Labour cannot afford to lose Rosie Duffield

The politician has spent her career advocating for the marginalised. Who will follow her?

A working single mother of two, a survivor of domestic violence, a career dedicated to helping others as a teaching assistant in local schools and a campaigner for women and girls and those living in poverty: it’s difficult to think of someone who is a better match for the traditional values of the Labour Party – a party that claims to have been “formed to give ordinary people a voice and improve lives.”

That someone is Rosie Duffield, the now independent MP for Canterbury. She resigned from Labour at the weekend, delivering an excoriating attack on Sir Keir Starmer in the process. “You repeat often that you will make the ‘tough decisions’ and that the country is ‘all in this together’,” Duffield wrote. But decisions made on scrapping the winter fuel allowance for ten million pensioners and not removing the two-child benefit cap were “cruel and unnecessary, and affect hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents”, she added.

The Kent MP argued that the Prime Minister had “never shown… true or inspiring leadership”, was lacking in “political instincts”, and had failed to “speak up once about the Labour Party’s problems with antisemitism” during his time in the shadow cabinet. Instead, that job was left to Duffield and a handful of other backbenchers, she said. Duffield made clear that the final straw has been the recent “freebies scandal” plaguing the party over the past fortnight. Starmer and top cabinet officials have accepted thousands of pounds of free gifts from donors, it was revealed, from tickets to a Taylor Swift concert to designer clothes for the Prime Minister’s wife. “The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale,” Duffield wrote. “I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”

That Labour cannot retain someone of Duffield’s background should prompt some serious thought in the party. In the last five years alone, Duffield has raised the plight of the most vulnerable more than a dozen times in parliament. She has spoken up for the homeless, those living with disabilities, refugees, children with mental health difficulties and those surviving on work-related benefits.

She has also been a champion for women and girls, first, on domestic abuse and then on traumatic births. Duffield’s contribution to a July 2018 debate on perinatal mental illness was the first time in Parliamentary history that anyone had ever mentioned a third-degree tear – a serious but not uncommon birth injury to mothers which, if left untreated, can result in long-term pain and permanent incontinence. Together with former Conservative MP Theo Clarke, Duffield helped catapult the issue of birth trauma into the national consciousness. With Clarke failing to be re-elected and Duffield now out of the mainstream, who will do this going forward?

Some have expressed surprise that Duffield remained in the Labour Party as long as she did. Her clashes with the leadership over views on sex and gender have been well publicised: Duffield was criticised by Keir Starmer for saying that “only women have a cervix” – a statement that the Labour leader later acknowledged was correct. Last summer, the Health Secretary Wes Streeting apologised for the way Duffield had been treated by the party over her views on protecting women-only spaces and sports. Duffield has insisted this is not the reason behind her resignation, however, something which we must take at her word.

Yet, the reaction by some within Labour indicate just how unpleasant it must have been for her over recent years. The Labour MP Nadia Whittome responded to her resignation by saying that Duffield had “made a political career out of dehumanising one of the most marginalised groups in society” and “should never have been allowed the privilege of resigning.” When Duffield announced in June that she would not attend local hustings for the general election because of concerns about her security, Labour peer Michael Cashman accused her of being “frit or lazy”. In his subsequent apology, Cashman – who had the Labour whip suspended as a result – could not bring himself to use Rosie Duffield’s name, instead referring to her as “the Labour candidate for Canterbury”.

Duffield has used her privileged position in parliament to speak up for the vulnerable, the poor and the voiceless. It is deeply worrying that she no longer feels at home in Labour. All parties are broad churches. Members do not need to agree on absolutely everything to share common goals. But if Labour is not the party of equality, the party that – in Duffield’s words – puts “the needs of the many before the greed of the few”, who is?