Expelled Labour MP Frank Field vows to drag Jeremy Corbyn through the courts to overturn his expulsion
VETERAN MP Frank Field vowed to drag Jeremy Corbyn through the courts to overturn his expulsion from the Labour Party.
Labour chiefs ripped up the 76-year-old poverty campaigner’s party membership as a punishment for resigning the whip on Thursday.
Birkenhead MP Mr Field had insisted he still wanted to stay a Labour member - which he has been for 60 years.
And he told The Sun was confident of mounting a “successful” legal challenge to his expulsion.
The latest dramatic turn in the party’s summer long antisemitism row came as a second rebel Labour MP declared he will also resign the party whip next week if Jeremy Corbyn fails to adopt a strong new rules about Jewish people.
Mr Field told The Sun: “I believe I can make a successful legal challenge to this.
“They are not applying the rules correctly. There are three peers in the House of Lords who are all crossbenchers but still Labour Party members, so why is it one rule for then and one rule for me?”
A legal victory for Mr Field would be potentially explosive for the spiralling rebellion of moderate MPs against Mr Corbyn.
It would mean dozens of others would also be free to resign the whip and ignore Mr Corbyn’s daily voting orders without fear of getting the boot from the wider party.
Mr Field also said he is considering triggering an embarrassing by-election, in which he would run against an official Labour candidate.
Labour denied Mr Field had been ejected from the party, insisting instead that he had in effect expelled himself.
A senior Labour source said: “The Chief Whip has met with Frank Field this afternoon.
“They had an amicable discussion.
“It was conveyed to him that the Labour Party rules state that resigning the Labour Whip means you automatically opt to resign from the Labour Party.”
The row’s dramatic escalation came as a second rebel Labour MP declared he will also resign the party whip next week if Jeremy Corbyn fails to adopt a strong new antisemitism rules.
Longstanding MP for Ilford South Mike Gapes’s ultimatum to follow Frank Field out comes ahead of a crucial showdown meeting of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee on Tuesday.
Five Labour MPs who could quit
JEREMY Corbyn is facing further departures over anti-Semitism.
A series of moderate Labour MPs are said by comrades to be weighing up whether to follow Frank Field and resign the party whip.
The five seen as most likely are:
- Mike Gapes, MP for Ilford South
- Luciana Berger (Liverpool Wavertree)
- Iain Austin (Dudley North)
- Wes Streeting (Ilford North)
- Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North)
The 69 year-old veteran Socialist boss is under massive pressure to adopt the full international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition without any caveats.
The hard left Labour leader is still insisting on having a free speech defence that allows hard left members to criticise Israel’s right to exist.
If Mr Corbyn doesn’t climb down, Mr Gapes said he will “consider his position”.
MOST READ IN POLITICS
Saying he was “tainted and sickened” by the avalanche of racism charges against Labour, he added: “I am agonising every day about the situation and the state of the Labour”.
Another Labour MP John Mann called on Mr Corbyn to “show leadership” by announcing every Jewish MP will be automatically reselected as a candidate for the next election.
Mr Mann added: “That’s leadership Jeremy, so get leading”.
- Former Home Secretary Lord Blunkett said Mr Field's resignation must be a "catalyst for seismic change" or the party risked being irrelevant.
The Sun Says: Labour's louts
THE vilification of Frank Field by Corbyn’s cult is as clueless as it is disgusting. Labour has become a swamp of ignorance and hate.
Young morons — with no knowledge of, or interest in, their party’s real history — dished out brainless lectures to a veteran MP who was a Labour member before their parents were born.
Some of these obnoxious idiots even have media columns where they masquerade as journalists, instead of myopic propagandists for a hard-left ideology which ends in starvation and early graves everywhere it is tried.
Field has given his life to Labour.
He has done infinitely more for his constituents and the poor than any of Labour’s new influx of middle-class posers will if they live to be 120.
He’s had enough. No one in their right mind should blame him. The party is a magnet for intolerant thugs, its leader a brazen anti-Semite and halfwit.
Corbyn cosies up to Islamists sworn to wipe Israel off the map. He honours terrorists who kill Jews. He makes racist speeches, hiding behind the age-old “Zionist” euphemism.
He rewrites internationally accepted definitions of anti-Semitism to allow himself and his followers more flexibility to voice their hate.
The Sun has been at odds with Labour before. But Corbyn, his sinister henchmen and his malevolent mob are the worst blight on public life we have ever encountered.
- GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAIL [email protected]