Why we’re leaving the Labour Party

The Labour Party was established in 1900 to represent the interests of the British working class and to promote the values of the Enlightenment. Yet recent YouGov polling shows Labour has more support among people earning over £70,000 than any other party. Meanwhile, Reform UK has become the most popular party among the working class and those least well-off. How has it come to this?

We – Sir Robin Wales and Clive Furness – have over a century of experience as Labour Party members between us. The two of us have shared almost half of that time in elected office. We remain committed to the principles that brought us into politics and to the people we sought to represent.

That said, today’s Labour Party lacks vision. It is swayed by whatever political fad is in fashion and has abandoned those it was originally formed to stand for. Since taking office, the current Labour government has demonstrated, at best, ineptitude, and at worst, an outright disdain for working people.

In British towns and cities, we can observe that Labour is not building a society for all. Instead, it is engaging in transactional politics with identitarian ‘communities’, and buying off power brokers with office, honours and access to money. Genuinely liberally minded individuals from minority communities end up marginalised in favour of reactionaries who can command a ‘bloc vote’.

With anti-Semitism on the rise, it is impossible to ignore that the world’s oldest hatred has put down roots in the Labour Party. We have seen this in our local constituency parties. We have seen it on the streets and in social media. Yet the Labour leadership still pussyfoots around the issue, turning a blind eye to those among the party’s ranks who engage in such behaviour. How many Labour Party members feel there is a religious obligation to rid the world of Jews, one wonders?

Then there is the grooming-gangs scandal. The party’s reluctance to hold Labour-run councils to account over their role in the scandal has only compounded the harm suffered by thousands of girls and young women. For years, it failed to even acknowledge the gangs’ existence. Even now, following the revelations made in Louise Casey’s National Audit on Group-based Child Exploitation and Abuse, London mayor Sadiq Khan refuses an independent inquiry into the extent of the problem in the nation’s capital – presumably for fear of what it might find.

The failures of Labour affect virtually every corner of Britain thanks to its inability to tackle illegal immigration. Indeed, this is an issue that the party has prevaricated over for years, but on which it has managed to make almost no headway. While home secretary Shabana Mahmood is talking tough, her backbenchers and activist ‘supporters’ continue to champion open borders.

Everywhere one looks, Labour is in disarray. By all accounts, it is complicit in the systematic erosion of the key principles of the Enlightenment – liberty of person and thought, free expression, scientific enquiry, and reason as opposed to dogma. Labour’s abandonment of these values is perhaps best demonstrated by its approach to free speech – a liberty that Keir Starmer’s government has shown no interest in defending. The use of the Public Order Act to shut down speech that some unspecified person might find ‘offensive’ is an affront. Police resources have been wasted collating information on ‘non-crime hate incidents’. And endless time is being spent on discussing an official, all-encompassing definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – never mind the fact that discrimination on the grounds of faith and race is already covered by the Equality Act 2010. Meanwhile, a school teacher who did no more than show cartoons of Muhammad during a lesson on blasphemy continues to live in hiding from religious bigots who threaten his life.

Labour’s embrace of transgender ideology has been particularly dispiriting. Back in April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The case, brought by For Women Scotland, clarified the law, making it clear that sex triumphs over wishful thinking. New guidelines from the Equality and Human Rights Commission followed. Nonetheless, a full nine months later, secretary of state for education Bridget Phillipson, who has the backing of unions GMB and Unison (both cheerleaders for gender self-ID), has yet to publish any updated guidance on single-sex spaces. The fact that Keir Starmer has come around to the idea that women can’t have a penis is certainly progress – but behind the words of frontbenchers lies an unreconstructed activist hinterland. Rather than confront them, party leadership quietly appeases them.

Economically, Labour seems clueless. Recent party policy is unacceptably hostile to our private-sector wealth creators. In increasing the employer national-insurance contributions, chancellor Rachel Reeves appears determined to make businesses pay (literally) for her financial mismanagement. She reserves particular contempt for publicans and farmers. Pressure from public-sector unions has resulted in an unbalanced Employment Rights Act, widely predicted to discourage new job hires. The loss of jobs, particularly for young people, seems not to matter to Labour politicians anymore.

Reeves has decided that buying popularity with free cash now is more appealing than developing a long-term strategy to increase the economic welfare of citizens who just want to take care of their families. The current government runs a massive deficit, requiring significant amounts of tax just to pay the interest. We are not blind to the fact that much of this was a bequest from previous Tory governments, but if we don’t tackle it now, our children and grandchildren will be the ones to pay the price.

We need a fundamental review of what the government spends money on, and why. When we ran Newham Council during David Cameron’s ‘austerity’ government, we froze council tax for 10 years, made no cuts to services and ran a large jobs brokerage, delivering the largest increase in employment in England. With a satisfaction rate of 80 per cent, we were the most popular council in the UK. We demonstrated that it is possible to review and improve public services without additional large dollops of cash.

As lifelong Labour Party members, our principles have not changed. We remain on the ‘left’ and believe that things can be changed for the better. But it will most certainly not be done by this government, or even a Labour government under a different leader. The rot has set in too deep. We have therefore decided to terminate our Labour Party membership. We know many people in the party will say good riddance – it is a tribal culture after all – but after a century of commitment, it is surely reasonable to ask Labour members to pause and consider why we are leaving. The repeated postponement of local and regional democratic elections may mean that, for some of us, it will be a long time before we can make our feelings known at the ballot box.

Sir Robin Wales served as Mayor of Newham from 2002 to 2018.

Clive Furness is a former Newham councillor and executive member.