My Labour membership application has been rejected.

My application to rejoin the Labour Party has been rejected because I won’t be voting for the Corbyn continuity candidate.

I received a letter from Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) this week saying that the General Secretary, Jennie Formby, had taken action to reject my membership application. She had the power to do this ‘for any reason she sees fit.’

This is the same Jennie Formby who told me when I applied to renew my membership on 15 January that members like me were ‘the heart and soul of the party’. You can see her welcoming email above. I received a text thanking me for rejoining at the same time.

The GLU letter, received at 00.44 on 24 March, meaning I missed it when it originally arrived, says I was being refused membership because of information ‘brought to the attention of national officers’, namely that ‘you publicly stated on Twitter on 23 May 2019 that you had cancelled your Labour membership and were voting for the Green Party’.

My tweet is here:

The GLU statement of course is inaccurate. My Labour Party membership had lapsed in March 2019. I was not a Labour member when I voted Green in May 2019. I explained in a blogpost here that I was loaning my vote to the Greens because of Labour’s failure to deal with anti-semitism and its hopeless dithering on Brexit. The BBC covered this at the time.

I’d been wondering for two months why my promised membership card hadn’t arrived. I explained in a New Statesman article on 9 March that I hadn’t had my membership card or ballot, and I would be voting for Lisa Nandy then Keir Starmer if I did. I said

I rejoined the Labour Party in January explicitly to vote in the leadership election for a candidate who can reclaim Labour from Corbynism, address the issue of anti-Semitism, and reconnect the party with the wider public.

I also explained that in the December 2019 General Election, I had  voted for my local Labour MP Kevin Brennan, who had a strong anti-Brexit position, having voted, like all other Cardiff Labour MPs, against the introduction of Article 50 in 2017. I had donated to a couple of local Labour campaigns in Wales too.

In the New Statesman article I speculated that perhaps my membership was being looked at:

My membership of the Labour Party lapsed in March 2019. I’d decided months before that I wasn’t going to be caught out by an automatic renewal and cancelled my direct debit. In the European elections. I decided not to vote for the pro-Brexit anti-Semitic shambles that the Labour leadership has allowed the party to become. After all, in the 2017 I had voted Labour, and my vote had been waved around with that of millions of others as an endorsement of the leadership’s plans for a better Brexit. Well, stuff that. Won’t get fooled again.

So, having left Labour, I loaned my vote to the Greens last May. My decision was explicitly prompted by the Labour NEC decision on Brexit. Perhaps that means that my membership application is being closely scrutinised. Who knows? Personally I would hope that my thirteen years as an elected Welsh Labour member of the National Assembly for Wales, along with eight years as a Welsh Labour minister, might just count in my favour. After all, a lot of people with long records of supporting other parties were allowed to join Labour in the summer of 2015.

Indeed, in 2015, people who had voted and advocating voting Green or Plaid Cymru in the 2015 General Election were allowed to join Labour just a few weeks later.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that I am being excluded for making it clear two weeks ago that I wouldn’t be voting for the Corbyn continuity candidate. The Labour hierarchy has been trawling round to find excuses to strip Labour membership of longstanding supporters like Alastair Campbell and Trevor Phillips, both of whom I count as friends, with far more urgency than they acted on anti-Semites.

Alastair explained why he decided in the end that he wouldn’t contest the decision to expel him , stating that

The culture you have helped to create has made the party one which I feel no longer truly represents my values, or the hopes I have for Britain. Secondly, as someone who has been obsessed all my life with Labour winning, because otherwise we risk the continuing, debilitating Conservative domination of our politics, I see no strategy in place or even in development that remotely meets the electoral or policy challenges ahead. On the contrary, in so far as I ascertain a strategy at all, it is one that looks more designed to lose.

December’s General Election proved him right.

Labour lost office at UK level almost ten years ago. In a podcast with the Western Mail‘s Martin Shipton in January , I outlined some of my criticism of UK Labour leadership since 2010, beginning with the failures to stop the Con-Lib coalition pinning the 2008 financial crash on Labour and to stand up for the 1997-2010 record.

My membership matters not a jot in the current crises the country faces. Labour’s inability to forge a broad, popular movement against a government destroying democratic norms matters enormously. Labour needs all the friends it can get – but as we know, some people are happier in a cult of the like-minded, not a broad popular movement.

The letter from Labour’s GLU is here: