In the end, Councillor Warren Morgan has done an honourable thing

I wrote this blogpost in advance of an 8am interview planned for today (Wednesday, February 28) on BBC Radio Sussex.

The programme’s agenda was made clear to me from the start: the “ousting” of Councillor Warren Morgan by left-wingers, including Momentum Brighton & Hove.

Emphasising Cllr Morgan had resigned of his own volition, I agreed to take part after being told initially that Ivor Caplin would also be interviewd at the same time. (Ever since we appeared together on Latest TV, Mr Caplin — responsible for many anonymous and cowardly attacks on Labour Party members in Brighton and Hove — has refused to debate me in person.)

My hopes, however, of a civilised conversation were quickly dashed. I subsequently learned that Mr Caplin had refused to take part unless he could be interviewed separately — and after I had my say. You can only imagine why.

Unfortunately, even this was impossible: BBC Sussex’s focus on the snowy weather led, apparently, to the interviews being dropped with only 15 minutes’ notice!

That’s the background; this is the blogpost — written in case I do not have time to say everything on my mind during the broadcast:

Change is coming.

Councillor Warren Morgan has resigned as leader of his minority Labour administration on Brighton and Hove City Council.

In a blogpost, he accepted he has achieved only a fraction of what he would have wished.

Cllr Morgan, 50, has also made clear he will not be seeking re-election in the Brighton and Hove City Council elections in May next year. He has represented East Brighton for 15 years.

There is a sentence that appears in media coverage of his statement, but which inexplicably does not appear in his blogpost as it now stands:

“I would have wished to lead the Labour group to a deserved win in next year’s elections before retiring in 2020. However, the local Labour Party and others have made it clear they do not want me to do so.”

Other Labour councillors who will not contest next year’s elections include Cllr Morgan’s two deputies: Gill Mitchell (East Brighton) and Les Hamilton (South Portslade). Of the 19 other Labour councillors, up to six are expected to call it a day.

[A curious note: When Cllr Morgan made his plans known to the Labour Group at the routine group meeting on Monday, February 26, elected Labour Party observers were told not to attend, because there was only one “confidential” item on the agenda!]

Change is certainly coming. And, for some of us, it has been much too long coming.

For nearly two years, a tiny minority of Labour Party members in Brighton and Hove — comprehensively outvoted by the mass of party members — have been in denial.

They have clung onto the past, refused to embrace the present, and fought against the future.

I write this blogpost to praise Cllr Morgan, not to berate him. For Cllr Morgan has, in the end, done an honourable thing. Finally.

The Labour Party is no longer the party he joined; he and his Progress Party colleagues — funded by billionaire Lord Sainsbury — have failed in their ambition to create the Social Democratic Party by different means. They have failed to win support for the politics of austerity, for the Tory spending plans they sought to ape in the post-Blair era.

Instead, they have worked together against the democratic will of party members — and against the democratically-elected leader of our party.

Thankfully, with the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn and the policies he epitomises, the few have lost. And the many have won.

But this is not the time to go over a pattern of behaviour by Cllr Morgan that has emerged over the last couple of years:

• Cllr Morgan’s “private” email claiming in 2016 that Brighton, Hove and District Labour Party had been taken over by Trotskyists, by entryists, by socialists;
• Cllr Morgan’s lies about the “spitting” incident that never happened — lies that were fabricated to ensure that the “City Party” was suspended and its elections annulled, lies that were disproved by CCTV footage, lies that defamed an innocent young man;
• Cllr Morgan’s smears about alleged anti-semitism at the Labour Party conference last year, generating headlines in The Sun and providing fodder for Theresa May’s speech at the subsequent Tory Party conference;
• Cllr Morgan’s outrageous libel of a Brighton and Hove citizen (and a Labour Party colleague) whom he named as a “Holocaust denier”, the Jewish son of a rabbi, to whom he was forced to apologise.

Despite it all, let us try to focus on Cllr Morgan as someone who finally did an honourable thing. By resigning.

The timing is something of a surprise, coming only days after he pushed through his council budget — £13 million of cuts and scores of jobs lost — in cahoots with the Conservatives.

Now is not the time to go over the past, but to look to the future.

With perhaps only 13 of the 22 sitting Labour councillors seeking election again in May next year, it is stranger than ever if the 8,000+ party members across the city are not allowed to have a vote about who should be the next Labour Group leader.

That person will be an important member of the leadership team of the Local Campaign Forum, whose responsibility is to manage the candidates’ selection process and the collaborative creation of a Labour Party manifesto for the city.

She — or he — must have a mandate from grassroots activists for championing a bold and optimistic strategy to shape and secure the best possible future for Brighton and Hove.

Only then can Labour be united in its efforts to win its first socialist majority on Brighton and Hove City Council, allowing socialists to do much more than getting the basics right and blaming the Tories for everything else.

That is the future we all want.

Cllr Morgan and cronies like Ivor Caplin are the past.

Change is coming. Nothing and no individual can stand in the way of our common endeavour: a socialist majority on Brighton and Hove City Council in May next year and a socialist prime minister in Downing Street.