Police Deputy was ‘Forced Out’ says Jane Kennedy

24th March 2019
Emily Spurrell
Resigning now would be a waste of public money, says newly-independent Police and Crime Commissioner Jane Kennedy (below). The former Labour Home Office Minister was responding to suggestions that, having been elected as a Labour candidate to her £80,000 per year job she should leave the post now. But Ms Kennedy pointed to the massive expense of having an unnecessary by-election right now across the whole of Merseyside when she had already announced that she was retirng soon.
Speaking on BBC North West ‘Talking Politics’ today, Jane Kennedy siad that it was a personal decision that she made to leave the Labour Party over the return of Militant members and Antisemitism in the Party. She respected others who felt the same way as hrself but who had stayrde in the Party. But she could not,any longer, go ‘on the doorstep’ any more in Liverpool and defend the Labour Party of which she had been a senior member for decades.
An awful example of how Labour was behaving, said Ms Kennedy today. was the way her Deputy Crime Commissioner Cllr Emily Spurrell (above) was “forced out” of her job immediately after Ms Kennedy made public that she had left the Labour Party. Labour would not permit Councillor Spurrell, who was being heavily-promoted as a successor to Jane Kennedy in the Police & Crime Commissioner job, to carry on in her paid executive role serving under a Commissioner who was no longer a Labour Party member.