Labour MP Rosie Duffield has quit, giving up the party whip “with immediate effect”. In a scathing resignation letter Ms Duffield attacked Prime Minister Keir Starmer over gifts he and his wife received from Lord Alli.
Ms Duffield will now sit as an independent MP after quitting the party she “loves”, The Mirror reports.
She wrote: “Someone with far-above-average wealth choosing to keep the Conservatives’ two-child limit to benefit payments which entrenches children in poverty, while inexplicably accepting expensive personal gifts of designer suits and glasses costing more than most of these people can grasp — this is entirely undeserving of holding the title of Labour prime minister.
“Forcing a vote [on the winter fuel payment] to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favourite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for — why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment?”
“With my [gender critical] views, all I wanted was for those views to be taken seriously and discussed and I think as a movement the Labour Party has shifted and we are talking about those things now,” she said in an interview with the Times.
“I and others put it on the agenda by basically being very loud about women’s rights and I am glad it is now a mainstream discussion, but that’s not why I am leaving the Labour Party. The Labour Party has left me.
“The Labour Party was formed to speak for those of us without a voice, and I stood for election partly because I saw decisions about the lives of those like me being made in Westminster by only the most privileged few. Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed,” she wrote.
“I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.”
Number 10 declined to comment.
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