Labour rocked as two Southwark councillors quit over Starmer’s crackdown on dissent

Two Labour councillors in the London borough of Southwark have quit the party to sit as independents, describing Starmer’s regime as one that “crushes dissenting voices”.

Councillors Ketzia Harper and Sam Foster attacked the government’s support for Israel’s genocide, its cuts to affordable housing quotas, and the local party’s handling of the regeneration schemes and its own election of a new council leader.

Harper and Foster, who are councillors for Faraday ward, were suspended for six months by the party for voting against the confirmation of Sarah King as the leader of the council in July, after the national party cancelled the election of James McCash a week after he won the first leadership vote, then raised concerns of rigging by barring independent observers from the leadership vote re-run.

Last week Kath Whittam, the former chair of Southwark Labour and Rotherhithe councillor, announced that she had joined the Greens after quitting Labour in July to sit as an independent. The resignation statement from Harper and Foster reads:

Like thousands of others, we joined the Labour Party with the hope to bring about a political transformation following generations of failure that wrecked our social fabric and led us into illegal wars.

As councillors, we took that fight into Faraday, where the stalled regeneration of the Aylesbury Estate looms as a reminder of the system’s dysfunction. But Labour has abandoned any ambition to change the system. Instead, it defends a status quo that caused the problems.