I won’t take back call to lynch woman MP, says bully McDonnell
SHADOW Chancellor John McDonnell was branded a bully yesterday after defending calls for a female Tory to be ‘lynched’.
In an extraordinary TV bust-up, he said he had no regrets about describing former welfare minister Esther McVey as a ‘stain on humanity’. He said he had been voicing ‘honest anger’ about her role in presiding over benefits cuts.
Miss McVey, who was sat just a few feet away in the same TV studio, hit back immediately, saying: ‘This is a man who talks about the (political) struggle through threats and intimidation and bullying. And he doesn’t just talk about it, he whips up that culture.’
Mr McDonnell’s original attack on Miss McVey came in 2014 during a Labour campaign to unseat her in Wirral West.
Yesterday he told ITV’s Peston on Sunday show that he had merely been reporting calls for Miss McVey to be lynched at a public meeting. He admitted calling her a ‘stain on humanity’ but said it had been justified.
Asked to withdraw the two comments, he said: ‘Sometimes you need to express honest anger and that was about what this last government was doing to people with disabilities and it was appalling to be frank.
‘And sometimes it is better to be honest with people about how you feel. Now at times it means using strong language, but actually if it reflects your honest views I think it’s better to be honest than it is to be deceptive.’
But Miss McVey, who lost her seat at last year’s election, said: ‘When we look at John McDonnell and what he has said in the past – whether it is lynching me, whether it was assassinating Margaret Thatcher, whether it is honouring the IRA, whether it is talking about his MPs being expletive-useless – this is a man who links violence with politics.’
And former Labour Cabinet minister Yvette Cooper said: ‘It’s not OK. It’s really, really not OK. The idea of saying that a woman MP, as Esther was at the time, should be lynched – it is just wrong.’