Today I was Expelled from Starmer’s Labour Party, it’s so Liberating.

Today I received an email from the Governance and Legal Unit of the Labour Party. It wasn’t a shock; I’ve been waiting for that little gem to land on my virtual doormat for a long time now.

You see, I’ve been a suspended Labour member for just over two years this May.

The story really goes back to 2019. At the time, I was standing as a Labour councillor in Chesterfield when a WhatsApp message dropped into my phone from The Sunday Times. The reporters, Richard Kerbaj and his colleague Gabriel Pogrund, were preparing yet another “exclusive” on antisemitism in the Labour Party.

By then, it had become a familiar pattern. Week after week, in the run-up to the local elections, the Sunday Times and others churned out stories designed to hammer the same message home: Labour was institutionally antisemitic, and Jeremy Corbyn personally was tainted by it. Never mind the timing, never mind the scale of exaggeration, never mind the weaponisation of individual cases to tar an entire movement — the press had found its stick, and they beat Corbyn with it relentlessly.

It didn’t matter that many of us on the ground could see what was happening: a coordinated campaign to derail Labour’s political agenda, sap its credibility, and divide the membership at a crucial moment. Branding Labour, and especially Corbyn, as antisemitic became the central line of attack. And anyone, anywhere, who could be used to support that narrative was fair game.

I’m a reporter at The Sunday Times working on a story…

Richard Kerbaj stated: I’m a reporter at The Sunday Times working on a story for tomorrow’s edition on antisemitism in the Labour Party. (Below is the original text.)

The Sunday Times Hit Job

Of course, I didn’t recognise any of this as mine, except for one line, stripped of context:

“I respect your freedom to have a religion and even practice it. But I do not respect the fact that you want your religion to dominate our politics or undermine the working class struggle.”

Three years on, I might phrase it differently, with more nuance about oppression and the universal workers’ struggle. But it was not antisemitic. It was never meant as such.

What Kerbaj and Pogrund had done was add their own “extras” to change the meaning. By prefacing it with “described Jews as attempting…”, they twisted a line about the dangers of religion and politics into something else entirely. The other two quotes? Nothing to do with me. Lifted from elsewhere and stuck onto my name like a label.

In hindsight, I should have kept quiet and let them print the lot. IPSO would have had a field day tearing it apart. Instead, The Sunday Times misrepresented the article wholesale, naïve on my part perhaps, but never antisemitic, never intended to offend.

What I had actually written was a comparison between Baroness Warsi’s call for an inquiry into Tory Islamophobia and Jonathan Arkush, then president of the Board of Deputies, who branded Corbyn antisemitic and warned that Jewish people might leave Britain if he became Prime Minister. My article was a warning against both parties disappearing down the rabbit hole of culture-war politics.

And down the rabbit hole they went….

So far down, in fact, that Labour staffers, as later revealed in the Forde Report and #LabourLeaks, set up systems to trawl members’ social media for anything critical of Israel: posts, likes, even emojis. It didn’t matter if it was old, nuanced, or factual. Criticism of Israel was rebranded as antisemitism and weaponised against members.

The truth is simple. I had made a clumsy attempt, years earlier, to argue that weaponising antisemitism and Islamophobia would corrode politics itself. I was ignored. And instead of heeding the warning, they buried me with it.

After receiving that WhatsApp, I phoned my Labour council leader to explain, then forwarded her both the messages and the original 2018 article.

That Sunday, for the first time in my life, I bought The Sunday Times. And there it was, the hit job. My article cut up, rewritten, twisted, and repackaged until it resembled nothing I had actually said. They didn’t report the truth. They manufactured the story they wanted.

There is always a silver lining and at least I got a column next to Julian Assange.

By Monday morning, however, the email arrived from Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit. I was placed under “administrative suspension.”

I dutifully answered their silly, leading questions about the article, but it made no difference. The suspension dragged on for two years.

Clearly, they struggled to find any actual antisemitic or Islamophobic content in what I’d written. But by then, evidence was irrelevant.

Like thousands of other Corbyn-supporting members, I had become a target of the so-called “witch-hunt.” Only in my case, there was little comfort in that solidarity. I was the “wrong type” of left-winger: a socialist who had also voted Leave. That was enough to make me expendable.

In the end, it felt like Orwell’s grim truth made flesh: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I did, to be fair, get some great support from a few Labour members, both local and online. In particular, two stalwarts who stood by me through the legal wrangling and data requests with the Party. You know who you are, C.T., and your small but solid group, my thanks to you.

Being a South Yorkshire miner’s son and an ex-squaddie, comradeship has always mattered to me. Unfortunately, that kind of solidarity belongs to the old Labour, and under Starmer’s new Blairite revival, it’s in very short supply. Most of the local Party dropped me like a bad smell. Exile is always lonely, but it does give you time to reflect on what real solidarity looks like, and how little of it remains. It’s not hard to imagine how Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Marc Wadsworth, and Pete Wilsman felt, abandoned by the very Party they had given their lives to.

At least Corbyn had his Corbynites, and many of us kept our comrades in the wider movement. The growing battalions of ex-Labour members and disillusioned socialists know better now: the Labour Party will never deliver real change to the status quo.

So I waited. Two years in suspension, expecting at some point a path back into the fold. Instead – bang! – an email from the Stasi, not offering reinstatement, but informing me I was expelled. And for a reason entirely different from the one I was suspended for in the first place.

It seems in today’s Labour Party, all members are equal, just that some are more equal than others. Starmer’s Labour has become a parody of Orwell’s warning: equality rebranded as exclusion, comradeship replaced with conformity, and socialism reduced to managerial diktat from on high.

My expulsion was for the alleged support I made to a candidate standing against the Labour party, attached the letter and an image of the offending Tweet.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. The very week Sir Keir launched his new campaign for veterans, his Labour Party expelled a combat veteran. To rub salt in, they couldn’t even get my name right. Some desk jockey at Southside spelt it “Knapps.” With a name like Knaggs, you’d think it would at least be memorable, if only for pub humour.

And what was my crime? An off-the-cuff remark to a friend on Twitter.

It was a little funny to be expelled for an off the cuff remark to a friend on Twitter.

It’s no secret I helped found the Resist Movement with Chris Williamson and others. I built the first website, the Facebook account, and the Resistance TV YouTube channel. None of that drew expulsion. No, what finally brought the axe down after two years in suspension wasn’t my politics, or even my so-called offences. It was a tweet. A simple line calling Chris Williamson and Joti Brar “two good eggs.”

That, apparently, was enough.

As a political blogger, I couldn’t help but laugh. The Party had tied me down for two years with trumped-up charges, only to expel me for a throwaway comment. Yet in that moment, the constraints were lifted. I was free again to write and speak without waiting for some Party bureaucrat to comb through my words with a magnifying glass.

I remembered my final exchange with Sunday Times reporters Richard Kerbaj and Gabriel Pogrund, back in 2019, when they asked what I thought Labour’s response to their piece on antisemitism would be. My answer was simple:

“I’m very sure, as an independent political writer (I don’t qualify to use the word journalist), I will take lessons from this. I will be removed from the Labour Party, but then have the freedom to express views without any political constraints.”

And so it has come to pass. Imagine being able to write a tweet or a post on Facebook without wondering if Labour’s pretend Stasi are lurking in the shadows, clipboard in hand. Imagine comradeship without witch-hunts, solidarity without suspicion.

It’s such a liberation to be out of Starmer’s Labour Party. I think I’ll bake a cake.