It’s been a week of bad news for the Labour Party, after eight of its MPs announced they were leaving to form their own splinter group. But if the party was hoping to show that it wasn’t dominated by far-left ideologues, news tonight suggests the party is heading down an altogether different path.
Derek Hatton, the former deputy leader of Liverpool council has been readmitted to the Labour party, after being banned for 34 years. Hatton was a key member of the hard-left Militant faction which dominated Labour politics in Liverpool during the 1980s, and was behind the council’s disastrous decision to set an illegal budget in 1985. As a result, the council went bankrupt and Hatton and his colleagues were forced to send redundancy notices in taxis to council workers.
The resulting scandal gave the moderate Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party, the ammunition to expel Hatton and the Militant faction from the Labour Party. They have been banned ever since. Hatton though has made multiple attempts to rejoin the party, and even announced that he had become a member in September last year after receiving a Labour membership card – which had not been approved by Labour head office.
If, as reports suggest, he has become a full member of the Labour party once again, then expect the news to go down particularly badly with moderate Labour MPs. Although if Labour does want to signal that it’s become the party of bankruptcies, hard-left factions and redundancies, Mr S reckons it may not be such a bad move.
UPDATE: In a remarkable twist, only two days after being readmitted to the Party, the Liverpool Echo reports that Hatton has been suspended once again. According to the paper, Labour has suspended Hatton pending an investigation into a tweet he posted in 2012.
Mr S wonders if it was perhaps this, rather interesting tweet of Hatton’s that caught their attention:
Keen to address the Jewish community’s concerns and widespread worries that the Labour Party has been taken over by a sectarian hard-left faction, the party yesterday readmitted Derek Hatton pic.twitter.com/o1UXJ7tMjp
— Ian Austin (@LordIanAustin) February 19, 2019
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