AND THEY’RE JUST THE LATEST INSULTS IN A TORRENT OF HATE FROM THE LEFT
THE refusal of Jeremy Corbyn to condemn John McDonnell for describing Esther McVey as a ‘stain on humanity’ only highlights the double standards of the Left.
It was all the more damning coming as it did only days after Clive Lewis was reappointed to Labour’s front bench as shadow minister for the Treasury.
Lewis has his own history of offensive comments, which includes comparing the Conservative Party to the Nazis and using the misogynistic phrase ‘ Get on your knees bitch’ at an event held by the proCorbyn pressure group Momentum.
The Left’s limp response to such remarks stands in stark contrast to the furious way in which it reacts to offensive comments from anybody right of centre.
Take, for example, the treatment given to Right-wing writer and free schools pioneer Toby Young after he was appointed to the newly created Office for Students.
His supposed crime was that years previously he had made sexist jokes on Twitter about female celebrities’ breasts, as well as tactless comments about workingclass and disabled students.
Yet while the Left-wing witch-hunt against Young meant he was forced to resign, Labour figures guilty of equally egregious comments have kept their jobs. And, as these examples show, it’s not just McDonnell and Lewis who have benefited from Labour’s double standards.
Shadow Chancellor
Esther McVey is not the only female Tory towards whom he has issued violent threats.
In 2010, he told a trade union conference that the ‘single act’ he’d most like to do to ‘improve the world’ would be to ‘go back in time and assassinate Thatcher’. After being elevated to Shadow Chancellor, he apologised.
In 2003 he said that members of the IRA should be ‘honoured’ for their ‘bravery’ and claimed: ‘It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table.’
He was also filmed describing violent student riots in 2010 as ‘the best of our movement’. His spokesman said the comments were ‘tongue in cheek’.
Shadow Treasury minister
Lewis, who was reappointed to Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench last week, was exposed last September by the Mail likening the Conservatives to the Nazis at an event held by Momentum during Labour’s annual conference.
He said that the Government had ‘systematically undermined’ the BBC, the NHS and other public services.
He likened this to the Nazi policy of ‘Gleichschaltung’, the process by which Hitler secured power by ensuring that all institutions conformed to Nazi ideology. Lewis denied ‘comparing the Conservative Government to the Nazis’. Video footage also emerged from Momentum’s The World Transformed festival of him using the misogynistic phrase ‘on your knees, bitch!’ to a man in the audience.
The prominent Corbyn loyalist was condemned by numerous colleagues, such as Harriet Harman, who Tweeted: ‘Inexplicable. Inexcusable. Dismayed.’
Lewis later said he wanted to ‘apologise unreservedly’ for the ‘ offensive and unacceptable’ remark.
Labour MP for Stoke
During last year’s by-election in which he was elected to Parliament, it was revealed that he had posted sexist, misogynistic and other offensive messages on Twitter.
In 2011, he said that a woman character in ITV’s Coronation Street should be given ‘a good slap’, described panellists on ITV’s Loose Women as ‘squabbling sour-faced ladies’ and called writer Janet Street-Porter a ‘polished turd, shiny and s***’. He also remarked that a ‘speccy blonde girl’ appearing as a contestant on BBC1’s The Apprentice was ‘f****** annoying’, adding: ‘Here’s an idea for you: why don’t you p*** off.’ When tackled about this abuse during the byelection campaign, he said: ‘I said some things that were silly and I should hang my head in shame for that, but I have learnt from that.’
Labour MP for Bradford West
After being appointed McDonnell’s parliamentary private secretary, it emerged that she had shared a host of anti- Semitic posts on Facebook.
One from August 2014 proposed, as a ‘solution’ to the Middle East conflict: the forced transportation of Jews from Israel to the US, adding that to ‘relocate’ in this manner might ‘save them some pocket money’.
Another compared Israel to Hitler’s Third Reich.
Shah was suspended from Labour for three months, but reinstated after apologising, saying she had been ‘ stupid’ and ‘ignorant’.
Last year, she shared a message on Twitter calling for victims of the Rotherham abuse scandal to ‘shut their mouths. For the good of diversity’.
Heavily criticised, she claimed her endorsement of the sentiment was ‘a genuine accident’.
Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam
After his election as an MP last year, the 36-year-old former bar manager was appointed to the Commons women and equalities select committee. It was then revealed that he had posted many obscene remarks (many about women) on a music website.
He’d invited the girl band Girls Aloud to ‘come have an orgy with me’, said the young woman who triumphed in TV’s Pop Idol in 2003 had ‘only won because she was fat’, called gay men ‘poofters’ and ‘fudge packers’ and said jazz musician Jamie McCullum was a ‘conceit-ed c***’ [our asterisks] who deserved to be “sodomised with his own piano’.
He also called Danish people ‘ pig shaggers’, described the Spanish as ‘dagoes’ and said young women he had seen at an Arctic Monkeys concert were ‘sexy little slags’.
The Momentum-backed ultraCorbynite apologised for his online comments, resigned from the women and equalities select committee and was suspended from the Labour party. He continues to claim his MP’s salary of £74,962.
Despite this deeply unpleasant charge-sheet, Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, declared recently that she remains “happy to sit alongside” O’Mara in the Commons.
Shadow Home Secretary
After commentator Bim Adewumni said she disliked the ‘lazy’ and ‘monolithic’ use of the term ‘black community’ during the trial of the men accused of murdering black teenager Stephen Lawrence, Abbott went on Twitter to say Adewumni was playing into a racist agenda that was ‘ as old as colonialism’. She wrote: ‘White people love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game.’
Abbott was rebuked for what was seen as a ‘stupid’ sweeping generalisation and threatened with the sack by then Labour leader Ed Miliband. Abbott then said: ‘I apologise for any offence caused.’
Labour MP for Kensington
She described former David Cameron adviser Shaun Bailey (who is black) as the Tories’ ‘token ghetto boy’, a ‘free-loading scumbag’ and a ‘low life’.
These vile remarks were made in 2010, when Bailey was contesting a council seat in Hammersmith.
He described them as ‘ hate filled’ and ‘racist’. But Coad initially refused to express contrition, before half-heartedly apologising ‘if he was offended’.
Undaunted, before Christmas, on Twitter, she shared an unflattering picture of the ‘ ugly’ Theresa May and earlier described the judge in charge of the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire as less than fully human since he “does not have empathy.”
General secretary of the GMB trade union
This Labour power-broker gave a speech during the EU referendum campaign in which he made misogynistic remarks about a woman Tory MP whose parents came to Britain from Uganda in the 1960s. ‘Priti Patel,’ he declared. ‘Surely a contradiction in her name.’
Rebuked by Tory MP James Cleverly, who asked whether he was ‘sexist, racist, blind or all three’, Roache said his comment was ‘ not sexest [ sic] in the slightest’ because ‘what she says and thinks of workers & rights is not pretty’.
(Labour mayor of London)
In his previous job as an MP, he was often interviewed by Press TV, an anti-Western news network owned by the Iranian government (which has since been banned by the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom).
During one such encounter, in 2009, he described moderate Muslim groups co-operating with the Government’s anti-terror initiatives as ‘Uncle Toms’.
He said: ‘You can’t just speak to Uncle Toms, you can’t just speak to people who will say what you want to hear.’
‘Uncle Tom’ referred originally to African Americans who were considered excessively deferential to white people, it has also come to be used as an insult against moderate Muslims.
Later, during his campaign to be London mayor, he was asked if he considered terms such as ‘Zio and Uncle Tom’ to be racist. ‘Zio’, short for Zionist, is a term often favoured by anti-Semites.
He replied: ‘They are racist. They should not be used.’
When tackled about his own use of ‘Uncle Tom’, he admitted: ‘It is a racial slur and I regret using that phrase. I was wrong and regret it. I am sorry.’