News came through yesterday of one of the saddest indictments of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party – Darren Williams has quit the party.

For those that don’t know Darren, he is a co-founder of Welsh Labour Grassroots (WLG) in 2003 and a continuous champion of the Left in Wales ever since. During my Corbynista years in the Welsh Labour Party, I had the pleasure of meeting him many times. He is a man of rare integrity, enthusiasm and decency. Everything Keir Starmer is not. 

His letter of resignation says everything that I would want to say about the current state of the Labour Party, but with more insight and authority than it has coming from me, so I’m sure he won’t mind me copying you all in here. He addresses it directly to Keir Starmer:

After 35 years’ continuous, active Labour membership – including time spent on the National Executive Committee, the Welsh Executive Committee, the National Policy Forum and as a Cardiff councillor – I have cancelled my direct debit today, as I can no longer bear to remain in a party that treats its members, representatives and voters with such contempt.

I have witnessed some pretty unedifying behaviour by various party leaders over the years, but you have outdone them all. Your abandonment of all the pledges on which you originally stood for the leadership was shameless enough, but you have proceeded to water down policy commitments on green investment and workers’ rights, among other areas, while failing to take a clear moral stance against the Tories’ inhuman attacks on refugees and migrants or against Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza.

And all the time you have persecuted decent socialists, suspending, expelling, driving them out of the party and besmirching their reputations, all to show that you have ‘changed the party’. Well, you have certainly done that: rules are bent and broken on virtually a daily basis, democratic decisions are ignored or overridden, and candidate selections are routinely stitched-up.

Developments over the last week have finally convinced me to give up on the party to which I have belonged for almost my whole adult life. Constituencies like my own, in Cardiff West, have had your stooges foisted upon us as candidates – people with no connection to local communities – while you have treated the likes of Diane Abbott, Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who have been a credit to Labour, in the most despicable fashion.

I’m sure that, even if you read this, you will be completely indifferent to my resignation, or even pleased to see the back of another troublesome leftie, but the fact is that long standing members like me are continuing to leave the party in their droves – or, at best, sitting on their hands – when you still need us to knock doors, deliver leaflets and keep the party functioning.

It looks virtually certain that Labour will comfortably win the general election and the overdue expulsion of office of the awful Tories will be something to celebrate, but my concern is that this opportunity for lasting change will be squandered because you lack the moral and political courage to deliver the radical reform that is needed to improve people’s lives – and seem determined to alienate and antagonise so many of Labour’s natural supporters along the way.

I hope that you start to listen to the concerns that must surely be reaching you from people like me, before it’s too late.

The only thing I’d take issue with here is the last sentence; it is way too late. I’m tempted to say ‘I told you so’ (my own resignation letter just over 4 years ago: https://greenleftie.uk/2020/04/24/resignation-from-the-labour-party/ ) but then again, I was not a lifelong party member and Trade Union representative like Darren. It has taken 4 years for Darren to come to the same conclusions as me. He gave it a more than decent chance to pan out differently than I envisaged. I can only respect that. 

Darren adds some other telling words on Facebook:

With Labour almost certain to win office in a few weeks’ time, probably with a comfortable majority, I should be feeling excited about the political prospects for the years ahead. Certainly, the overdue expulsion of the awful Tories will be something to celebrate, and there are aspects of Labour’s platform – on public transport and energy, in particular – that will bring benefits if they are delivered as promised. But everything Keir Starmer has done since becoming leader – the abandonment of all his original pledges, the watering-down of key policy commitments in areas like green investment and workers’ rights, the repeated praise for Thatcher, the failure to take a principled stand against Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza – makes me pessimistic about the chances of an incoming Labour government standing up for ordinary people once the pressure is on.  

But it’s the ruthlessness of the party’s internal regime under Starmer that has been hardest to live with. Hundreds of hard-working activists and dozens of principled politicians – beginning with Rebecca Long-Bailey and Jeremy Corbyn – have been traduced, disciplined or even expelled on the flimsiest pretexts, to appease Labour’s media and establishment critics, ‘reassure’ floating voters and show ‘Labour has changed’. The party’s own rules have been bent or broken on virtually a daily basis, democratic policy decisions (e.g. in support of electoral reform) have been dismissed and selections have been routinely stitched-up. Of course, much of this has been seen in the party before, but even under Blair there was some residual respect for consistent rules and accountability and the leadership’s left critics were simply marginalised, rather than purged.

And he concludes with these word, echoing what I heard a lot of 4 years ago: “Good comrades will say that we should just keep on fighting – ‘they don’t call it ‘the struggle’ for nothing’ – and I would have agreed with them until recently, but we all have our limits, which are as much emotional as analytical.” We have both ended up jumping before the indignity of being pushed, just 4 years apart. 

‘Good comrades’ in my own local Labour Party, like my neighbour John Spanswick, who used the exact same ‘keep on the good fight’, and ‘they don’t call it a struggle for nothing’ lines, actually backed Starmer on the basis that he was best placed to win the next GE, and being in power is essential to achieving anything. Being in power also comes with bigger personal rewards and bigger platforms for big egos. To hell with the socialist agenda. John is now Leader of Bridgend Council (not long after a year swanning around as Mayor) and topping up his works pension to the tune of over £55k a year now. Nice work if you can get it! I am watching what you ‘achieve’ carefully, John!

I suspect Darren will simply abstain in the GE, as I doubt that he will be able to bring himself to cast a vote for any other party. If I’m wrong about that, then I hope he’ll come to the same conclusion as me and vote Plaid Cymru, and do so publicly. 

As a fully paid-up member of Yes Cymru, me voting for Plaid Cymru will surprise no-one anymore. I’ve resisted the temptation to join PC as I feel that I am more useful to the independence debate as a non-Welsh-speaking, English born-and-bred, non-member than as just another member of the Welsh nationalist party. My support for Yes Cymru has nothing to do with nationalism. 

Having said that, PC are still the nearest approximation to my views on offer to me. They are predominantly Left-leaning ecosocialists in my experience, as personified by the great Leanne Wood. It is real pity that she ran out of steam and is no longer at their helm. (I do have some reservations about Rhun ap Iorwerth, but hey.) I hope that the Welsh electorate wake up to what Labour has become (they largely take support for granted, which is why they have become so complacent, lazy and the polar opposite of radical). They will surely, at least, shudder away from their dalliance with the Tories, especially in places like Bridgend, and re-assert Wales as a Conservative-free zone, despite, as Darren highlighted in Cardiff West, lots of Starmerite red Tories being parachuted into Welsh constituencies. If this isn’t yet another reason to switch away from Starmer’s Labour, I’m not sure what is.

So there you have it. I would encourage all of you left-leaning folk out there to do the same thing. The only way forward for the Left in Wales is to work towards completely detaching ourselves for the Tory hegemony (blue Tories, red Tories and a few other shades of Toryism) that engulfs Westminster and that will not change, irrespective of the relative sizes of the major parties before and after the upcoming election. But I can already see another ‘I told you so’ in another 4 years time!