the Party a couple of months before the General Election that brought Mrs Thatcher into power. I was ‘inducted’ by ‘Red Ted Knight in Brixton and was active in London, in Burton and elsewhere during the 1980s and 1990s. I believed that a Socialist society was the only alternative to rampant Toryism of the time. Both of my parents are lifelong Labour supporters. It was in the blood.
- My decision to leave has evolved since the Iraq war and the financial crisis of 2007–08. I consider the crisis has exposed the contradictions and weaknesses of the neo-liberal economic experiment: attempting to make global corporations and capitalism profitable by making the rich richer at the expense of working people. This began in the early 1970s, it influenced the 1974–79 Labour Government; was extensively implemented by the Tories 1979–1997; little modified by Labour 1997–2010 and has been accelerated by the current Tory government. This near decade of economic depression has exposed this agenda for all to see and created the conditions for truly radical change.
- Any challenge to the neo-liberal agenda has now been compromised by the One Nation Labour approach based upon ‘responsible capitalism’ epitomised by the Union Jack emblem that would fit the Tories just as well. Austerity has now been accepted by the Party and is being implemented by Labour councils up and down the UK under the ‘dented shield’ rhetoric.
- Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, elsewhere. It’s hard to know where to start. I didn’t join the party shortly after the ‘fall of Saigon’ expecting to find the government and it main so-called opposition party 35 years later pursuing Armed conflict around the world – more than ever in history. Along with our ‘allies’, Britain has invaded and desolated so many countries that I cannot, with honesty, support a party that talks peace but promotes wars. I believe Labour’s foreign policy is merely an ersatz version of the corrupting Tory (neo-con) ambition abroad.
- I feel the austerity ‘Lite’ promoted by the Labour leadership is hypocritical. Fighting the Tories by Tory defined rules is simply unacceptable.
For the above, and other, reasons I am no longer able to vote Labour or be a labour supporter. Will you please remove me from the membership list and cancel my direct debit.
5 August 2015
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t receive a reply. I then went off to sign up with the Green Party. More my kind of guys/girls.