Analysis Breaking

Labour loses another Newcastle councillor, now has less than half of seats

Winning north-east city used to be a given for Labour, now Starmer’s pseudo-Labour is minority

Labour now has fewer than half the seats on Newcastle City Council after yet another councillors resigned her party membership in disgust.

Monument ward councillor Jane Byrne announced on Sunday that she will serve out her term as an independent because Labour is “no longer the party of ordinary people”, leaving Labour, which has run Newcastle City Council for the past fourteen years, one short of half of the city council’s seventy-eight seats after six months of it being under no overall control after six other councillors resigned the Labour whip to become independents.

Byrne was first elected five years ago and has said she could not trust the council’s officers and that council CEO Pam Smith had put out a quote in her name that she Byrne knew nothing about. Announcing her resignation, she said:

Under Keir Starmer it’s no longer the party of ordinary people. It serves big business & billionaire donors; demonises the poor; slashes support for the disabled; & says the answer to the housing crisis is to allow developers to destroy our environment.

As an elected Labour representative I thought I owed it to the Labour members who selected me for Monument & the residents who voted for me as the Labour candidate to stay in the party. This did not mean, however that I would ignore the party’s mistakes and failures.

Labour is now running the council as a minority administration, unless the forty independent councillors and those of other parties agree to work together to oust it before next year’s all-out elections next year.

Labour has similarly lost its majority on Wirral council and in January this year lost control completely of Broxtowe Council after twenty councillors quit the party, formed an independent group and took control over Keir Starmer’s was on party democracy.

So frit were Starmer and his advisers about the prospect of collapse in local elections scheduled for 2025 that last December the government cancelled the planned elections altogether in many councils, deferring them to 2026 or 2027. Starmer is right to fear collapse – Labour has performed catastrophically to lose a slew of seats in by-elections that Starmer was powerless to cancel.

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5 comments

  1. Tell us why they’re NOT tories, wee gobshite.

    No? Ok, i’ll tell you then. They’re worse than tories. Ask the (women) pensioners, the disabled, the unemployed, the low paid, the small business owner.

    Ask those who can’t afford to heat and eat.

    Or those who can’t afford a school uniform for their children.

    Or a bed for them.

    Or other furniture

    Or a carpet.

    Ask those who are forced to remove their own teeth because there’s no nhs denfist for 200 miles.

    And those forced onto pre paid meters by greedy, lying energy companies, who lie about, and abuse health and safety measures to get court orders to do so.

    Those fined by rail firms for supposedly dodging fares when fhey did no such thing.

    …And having fraudulent bailiffs trying to remove their worldy possessions as a result.

    All this is happening on keefs watch. All happening because keef refuses to make the wealthy and the corporates pay their whack.

    But they’re NOT tory.

    I am. And so is everyone else who disagrees with keef (you)

    Weirdo.

    1. yeah, if only killing NHS dentistry was the worst thing Gordon Brown did. Future historians are gonna see him as a bigger globalist ‘insider’ than Blair, Clinton and Carney.

  2. And don’t forget it was mizz balls who introduced work capability assessments.

    Not only did smarmerism not get rid of them, they’re gonna go into overdrive with them, and push more disabled people over the edge; fully aware of the damage they’ve already done, they don’t give a shite about what they WILL do in future

    What’s NOT tory about THAT, wee gobshite?

    Come along, you’re forever telling us that WE are the toerags…

  3. As expected. Silence.

    Now, imagine this was yet another tale of a nonce within the smarmerite ranks…

    No need for anyone to ask themselves if the the gobshite’d be so reticencent to provide an excuse.

    They see the unmistakable pattern, too.

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