{"id":710195,"date":"2026-07-25T08:05:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710195\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T08:05:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:05:09","slug":"former-leader-forced-out-says-ex-labour-luton-councillor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/710195\/","title":{"rendered":"Former leader forced out, says ex-Labour Luton councillor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Roche, who has been a councillor for seven years and held the housing portfolio for two years, said resigning from the party was &#8220;really tough&#8221; as he had been a Labour supporter since the 1970s and his mum had been a trade unionist.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It pulled at the heartstrings but we felt we had to do this to represent local democracy in Luton,&#8221; he added. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Roche said the council&#8217;s Labour Party members can force a no-confidence vote in a leader if 40% of them agree to the move, but added a review was instigated by Labour East in March on the political leadership of the authority.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said: &#8220;The official outcome was never shared with the whole group and as such there was no opportunity to debate or respond to what their findings were.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It was done via telephone interviews with a few selected people, MPs and councillors me included, and on completion Hazel Simmons was informed she must stand down but must do a statement resigning her post so effectively she was forced out.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roche, who has been a councillor for seven years and held the housing portfolio for two years, said&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-710195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}