Welsh Labour councillor quits party over Starmer's right wing leadership

Image of Wedlake via X

Anthony Wedlake, a Labour Wrexham county borough councillor for Coedpoeth in Wales, has announced he is resigning from the party and will now instead sit as a councillor of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). He is making this move due to Keir Strarmer's right wing leadership as shown by the Labour government's decision to cut disability benefits in order to fund massively increased military spending. (See: Labour aims "to be the war-mongering party of the military-industrial complex": British Communists)

This comes on the heels of a Labour defeat in the West London borough of Hounslow's Syon and Brentford Lock ward on March 6 when former Labour council cabinet member Theo Dennison won there as a progressive independent. Dennison quit the party in 2022.

After quitting Wedlake said:

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer’s leadership has been moving further and further from the core values Labour is meant to represent. I have been concerned about the direction of the party for some time, but to take money from the poorest in our society to spend on armaments is the final straw. I cannot in all conscience remain a member of a party that attacks the working class. I have not left Labour so much as Labour has left me.

I believe that we need a new party of the working class that will stand up for the rights of working people and fight the austerity policies of all the other parties: Labour, Tory, Plaid and of course Reform – all of whom would cut spending on services for working people while the richest 1% amass colossal wealth. That is why I will be sitting as a Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition councillor.

Dennison after his win stated that "I didn’t have any great expectation that Keir Starmer’s leadership was going to be transformative or that progressive. And so… I don’t think I was as disappointed as many other people who had actually just believed that things could not get worse, and their experience over the first 6 to 9 months is that, oddly enough, the Labour Party seemed determined to make them worse than they had been, and the distress that actually you met on doors – people who just could not believe that that hope had been entirely false. It’s very, very palpable."

The TUSC is planning to run at least 101 candidates in the upcoming council elections on May 1 as the largest "working class left-of-Labour challenge to Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘Continuity Tories’ New Labour party".

Dave Warren, secretary of TUSC Wales, welcomed Anthony as a TUSC councillor and also noted: “TUSC Wales welcomes any other Labour councillors who cannot stomach Labour’s commitment to austerity, nationally and locally, to come under the TUSC umbrella. We will be campaigning for a new workers’ party to contest the Senedd and Welsh council elections in 2026 and 2027".