Former minister resigns Labour whip

Norman Warner, a peer who served as a health minister between 2003 and 2007, has resigned the Labour Party whip, saying that the party is no longer “credible”.

Lord Warner was last in the news in March last year, when he made a proposal to have a £10 fixed monthly fee for “membership” of the NHS. The peer appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics to debate the idea, which had been met with hostility by many in Labour, with then LabourList editor Mark Ferguson.

In a letter to Jeremy Corbyn, Warner describes the election of the new Labour leader as a “calamitous decline” and says he has “fear for the future of the party”.

He wrote:

“I have watched for some time the declining quality of the Labour Party’s leadership, but had not expected the calamitous decline achieved in 2015. The Labour Party is no longer a credible party of government-in-waiting. The approach of those around you and your own approach and policies is highly likely to to worsen the decline and in the Labour party’s credibility.

“I fear for the future of the Labour Party if your supporting activists secure ever control of the party’s apparatus and process, and the role of the parliamentary Labour Party diminishes further in the selection of a leader and the formulation of policies likely to win an election.”

Warner, who will continue to sit in the Lords as a crossbencher, also warned that Labour needs to win back voters who have left to support the Tories and UKIP, and does not believe that is likely under Corbyn’s leadership. “Labour will only win another election with a policy approach that wins back people who have moved to voting Conservative and UKIP, as well as to Greens and SNP”, he writes. “Your approach is unlikely to achieve this shift.”