Our job was to expel Trots from the Labour Party
“I no longer work for the Labour Party. Almost unbelievably, I have retired. …
I apologise deeply to my colleagues for the work I’ve left undone. But I don’t apologise for having retired. One of my proudest moments was to look at the team I leave behind to deal with the governance and legal issues of the Labour Party.
And contrary to popular belief that’s not just about expelling Trots from the Labour Party – although they will continue to do that. Militant, Socialist Appeal, Alliance for Workers Liberty have no more place in the Labour Party than the BNP or the EDL.
No, the team I leave behind will spend the overwhelming majority of the time, as they always have, making sure that ordinary party members, the hard-working activists who organise the Party, run elections, raise the money have the tools and expertise to do that job within the law and to the best of their ability…
I knew it would be tearful. My tears started, to the bemusement of fellow commuters, on the train on the way to London, and continued on and off during the day. I almost had to run out of the office, to flee the desk banging, whooping and cheering which opened the floodgates again.
For my speech I wanted to remind people why we do what we do. If I couldn’t leave people who weren’t even born when I started working for the Party with a sense of purpose, an appreciation that what they do matters, then the whole of that 27 years would have been diminished.”
For the rest of Mike Creighton’s fascinating account of his March 2017 retirement party, click here.
In this photograph, you may recognise several of the ‘whistle-blowers’ who appeared in the BBC Panorama Programme, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’.
