Author Archives: Sam Ammar

Three hours before the deadline for General Election nominations on June 7th, 2024, I resigned as a Labour councillor and as Chair of the Bromsgrove Labour Party. I stood as an independent parliamentary candidate, secured 1561 votes, while Labour lost by 3016 votes to the Conservatives. I have since joined the Lib Dems as I explain below, and we are now the main opposition on Bromsgrove District Council.

Why did I leave the Labour Party and stand against its official candidate?  I had poured my heart and soul into leading the Labour Party in Bromsgrove, transforming it from a gathering that struggled to reach quorum (with fewer than five attendees in 2021) to a team of eight dedicated councillors within three years. Throughout my tenure as a councillor, I earned the respect and trust of all political parties in Bromsgrove, culminating in a unanimous vote to chair the council for a second term in May 2024, just before the General Election was called.

The decision to resign from Labour weighed on me heavily, but the Party had behaved in a very undemocratic way, and after deep reflection, I knew I had to leave.  The local party had been trying to appoint me as its candidate for some time and had been pressing the National Executive Committee (NEC) for action. But on 24 May, it received an email from HQ announcing that Neena Gill, a former MEP, was to be the candidate. I received a phone call the following day from a member of the NEC from which I gathered that I had failed the “due diligence test”. When I pressed for the report, they told me it might be shared after the elections, but not before. I saw this as an affront to the democratic process that denied me the opportunity to understand the basis of their rejection. I submitted a data access request after the General Election, but I was not allowed to see it. 

During my time as a councillor, I had focussed very much on local issues but, following Israel’s war on Gaza, I started to post and write about Palestine, including the ICJ ruling, and my father’s harrowing story of ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem in the Nakba of 1948. It became clear to me in the days after the nomination fiasco that this is what had upset people in the higher echelons of Labour who are/were keen to suppress pro-Palestinian voices and who were probably uncomfortable to discover that my father was Palestinian. 

Initially, local councillors tried to persuade Gill to step aside and called on the Party to reconsider its decision.  But then, twenty-four hours before my resignation, all councillors but two were photographed championing the parachuted candidate.