U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is about “greed and power,” a top MP said Sunday after resigning over the leader’s austerity measures and a billowing scandal around his acceptance of expensive freebies from donors.
“It is so profoundly disappointing to me as a Labour voter and an activist … to see this is what we have become,” Rosie Duffield told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, a day after she announced that she was quitting the party to sit as an independent.
Her move follows revelations that Starmer and top Cabinet officials had accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of free gifts from donors.
Starmer’s leadership, Duffield said, was “more about greed and power than making a difference … I just can’t take any more.”
In her resignation letter, published in the Sunday Times, Duffield said Starmer had acted hypocritically by accepting lavish gifts while maintaining a controversial cap on child benefits and slashing winter fuel payments for as many as ten million people.
“Forcing a vote [on the winter fuel payment] to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favorite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for — why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment?” she wrote in the letter.
The departure of Duffield, who previously clashed with Starmer over trans rights, is a blow to a party that is yet to complete its first hundred days in office after winning a sweeping parliamentary majority in July.
The new government has been consumed by scandal since revelations surfaced that the prime minister and close associates had accepted expensive gifts — including designer clothes — from longtime Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli and other donors. Starmer himself is reported to have accepted £100,000 worth of gifts and has caused further frustration by repeatedly defending his decision.
“We all had our faith in Keir Starmer and a Labour government, and I feel that voters and activists and MPs are being completely laughed at and completely taken for granted,” Duffield told the BBC.
Duffield is the first MP to voluntarily quit since Starmer took office, but her move follows the suspension of seven MPs earlier this year who rebelled by calling for the two-child benefit cap to be abolished.
In her letter, Duffield also lambasted Starmer’s “technocratic and managerial approach,” citing his “promotion of those with no proven political skills … but who happen to be related to those close to you, or even each other.”
