Membership down 11% since election as Labour loses a member every 10 minutes

Labour has lost more than one in ten members since the general election, new figures suggest, with the party losing one member every ten minutes on average in recent months.

 The party’s paid-up members currently number around 309,000 – down 11.4% from around 348,500 in July last year, according to members of the party’s governing body.

The most recent figures suggest membership fell by more than 9,500 between the end of November and the end of January – a rate of around one departure every 10 minutes, or 152 a day.

The statistics are net figures, meaning the rate of departures could be even higher but offset by new joiners.

National executive committee members also report that the party’s youth membership has fallen to 30,000, from more than 100,000 five years ago.

READ MORE: Labour expels a member every three days for backing rival parties or banned groups

Three left-wing Constituency Labour Party representatives on the NEC have attributed the decline to controversial decisions like winter fuel cuts, the continuation of the two-child benefit cap and a reluctance to criticise Donald Trump.

Jess Barnard, Gemma Bolton and Yasmine Dar also attributed it to what they called “sustained attacks on the democratic rights of members”, with many cases of CLPs not being allowed full control over candidate selections in recent years.

However, it has been suggested elsewhere that the general election itself and the Budget both resulted in recruitment boosts, but there are no figures available on new members, and they were offset by greater departures overall.

It comes around six months after Labour’s annual accounts revealed membership of the party had dropped below 400,000 for the first time in almost a decade.

The Labour Party declined to comment.

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