John Rankin has joined the Labour Party and will take the Labour Whip when he next sits in the Hastings Borough Council chamber. The Conquest ward councilor was first elected to the council in 2016 as a Conservative and he retained his seat in 2022.

He left the Tory Party last October to sit as an independent, saying he had become disenchanted with the way the party had changed since the Brexit referendum in 2016 and its adoption of “extreme right-wing policies which were anti-business and authoritarian.”

His decision to join Labour was prompted after he suffered a heart attack whilst in Alexandra Park last November There were no ambulances available, he says, and a friend had to drive him to the Conquest Hospital, only to be told that the catheter laboratory was shut. He was eventually put in an ambulance and driven to Eastbourne where he was fitted with a stent and survived.

Mr Rankin says he was lucky and had he been older or less fit he would not have survived, and, as a result, he was joining Labour, to save the NHS.


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https://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/news.jpghttps://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/news.jpgHIPNewsJohn Rankin,Labour PartyJohn Rankin has joined the Labour Party and will take the Labour Whip when he next sits in the Hastings Borough Council chamber. The Conquest ward councilor was first elected to the council in 2016 as a Conservative and he retained his seat in 2022. He left the Tory Party...The Hastings & St Leonards non-profit community newspaper