Five Labour councillors at Lancaster City Council have resigned from the Labour Party in protest at the party’s shift ‘to the right’ under the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer.
Particular issues cited by them include his instruction to members of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s to abstentain on the spycops bill, the suspension of former leader Jeremy Corbyn and a ‘watering down’ of the Green New Deal policies.
The five councillors, Kevin Frea (current Deputy Leader of the Council) Alistair Sinclair (current Cabinet Member for Communities and Social Justice), Faye Penny, Jack O’Dwyer-Henry and Katie Whearty will now sit as a new group known as the Eco-Socialist Independents.
A statement from the five councillors said: “Humanity faces a future of spiralling inequality and climate catastrophe. The world needs strong socialist movements to fundamentally challenge the capitalist system that is destroying our planet.
“For a brief time, a ‘moment’, the Labour Party offered hope to millions, to the many not the few.
“Today under Starmer, it is offering a return to ‘business as usual’. The country and the world doesn’t have time for this. The climate extinction clock is ticking. So, we cannot in good conscience remain as representatives of this Labour Party with which we now hold so little in common.”
They went on to say that the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn represented an ‘unjust attack on a decent man and an attack on the left’.
Lancaster City Council is controlled by an alliance of Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat councillors and the new group intends to remain a part of it to work ‘closely and constructively with them’.
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