Letter to David Evans – General Secretary of the Labour Party

Dear Mr Evans

Cancellation of Labour Party membership

After 20 years of Labour activism, during which I served as a councillor and stood for parliament, I am writing to cancel my party membership. It is hard to leave a surrogate family and risk losing political friends. But I must speak the truth and be able to look my own family and friends in the eye.

Today is India’s Independence Day. I am choosing to mark the occasion by leaving an organisation I know to be institutionally racist and anti-Indian. Also, I can no longer support a party that acts against the interests of working people, and is consistently embarrassed by Britain’s values and traditions.

As a British Indian, I am proud of both facets of my identity. My Indian heritage, rooted in Gujarati culture and Hindu values; and my sense of Britishness, growing up in white working class areas of Leicester, before representing outer estates in local government. Both these communities no longer matter to the modern Labour Party.

It is a sad indictment I should have to outline my background to reference the party’s bigotry and intolerance. But having lost its principles and all sense of direction, identity politics is the only language Labour now understands.

The party’s descent, from meritocracy to mediocrity, and its growing irrelevance to the lives of ordinary people, runs parallel with its increased anti-Indian, anti-Semitic and anti-worker sentiment of recent years. Playing racist power games and identity politics, whilst professing to care about the public good, is regressive and deceitful.

Post-Jeremy Corbyn I have come to realise the problem was not merely Corbynism, it was socialism. Socialism was the toxic oil spill that washed ashore, polluting the party with hatefulness and division. Traditional and moderate values were corroded by the rancid ideas of emboldened socialists: extreme left-wing ideologues, striving for unachievable perfection; and embittered intellectuals, desperate to offset lives of passive inaction.

Despite the election of Sir Keir Starmer, a respectable man who is not a deluded Marxist, I have seen no evidence that sensible values will be restored; and that socialism, as an oppressive totalitarian ideology, will be ditched forever.

Indeed, the drive towards clickbait over convictions is continuing, particularly by self-proclaimed ‘Socialist Labour’ MPs – and the soft-left apologists who prop them up. Tweeting to stoke emotional rage, rather than using logic and reason to offer solutions, is the inevitable brain rot of ideologues lacking pragmatism and real-world competence.

And so, having moved much further to the left, abandoning social democracy in favour of socialism, the party founded by working people has come to embrace intellectual idleness and resentment, over hard work and ambition.

My experiences of anti-Indian bigotry and racial abuse in Labour over the last four years, details of which I intend to publish soon, have made me extremely resilient and determined. I have honed my political voice and I plan to use it, particularly in support of those communities and values which the party has betrayed.

Ultimately, I may have chosen to be a Labour member, but I was born British Indian. My loyalty rests with the people I come from, and this great country of ours.

Yours sincerely

Sundip Meghani