Whip suspended in September 2022 following an unspecified complaint. The party will not divulge the nature of the complaint and at the time of the suspension, Brown (who served as chief whip under five Labour leaders) claimed he did not know the nature of the complaint.
As of September 2023 there has still been no update.
One Year On And Labour STILL Refuse To Tell Us Why They Suspended MP Nick Brown
Keir Starmer, when taking over as leader of the Labour Party, promised a new age of complete transparency. He lied. One year on, and the party is still hiding the truth about MP Nick Brown from the general public, including his constituents.
The veteran Labour MP had the whip suspended after a complaint was lodged against him back in September last year.
The senior politician, the incumbent MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East, who has been chief whip for every Labour leader from Tony Blair onwards, was placed under investigation after a complaint was made against him.
Brown, 72, one of Labour's longest-serving MPs, also had his party membership suspended until the case is resolved. The former minister said he hadn't been told what the complaint was about but that he was "cooperating fully" with the investigation. In fact the alleged complaint came from "a political rival within the party" and concerned an alleged event said to have taken place more than 25 years earlier.
The investigation, however, cannot possibly take one year to complete – and Labour HQ have declined every request from the media, for them to be honest and transparent and reveal the nature of the complaint.
In a statement issued at the time he was first suspended, Brown said "There has been a complaint made about me to the Labour party, which is under investigation. I am therefore under an administrative suspension from the Labour party until the investigation is concluded. I'm not aware of what the complaint is. I am cooperating fully with the investigation."
Meanwhile, Labour continues to refuse to reveal why ANY of its politicians have been suspended, unless the details are already made public by third parties or the press.
In recent months, this led to constituents in Hackney being unaware that their children were living near Tom Dewey, a Labour Councillor who was later convicted for possessing thousands of child pornography images.
Nick Brown has now retired from the Labour Party citing the length of time the Party has taken to investigate the claim. He wrote "against the backdrop of a long-running internal Labour party disciplinary process against me – a process which I consider (and am advised) is so fundamentally, and inexcusably, flawed that I can no longer engage with it".
He added "To be clear; the accusations against me were, and remain, entirely false, without even the faintest germ of any truth to them. Not only had they never previously been made in the ensuing 25 years, they had never been so much as hinted at, whether by that individual or anyone else."
Saying there was "no proper corroborative evidence", Brown lambasted the way Labour had handled the claims and the time it had taken, saying that at first he had assumed he could trust the party's disciplinary system. He added the claims made against him "were very serious and it was important that they were looked at properly".
However, Brown wrote, the process "has been structured, and conducted, in such a manner as to lack even the most basic of procedural fairness and evidential safeguards".
As examples, he said Labour had refused to hold a disciplinary hearing in person, or to allow his lawyers to directly question the complainant, and that he and his legal team considered the evidence to be hugely thin. "Despite my hopes that good sense, legal propriety and basic natural justice might prevail, it has become increasingly clear to me not only that I cannot possibly expect a fair hearing, but that this process is a complete farce" he wrote.
His legal team, he added, "have told me that, in light of the party's refusal to comply with even the most basic of safeguards, evidential and procedural measures to be expected of any quasi-judicial process, they are unable to advise me that I could expect a fair hearing"". He ended "Things have reached a very sorry pass when the likely next party of government conducts cases of this gravity in a manner more akin to those of a mismanaged golf club."
A Labour spokesperson said "The Labour party treats all complaints with the utmost seriousness. It has established an independent complaints process that ensures complaints are decided impartially and fairly."