Former Labour Deputy Leader Says ‘Brutality and Hostility’ is Why He Left Labour Party

The former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party says that he was forced out of parliament because of abuse he suffered at the hands of the far-left within the party.

Tom Watson, former MP for West Bromwich East, said that the reason he left the Labour Party as a result of the “brutality and hostility” he experienced from the radical leftists within the party.

“Two weeks before I resigned, a guy was arrested for giving me a death threat. He was a Labour supporter. The police got in touch and said, ‘We’ve arrested this guy’, assuming I knew about it. But I didn’t. The Labour party had sent out a fundraising email that he had responded to with a death threat. The party reported it to the police, but didn’t tell me”, Watson told The Guardian.

“The point is that the brutality and hostility is real and it’s day to day. So I just thought: now’s the time to take a leap, do something different – you’ve had a good innings. You’ve done good stuff. Go now. And it was quite quick”, he added.

Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester and former Labour MP, agreed with Watson’s assessment of the party, saying “we cannot carry on as we are”.

“The tone of public discourse, generally but also internally, has become poisonous at times and I think Tom was very much bearing the brunt of that,” he told BBC’s Radio 4 Today.

Watson, who stood down in November and whose seat was lost to the Conservatives in the general election, also took aim at the electoral strategy of the Labour Party.

“I don’t even know what the message of our campaign was”, Watson said.

“There were announcements everywhere, but none of them got through because there were so many. You knew what Boris Johnson’s was: Get Brexit done. What was the Labour strapline?”, he questioned.

“Does the Labour party in its current form actually want power? The ultimate betrayal of working-class people is not to take power when you can, and if you are a party that believes in power through elections, then that requires pragmatism, prioritisation, compromise and collaboration”, he said.

Watson went on to deride the leftist purity tests through which Jeremy Corbyn’s allies tried to oust him as deputy leader, calling it an exercise in “collective self-harm” and “political idiocy”.

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