My Resignation from the Labour Party

To whom it may concern,

I am writing to you to declare my intention of resigning from the Labour Party. My three years of membership have been tumultuous. When I look back on it in hindsight, I realise that I was the victim of an utter scam.

I joined the party in October 2017, at the same time as I got involved with a loathsome Trotskyist cult. The name of that cult is Socialist Appeal/International Marxist Tendency. I go into detail about my unpleasant experiences with that organisation in the following articles:

https://aaronthenietzschean.medium.com/an-unpleasant-encounter-with-the-international-marxist-tendency-imt-a-former-cultist-speaks-out-1a905264f6be

https://thecritic.co.uk/inside-university-marxist-societies/

I have also set up a blog on which I go into even more detail about this sinister sect:

https://extrotskyistrenegade.com/

My time in the Labour Party was one centred around practicing ‘entrism’ for the sect. What this meant is that we would use our membership of the party to undermine it from within and promote our vile brand of Leninist politics. In March 2020 I left the organisation after realising that it was a cult and that I had been manipulated into joining and staying. Initially I remained a Labour Party member, as I still considered myself a socialist. However, as the months have gone by, I now realise that I can no longer even call myself that.

My membership of a Leninist sect was not the only thing that was misguided. My support for Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbyn movement as a whole was one of the greatest mistakes I have made in my entire life. I was so blinded by idealism, optimism and self-righteousness that I overlooked the fact that this man had spent his entire life associating with Islamic terrorists, Israel-haters and enemies of Western civilisation. The left of the Labour Party has demonstrated its deep and utter loathing for our nation and its allies time and time again, and I should have known better than to throw in my lot with it. I therefore renounce it utterly, and rebuke myself for my error. The hundreds of thousands of people who, in their delusion, dedicated themselves to this false project, must wrestle with their own consciences. I now know that my ultimate loyalty is to my country and to liberal democracy, for all its flaws, as opposed to the utopian delusions of the socialist left, which, with every passing day, seems to advance closer and closer to the precipice that marks off the heights of reason and virtue from the depths of insanity, and now seems poised to tumble off these heights altogether.

Even with Corbyn defeated and the party moving rightward under Starmer, I still feel unable to remain in the party. Both the left and right of the party are contaminated with the scourge of identity politics, an ideology which I have never supported and always considered to be one of the greatest evils of our time. This is now the party’s mainstream ideology, as can be seen by the enthusiastic and uncritical support given by the party to the preposterous Black Lives’ Matter movement, which I can say, as a young black Briton, does not speak for me. The orgy of statue-pulling and rewriting of history, the noisy denunciation of our country as contaminated with racism, the unfounded attacks even on our monarchy as institutionally racist, the demonisation of Israel, the endorsement of cancel culture and all the cretinous language and paraphernalia of campus leftism – all these have been warmly embraced by the Labour Party. They are a source of deep and utter disgust to me.

I think that what I am trying to say is that my experience in the Labour Party and Socialist Appeal has made me realise that I am actually a conservative – like most people in this country. I do not want a revolution. I do not want to tear down the statues of great but imperfect people from the past – and I especially do not want them torn down by baying, ignorant mobs who know hardly anything about the people being denounced. I do not want a government which is going to treat the entire nation as naughty students in a seminar room needing constant lecturing on racism, white privilege and anti-colonialism. I do not want to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. I do not believe in dividing society into ‘identity groups’.

If the Labour Party were not corrupted by identity politics, if it were still the party of Attlee and Wilson, even of Blair, then perhaps I would not be departing. If it was the party of sensible, patriotic social democracy, I might have no problem remaining in it. As it stands, the Labour Party has lost its soul. In place of true titans, like Gaitskell, Bevan and Foot, we have pygmies like Starmer, Miliband and Corbyn. In place of men and women with love of country, we have men and women who are busy desecrating it, convinced that we must destroy it and rebuild it all over again as part of some fantastical social engineering project, the results of which are likely to be closer to hell than any place that is even remotely desirable to live in. I must face the fact that my politics now have much more in common with the people I once considered the ‘class enemy’ – the Conservative Party – than they do with the Labour Party.

I have by no means given up my commitment to defending the working-class. I do not believe that socialists have any monopoly on championing the cause of those hardest hit by the vicissitudes of market forces. As Roger Scruton says in his 2014 book, How to be a Conservative:

I have argued that we must distinguish the core of truth in socialism, which tells us that we enjoy the fruits of society only if we are also ready to share them, from the casing of resentment that surrounds it. As with nationalism, the core of truth has been exaggerated into heresy, so changing truth to error, and natural sentiment to religious need. There is a temptation, felt most strongly by left-wing intellectuals, to replace the imperfect individual with the pure abstraction, to rewrite the human world as though it were composed of forces, movements, classes and ideas, all moving in a stratosphere of historical necessity from which the messy realities have been excluded. This Orwell perceived in the world that the intellectuals had created – the world dreamed up and imposed by the Communist Party and distilled in the “Ingosc” of Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a call to rectify the existing order, socialism should appeal to us all. But as an attempt to revise human nature, and to conscript us in the pursuit of the millennium, it was a dangerous fantasy, as an attempt to realize heaven that would lead inevitably to hell. We can see this clearly now, as the Western world emerges from the Cold War and the communist nightmare. But still the “totalitarian temptation”, as Jean-Francois Revel called it, is there – the temptation to remake society, so that equality is imposed from above by the benign socialist state, whose good intentions can never be questioned since nobody knows what it would be like to achieve them.

No doubt I will be denounced in vicious terms as a ‘sell-out’, ‘race traitor’, ‘class traitor’, ‘renegade’ and much abuse along those lines. Needless to say, this simply proves my point for me. But I have no desire to be lectured to by middle-class intellectuals as to what is best for me on the basis of my class and racial background, which I consider to be utterly inessential aspects of who I am. Once the partisans of the socialist left recognise these simple facts, perhaps the electorate of the West will be willing to lend an ear once more to their proposals for social reconstruction. Until then, I am convinced that the left faces well-deserved oblivion.

I believe I cancelled my direct debit months ago, but in case that did not suffice, I thought I would write this short letter laying out my disagreements with the party and affirming my desire to resign. I hope others draw the same conclusions that I have.

Aaron