Torrent of vile abuse she received for speaking out
LEFT-WINGERS targeted Sarah Champion with online abuse after she wrote her article in The Sun.
Twitter users demanded the MP be sacked, calling her a peddler of ‘racist garbage’.
She was accused of ‘dogwhistle, racist politics’, of ‘inciting racial hatred’ and being as bad as the far-right British National Party.
The Sun article appeared last Friday, soon after 17 men were convicted of forcing girls in Newcastle upon Tyne to have sex. Mostly British-born, they were from Iraqi, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iranian and Turk- ish communities. Miss Champion also faced criticism from fellow Labour MP Naz Shah, who wrote an article saying the headline on the Sun piece had been ‘irresponsible’ and was ‘setting a dangerous precedent’.
She said at the weekend that the ‘blanket, racialised, loaded statements’ would set up stigmatised Pakistani boys to fail. The Bradford West MP’s criticism came despite the fact that she herself was suspended from the Labour party last year for promoting anti- semitic messages on social media. Hours after the Sun article appeared, a Twitter user called Hayls wrote: ‘Hello Jeremy Corbyn you need to remove Sarah Champion from her position right now. This racist garbage is not acceptable.’
Michael Walker, who describes himself as a ‘class war social democrat’, wrote: ‘There’s exploring how attitudes to sex and gender relate to culture; and there’s dogwhistle, racist politics. Sarah Champion’s piece was latter. It reduces problem entirely to race, claims PC culture has hidden truth. It’s proper BNP s***.’ West Lancashire council- lor Paul Cotterill called the article ‘a sinister piece of propaganda’, and Labour activist Tony Greenstein said she should be sacked just as Ted Heath had sacked Enoch Powell in 1968 after his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
He wrote: ‘It is intolerable that Sarah Champion, who has engaged in no less despicable racist stereotyping, remains as Labour’s shadow minister for women and equalities.’
One Liberal Democrat tweeted a link to her Sun article and writing: ‘This sweeping generalisation vilifying all Pakistani men was not written by Nigel Farage but Labour’s Sarah Champion. Progressive party?’