THE Labour Party is defending, welcoming right wing Tory defector Natalie Elphicke into the party despite anger from many backbench MPs and workers at the decision to welcome her as the Labour MP for Dover.
Labour Party Chair, Anneliese Dodds, said the Dover MP was a ‘good, natural fit’ for her party.
Elphicke defected to Labour in a surprise move last Wednesday, hitting out at the ‘broken promises of Rishi Sunak’s tired and chaotic government’.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Dodds insisted: ‘What she set out is absolutely fundamental to the Labour Party.’ She added: ‘Natalie Elphicke is not the first Conservative MP who’s taken this decision … she’s taken the same decision as so many other former Conservative supporters up and down the country.
However, some Labour MPs have expressed concern about Elphicke’s ultra right political views and past criticism of Labour. Dodds has responded: ‘People can change their minds.’
Many Labour MPs are deeply uncomfortable with remarks she made about her ex-husband Charlie Elphicke, whom she replaced as Dover MP in 2019.
In an interview with the Sun after his conviction in 2020 for sexual assault, she was reported to have said being ‘attractive’ and ‘attracted to women’ had made him an ‘easy target’.
Jess Phillips, the former shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, said Elphicke should ‘account for her actions’.
The Labour MP told ITV’s Peston: ‘I’m all for forgiveness but I do think that that needs some explaining.’
Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer said on Wednesday he was ‘delighted’ with her defection, telling reporters it showed Labour was ‘the party of the national interest’.
In her defection statement, Elphicke said Labour had ‘changed out of all recognition’ under Keir Starmer and now occupied the ‘centre ground’ in British politics.
It is the second defection to Labour for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in less than two weeks, after Dr Dan Poulter also quit the Tories last month. Poulter was viewed as more on the centre of the Conservative party, however.
Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield said Labour MPs were ‘baffled’ by Elphicke’s defection, describing it as ‘really peculiar’. She said she did not ‘believe for a second Elphicke has suddenly transformed into a Labour MP’.
John McDonnell, who was shadow chancellor under former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, told LBC he was ‘surprised and shocked’, adding: ‘I’m a great believer in the powers of conversion, but I think even this one would have strained the generosity of spirit of John the Baptist, quite honestly.’
Labour backbencher Mick Whitley called the defection ‘outrageous,’ adding Elphicke did not share the ‘values of the Labour movement’.
Foreign Secretary – and former prime minister – Lord Cameron said the defection demonstrated that Labour stood for nothing. He told an audience at the National Cyber Security Centre that when he first heard about it he thought: ‘Oh no, not another one.’
Other Conservatives expressed surprise, with Education Secretary Gillian Keegan labelling Elphicke’s move ‘bewildering’ and showing ‘a real lack of principles’.
‘She’s very much on the right wing of the party. I know all parties are a broad church, but she was an ERG member and big Liz Truss supporter, I believe,’ she told GB News.
Transport Minister Huw Merriman branded her ‘shameless’ and an ‘opportunist’, adding: ‘I’m just disappointed for politics that she’s done what she’s done.’
In fact, ‘She’s not fit to be a Labour Party member, let alone an MP,’ he added.
It is now clear that Labour leader Starmer is fashioning a right wing regime, to do the dirty work for British capitalism, by making the working class pay the price for the crisis of British capitalism with huge wage and job cuts.
The WRP calls on workers and youth to respond to the class war moves of the UK government, and the bankruptcy of the Labour Party by building up a mass Young Socialists movement and the Workers Revolutionary Party to organise and lead the successful British socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism for ever.
