| Tristram Hunt |
A senior lawmaker from Britain’s opposition Labour Party and critic of its leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Friday he would resign from parliament to take up the role of Director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
In a letter to local Labour party members, Tristram Hunt, a lawmaker since 2010 and a former education spokesman for the party, said he did not want to “rock the boat” by standing down as the representative for Stoke-on-Trent in central England.
“The extraordinary privilege of serving in Parliament has proved both deeply rewarding and intensely frustrating,” he said in the letter, sent to Reuters by his office.
Hunt said the frustration had included the party’s inability to implement policies to tackle issues such as poverty and inequality following its defeat in the 2015 election, and questions over how it should respond “to the social, cultural and economic forces which have rocked mainstream social democratic and socialist parties.”
Labour have held Hunt’s constituency of Stoke-on-Trent central since it was created in 1950, but the popularity of the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party has been on the rise in the area, which voted strongly in favour of Brexit in last June’s referendum.
At the 2015 election, Ukip came second with nearly 23 per cent of the vote, and increase of more than 18 percentage points on their 2010 result.
Hunt has been a vocal critic of left-winger Corbyn, who was re-elected Labour leader in September after a challenge from one of his lawmakers that exposed sharp divisions between the party’s elected representatives and grassroots supporters.