From Eeyore to Tigger: Cllr Warren Morgan shows his true colours
Below is an article that I wrote for this month’s edition of Labour Briefing:
If it is true that all political careers end in failure, few failures can be as abject as that of Councillor Warren Morgan.
Cllr Morgan left the Labour Party in February to become a fully-fledged Tigger — even though his demeanour is frequently more reminiscent of Eeyore.
The former Labour leader of Brighton and Hove City Council is now one of two city councillors who support The Independent Group (TIG).
The other one is a former Labour councillor who resigned from the party two years ago, alleging it was overrun by anti-semitism. Strangely, this individual still wished to rejoin the party, just as anti-semitism smears peaked and shortly before local Labour members began selecting candidates for next month’s city council elections; his application was, of course, unsuccessful.
A third long-serving councillor has decided to abandon all pretence of principles by quitting Labour and joining the Tories, a move immediately welcomed in the House of Commons by Theresa May. She had only recently failed to convince all but five members of her local Labour Party branch in a doomed attempt to win re-selection as a council candidate. A coincidence, I am sure.
True to form, however, it was Cllr Morgan — a career politician for almost all his working life — who attempted to inflict as much damage as he could: by robbing Labour of its position as biggest party on the city council and by timing his resignation to coincide with a letter to The Sunday Times and a subsequent interview on Channel Four News.
In a separate statement, he even suggested he might stand against pro-Corbyn Labour candidates in the forthcoming council elections on Thursday, May 2.
It is worth reminding ourselves what sort of creature Cllr Morgan is.
For it was he who played a key role in getting what was then the 6,200-member Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party suspended in July 2016, after the annual meeting of the biggest party unit in the country elected a pro-Corbyn leadership team — including me as its secretary, with 65% of the vote.
Cllr Morgan infamously — and falsely — claimed there was a “spitting” incident at the all-member meeting, along with fake allegations about “abuse” of Peter Kyle, the MP for Hove. He was — probably still is — a leading member of Progress, billionaire Lord Sainsbury’s failed attempt to create the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by different means.
Shortly before the 2016 annual meeting, Cllr Morgan had emailed “friends”, warning the local party faced “a takeover” by individuals from Momentum, TUSC (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition), Alliance for Workers Liberty, and “other fringe left-wing groups”.
After I exposed the “spitting” lies for what they were, I was suspended for more than two years.
Unsurprisingly, Cllr Morgan — subsequently forced out as leader of the Labour Group on the city council — refused to leave the political stage quietly.
Far from it. He connived with Sussex Friends of Israel seeking to ban pro-Palestinian protests in Brighton city centre; he had to apologise for libelling one of his fellow citizens, after claiming he was an anti-semite and a Holocaust denier; he said the Labour Party would not be welcome to hold its annual conference in Brighton because of alleged anti-semitism not only at a fringe event, but also on the conference floor; he even told friends he wanted Labour to “clean house” in Brighton and Hove, as had happened with the witch-hunt of Militant in the 1990s.
Ironically, in one of his many resignation statements, Cllr Morgan let slip information that hinted it was he who was the infiltrator, an entryist from the SDP after its collapse in the early 1990s.
He even paid tribute to a university friend whom he preceded as students’ union president at Hull University. He wrote: “I joined the Labour Party in 1993, having been persuaded by a friend at university, Tom Watson, that the party had changed from the days of Militant and offered hope for the future.”
For a long time, it has been rumoured that Cllr Morgan was, in fact, an SDP member or supporter until Labour introduced “one member, one vote”.
It gives me tremendous pleasure to know he resigned from the Labour Party on the same day I was formally told my suspension from the party had been lifted.
In the end, all Cllr Morgan has done is show his true colours. As a result, the Labour Party in Brighton and Hove is stronger and more united behind socialist council candidates standing on what promises to be the most radical manifesto in our history.
