It’s surprising, but I’m feeling sympathy for Corbyn’s acolyte

AS IF Labour doesn’t have enough problems with alienating Britain’s Jewish community, it now seems intent on becoming a hostile environment for Catholics, too. This is the only conclusion to be drawn from the way Rebecca Long-Bailey has been treated after the candidate for the party’s leadership was revealed — shock, horror — to be a practising Catholic.

One of her rivals for the top job (or someone on their team) unearthed an interview Long-Bailey gave in Salford Cathedral during the last election, in which she said she ‘very much values’ the role of the Catholic community in providing education, and that ‘I pray to God every day…my faith is often the only thing that keeps me going’.

Worse, or so her rivals would see it, is that she criticised an aspect of the law governing termination of pregnancy.

She pointed out that while abortions could not be carried out beyond the 24th week of a ‘normal’ pregnancy, it was allowed right up to full term if the unborn child was found to have a ‘disability’. Long-Bailey said: ‘I personally do not agree with this position.’

Dictated

In response, Long-Bailey’s rival Jess Phillips opportunistically dashed off a piece for the Daily Mirror declaring that ‘there can be no going back on abortion rights, not an inch’.

Meanwhile the former BBC and Channel 4 presenter Paul Mason — now campaigning for Keir Starmer to become leader, having previously been a cheerleader for Jeremy Corbyn — tweeted: ‘I don’t want Labour’s policy on reproductive rights dictated by the Vatican, thanks.’

This is identical to the justification given for Westminster’s discrimination against Catholics in earlier centuries, namely that they were loyal to an alien authority: Rome. And it also has a parallel with the anti-Semitic trope rife among Corbyn’s most fanatical supporters, that British Jews are stooges for Israel. Just as the Jewish community had, for the most part, regarded Labour as its natural political home, so too did Catholics.

This explains why the Labour MPs Mike Kane and Conor McGinn declared: ‘For over one hundred years Catholics across the United Kingdom have formed the backbone of Labour’s vote. Neither of us have nominated Rebecca for the leadership. But we will not stand idle while her faith is being used to smear her.’

I am not a Catholic. Nor do I share LongBailey’s political views, which are what you might expect from someone who even after the election gave Jeremy Corbyn ‘ten out of ten’ for his leadership. But for personal reasons, I am grateful for her criticism of the way unborn children with disabilities are regarded as suitable for eradication at any time in the womb, unlike those designated ‘normal’.

Our youngest daughter, Domenica, has Down’s Syndrome. And this condition is overwhelmingly the most common form of disability which, if detected, is considered grounds for termination. Indeed, mothers-to-be come under insidious pressure from medics to terminate, as some who refused have later related.

We didn’t know that Domenica was carrying a third copy of the 21st chromosome until she was born. But when she emerged with the visible signs of Down’s (floppy, with almond-shaped eyes and a distended tongue) to the evident dismay of the medical staff, we were soon given the bleakest prognosis for her quality of life. She would ‘suffer’ from her condition; she might never talk, or even walk.

It was all rubbish. Now 24, Domenica has a vast vocabulary. She has qualified as a Zumba instructor. She works two halfdays a week in the kitchens of Brighton’s

Grand Hotel. And she has a capacity for sheer joy, to an extent that I have not witnessed in any other human being.

This is not unusual among people with Down’s, though. In 2011 the American Journal of Medical Genetics published a paper entitled ‘Self-perceptions from people with Down’s Syndrome’, based on a survey of 300 people with the condition, aged 12 and over.

The authors concluded: ‘99 per cent of people with DS indicated that they were happy with their lives, 97 per cent liked who they are, and 96 per cent liked how they look.’ You wouldn’t get anything like such positive feelings from a similar questionnaire among ‘normal’ people.

Cerebral palsy is perhaps the next commonest form of disability observed in the new-born. So listen to what the comedian Francesca Martinez (who has CP) says: ‘I have several mates with “severe” CP (I prefer “uber-wobbly”) who fall over regularly or take an age to get a sentence out. But they tend to be happier than pretty much everyone else I’ve met.’

She added: ‘Most parents-to-be still fear that their beloved newborn will turn out to be — oh, the horror — disabled…Had my wobbliness been detected in the womb, my parents would probably have been advised, by a softly-spoken but firm doctor, to have an abortion.’

Offensive

It is barbaric that people like Martinez — or my daughter — should be stigmatised in the womb as deserving, on grounds of their disability alone, inferior protection.

Because if they were not deemed to be inferior, why is it legal for them to be aborted right up to the moment of natural birth, when such terminations between 24 and 40 weeks are illegal if the unborn child has no detected flaws?

It is bizarre that the Labour Party, which sees itself as anti- discriminatory above all, should be blind to this. It is offensive that when Long-Bailey makes this point, it is attributed to her allegiance to ‘the Vatican’, rather than a genuine concern about an aspect of the law that discriminates against disability to the extent of making it a special reason for extinction.

But in turning on Catholics, it is Labour that seems to have a death-wish.