Councillor Stanton Sent into Wilderness by Local Labour Group

The Labour whip was withdrawn from long serving Tottenham councillor, Alan Stanton last night.

A meeting of the local Haringey Council Labour group last night took the rarely used step of withdrawing the whip from one of its longest serving councillors. The official reason given was Councillor Stanton's voting in opposition to the appointment of new Council Chief Executive, Nick Walkley.

The action was taken by the Labour political group on the Council. It's party business, rather than official council business. However, I do wonder at the meaning of that distinction; when it's a decision by the ruling group over the issue of the appointment of the Council boss, it seems barely relevant to draw a line between the two.

Being deprived of the whip cuts a concillor off from the party’s support machine, labels them as a bad boy, and can lead to their being deselected as the party’s candidate for the next election. It's the grown up political equivalent of playground kids sending someone to Coventry.

So that must be awful for a serious councillor like Alan Stanton with fifteen years of office behind him, right? Wrong. Stanton made clear how he felt about it at 3:00AM this morning on Twitter:

Kober threw me in the briar patch. This is really gonna be fun!

— Alan Stanton (@AlanStanton_) December 7, 2012

(For those of you less familiar with Uncle Remus, Stanton's briar patch refers to an apparently awful thicket into which clever B'rer Rabbit tricked Bre’r Fox throwing him and from which he quickly escaped to make more mischief.)

In conversation with Alan, some hours before the briar patch tweet, Alan told me, "I'm so disillusioned with the level of secrecy in the local party, the need to control from the top, that I'm glad to be out of it". 

The current censure applies to Alan for three months. Whist it's by no means certain whether the party want the independent minded Tottenham Councillor back amongst their number when that time is up, this Councillor is certainly not for turning. Alan told me, "No, I won't reapply to rejoin the Labour group that's enough for me." Their loss I'd say. Independent minded he may be, but he's a politician who is a serious thinker and has his heart in the right place. I have to question where a party who doesn't have room for someone like Alan is headed.

As for Alan's future, he has a big agenda he wants to get his teeth into with the big issues around making Tottenham a better place to live, short of simply allowing it to gentrify. He seems to think the chances of his serving as a councillor again are slim though since he sees little chance of an independent councillor ever being elected in his neighbourhood. 

Let's not bid farewell to Alan yet, though. This is after all a rabbit that lives by its wits.