British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has suffered his first setback since taking charge at 10 Downing Street in July after one of his members of Parliament resigned from the Labour Party, delivering a scathing attack on his leadership.
Rosie Duffield, MP for Canterbury in Kent, will now sit in the House of Commons as an Independent after her resignation letter published in âThe Sunday Timesâ attacked the Labour leaderâs âcruel and unnecessaryâ policies amid an ongoing expensive free gifts row.
Duffield claimed there were many “last straws” that led to her decision to resign, but her main reason to step down this weekend is over the governmentâs programme of unpopular policies.
âThey are cruel and unnecessary and affect hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents. This is not what I was elected to do. It is not even wise politics, and it certainly is not âthe politics of serviceâ,â writes Duffield in her resignation letter.
The MP goes on to state that she has no confidence in the Labour PMâs commitment to deliver the âso-called changeâ he promised during the general election campaign and that she could not look her âconstituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changedâ.
Delivering a more personal broadside on Starmer, she added: âAs Prime Minister, your managerial and technocratic approach and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long fourteen years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.
âSince the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.
âHow dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicat