THE FORMER council leader ousted from the Labour Party has spoken out about anti-Semitism in his once beloved party.

Warren Morgan - who was leader of Brighton and Hove City Council from 2015 to 2018 - has said he is “mourning the loss” of the Labour Party.

Speaking to The Argus he said: “I’m sad at what the party has become.

“If you look at what’s happened during the conference this week anti-Semitic cartoons have been posted on fences, we’ve had Labour as a whole not taking a position on Brexit. There have been a whole range of things about the conference that makes me feel it is not the party I represented for 20 years.”

In a blog post Mr Morgan wrote: “In the Spring of 2014, I sat in committee room one of Brighton Town Hall opposite the organiser of the March For England, an EDL-linked event that had previously caused violence in the city. I looked him in the eye and told him that he and his followers were not welcome in Brighton and Hove.

“Three years later, when Labour last came to Brighton for its conference, I sat in the BBC studios a few hundred metres from the town hall, listening to the recorded testimony of people who had faced abuse inside a council-owned venue because they were identifiably Jewish.

“I’d heard statements recorded at a meeting saying it was fine to question whether the Holocaust had ever taken place. Representatives of the city’s Jewish community quite rightly and understandably contacted me asking what I, as leader of the council, would do.

“It was, I believed and I still believe, incumbent on me to again speak out. I wrote to the head of the organisation of the event saying that steps had to be taken to prevent any reoccurance before the event returned to the city.

“As leader of the city’s council, I had to act. I wrote a letter saying Labour would not be welcome back in Brighton if it failed to sort out its issues with anti-Semitism. Two years on, I have been forced out of the party I loved. But Labour’s dark problem remains.”

Mr Morgan said he was penalised and forced out of the party for speaking out about anti-Semitism - but maintains that there should be no place in Brighton and Hove for racism of any kind.

I will continue to speak out against that just as I did when hate crimes spiked in the wake of the referendum.

“You don’t get to pick and choose the racism you stand up against,” he added.