Leaving Labour

Just sent:

Dear <CLP Secretary>,

It's with sadness that I write to tell you I have decided to leave the Labour Party.

Despite having initially welcomed the arrival of a nominally more socialist national party leader, the Corbyn team have backtracked, vacillated, and failed to deliver any coherent progressive economic message. In their hands, Labour has become an incoherent policy vacuum with constantly bungled media management. I don't believe that leftist or revolutionary policies make a party unelectable -- look at the two big electoral shocks of the last year -- but an incoherent party that occasionally strikes radical poses (before immediately backtracking) is going nowhere.

This has been going on for many months, but I have remained a member in the hope that the party would rediscover its purpose -- currently to hold the government to account, at a time that that is needed more than ever before in my lifetime. I continue to respect the commitment and competence many of the Party's MPs and MSPs. But Labour's failure over the last 6 months to provide an alternative to the Government's partisan & scorched-earth attitude to Brexit, crowned by last week's (yes, again bungled) declaration that Labour MPs will be either encouraged or whipped to vote for the Government's A50 bill, without demanding answers to the detail, has been the final straw for me.

I appreciate that many of these issues are not primarily the remit of the Scottish Labour Party, especially with its current paltry Westminster representation, and that by cancelling my membership I am unfairly tarring you with the same brush. But this is the only way I can make my displeasure known to the Party as a whole, and with the rhetoric coming from Theresa May and other representatives of "Little England" I cannot even say that my commitment to the Union -- the main distinction between Labour and SNP -- is as unwavering as it used to be.

Yours, Andy Buckley