Ten Years Hard Labour

For 42 years, Chris Williamson was a Labour Party member. In 2010, he was elected to Parliament to represent his home town. However, in 2019, he was unceremoniously suspended from the party after being subjected to a smear campaign, and he later resigned in protest at the betrayal. In this forensic memoir - free of his Labourist clutches - Williamson provides a unique ringside view. As well as lifting the lid on the amateurish politics-by-focus-groups under Ed Miliband, Williamson exposes some of the major events that created and deepened Labour's 'antisemitism crisis' under Jeremy Corbyn. In his mission to set the record straight on numerous misreported events, Williamson names and shames the individuals - on the left and the right - whom he holds responsible for delivering his former party back into the hands of New Labourism under Sir Keir Starmer. To understand the existential crisis facing socialists in Britain today, Williamson's account of recent Labour history is indispensable.

Chris Williamson was born in Derby into a working class family in 1956. He left school at 15 to work in a factory, before training as a bricklayer. He has also been a market trader, a social worker, and a welfare rights officer. He joined the Labour Party in 1976 and is a lifelong socialist, trade unionist, and animal rights campaigner. He has been a Labour councillor, council leader, and an MP. He was a Shadow Minister under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, and, from 2017 onwards, he was Corbyn's most vocal supporter inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. He was suspended from the party in February 2019 and, after being briefly reinstated, was re-suspended in June 2019. Later, the High Court declared the second suspension to be unlawful, but a third suspension was imposed. He resigned from the party after Labour's National Executive Committee prevented him from standing as a Labour candidate in the 2019 general election.