My party is a disgrace... by veteran ex Labour MP!
A FORMER Labour MP has accused Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell of allowing the Labour Party to be poisoned with extremism.
Ian Austin, who sits as an independent, accused hardliners of ‘dragging Labour into the mud’.
In his speech in an emergency Commons debate on Monday night he told fellow MPs:
I did not leave the Labour party to join another party – I left the Labour party to shine a spotlight on the disgrace it has become under the Leader of the Opposition’s leadership and because I regard myself as proper, decent, traditional Labour, not like the extremists who have taken over this party and are dragging it into the mud. That is the point I am going to make in this debate.
These are people – the Leader of the Opposition, the Shadow Chancellor – who have spent their entire time in politics working with and defending all sorts of extremists, and in some cases terrorists and antiSemites. We should remember what these people said about the IRA.
It might be ancient history to the Labour party’s new young recruits, but many people will never forget how they supported terrorists responsible for horrific carnage in a brutal civil war that saw people blown up in pubs and hotels and shopping centres.
A few weeks after the IRA blew up a hotel in Brighton and murdered five people at the Tory party conference, the Leader of the Opposition invited two suspected IRA terrorists to Parliament. When the man responsible for planting that bomb was put on trial, he protested outside the court.
The Shadow Chancellor said that “those people involved in the armed struggle” – people he said had used “bombs and bullets”– should be honoured. And they have the brass neck to lecture anybody about the rule of law! What a disgrace.
This is a debate about whether politicians can be trusted to obey the rule of law, and there is not a single Labour figure in the past – not a single one – who would have backed violent street protest, as the Shadow Chancellor did when he called for “insurrection” to “bring down” the Government, or praised rioters who he said had “kicked the s***” out of the Conservative Party’s offices. After a Labour MP said he should join the Tories Mr Austin added: She might not want to hear it, but I will tell her this: I am here because voters in Dudley North sent me here to represent them, and none of my views have changed on any of the things I stand up for: decency in politics, the rule of law. And everybody in Dudley knew exactly what I thought of these people at the last election. And I will tell the honourable lady this: I will make absolutely certain she is going to have to answer to her voters for these points at the next election.
No other senior figure in the Labour Party’s history would have joked about lynching a female member of parliament. These people do not believe in the rule of law abroad, either. They always back the wrong side, whether it is the IRA, Hamas or Hezbollah, who they describe as friends. No previous Labour leader would have supported brutal totalitarian dictatorships like the ones in Cuba or Venezuela that have no regard whatsoever for the rule of law.
No previous Labour leadership would have allowed a party with a proud history of fighting racial prejudice to have been poisoned by racism – which is what has happened under these people – against Jewish people, to the extent that members have been arrested on suspicion of racial hatred, and the party itself has become the first in history to be investigated under equalities laws by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
These people, and the people around them, are a million miles away from the traditional mainstream, decent politics of the Labour party. They have poisoned what was once a great party with extremism, and they cannot be trusted with the institutions that underpin our democracy. They are completely unfit to lead the Labour party, let alone our country.