Jamie Driscoll clashed with a Labour frontbencher on Wednesday in the ongoing war of words over the North East mayor job.
A feud erupted last Friday after the left-wing Mr Driscoll was omitted from the party’s longlist of candidates to stand for mayor of a new combined authority area stretching across Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and Durham. The sitting North of Tyne mayor has been pressing Sir Keir Starmer to let him back into the selection race.
His exclusion has been pinned on an event he held earlier this year with film director Ken Loach, who was previously expelled from Labour during efforts to root out anti-Semitism, though Mr Driscoll says he is yet to be given an official reason for the ruling of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). The mayor appeared on the BBC’s Politics Live on Wednesday lunchtime, where Labour frontbencher Nick Thomas-Symonds said there was no appeal process for Mr Driscoll to follow and that the “decision has been made”.
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The former Newcastle councillor has raised the prospect of taking legal action and has not ruled out the prospect of standing as an independent in the 2024 mayoral election. Mr Thomas-Symonds, the shadow international trade secretary, said that “holding one office in the Labour Party does not entitle you automatically to be considered for another one”.
He added: “I make no apology for having this very robust selection process that we currently have in place, it is one of the things Keir Starmer has changed since 2019. I was obviously not part of the NEC panel that made this decision, but I do understand there has been a question raised around political judgement and the sharing of an interview earlier in the year with someone who the Labour Party had expelled two years previously for opposing the work Keir Starmer has been doing to tackle anti-Semitism.”
Mr Driscoll accused him of “weasel words” and claimed that party bosses “want me out because I support the policies that Keir Starmer was elected on as leader of the Labour Party and that is what it comes down to”. Asked if he would stand as an independent, he replied that it was “much too early for that” and added: “I am a sitting Labour mayor and there has been no charge against me for anything disciplinary. If there was something I am supposed to have done wrong, here is the question, why am I good enough to be a mayor but not good enough to be a candidate for mayor?”
Mr Driscoll later said that he was “not leaving the Labour Party, but they might be leaving me”.
On Tuesday night, the Wansbeck Constituency Labour Party “unanimously” refused to nominate any of the candidates on the mayoral longlist because the contest had been “undermined”. A source within the constituency told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that members were “very unhappy about the situation” and that the exclusion of a sitting metro mayor from a selection process was a “really dangerous precedent to set”.
The three names who have been put on the longlist are Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Kim McGuinness, Newcastle councillor Nicu Ion, and former MEP Paul Brannen. Mr Loach, who has directed several films set in the North East including I, Daniel Blake, was expelled from Labour in 2021 during what he called at the time a “purge” of Jeremy Corbyn’s allies.
Speaking to the PA news agency at the weekend, he called the decision to exclude Mr Driscoll from the mayoral selection because of their event at Newcastle’s Live Theatre the “lamest excuse I’ve ever heard”. He said: “The whole anti-Semitism issue has been substantially revealed as a campaign that is not based on fact. It’s based on political determination to do a number of things, to remove people from the left, to protect the state of Israel, which many people, many Jewish people in the Labour Party, oppose, oppose this campaign.”
The Jewish Labour Movement described Mr Driscoll’s appearance with the filmmaker as “hugely upsetting”.
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