Former MP’s appeal to Labour politicians

SIMON Danczuk has called on Labour Party politicians not to share platforms and rallies with groups using Soviet, Communist and Stalinist symbols.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has been criticised for speaking under a Communist hammer and sickle banner at a May Day rally in London’s Trafalgar Square on Monday last week.

Photos from the event also show some people at the mass rally holding portraits of Joseph Stalin and other Soviet iconography.

The Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB) said politicians had “no excuse” for sharing a platform with others carrying banners of Stalin, a “tyrant” who killed millions of their countrymen and a hammer and sickle representing “repression and mass murder”.

And Simon Danczuk, former Labour MP for Rochdale, said the 20,000 Britons of Ukrainian descent, like himself, would be ‘absolutely appalled’ at senior Labour politicians being associated with Stalinist symbols.

Fedir Kurlak, chief executive of the AUGB, called on Labour politicians to refuse to take part and instead speak out against groups using symbols of Stalin and his Communist dictatorship.

“There has to be principles, moral principles,” Mr Kurlak said.

“To use pictures of Stalin in this country, for whatever political purpose, and deny the kind ●●Former Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk (inset) made his call after shadow chancellor John McDonnell spoke at a May Day rally in Trafalgar Square of atrocities he committed is shameful.

“It is like putting up a picture of Hitler and espousing Nazi ideals.

“Being at the rally, why didn’t he say ‘Keep that away from me because I don’t think you should have this at a rally and I’m not prepared to speak to you and to remain silent, because if someone presents these symbols they all represent repression’?

“Perhaps he should comment on why he thinks that’s acceptable. Would he do the same if somebody carried a portrait of Hitler?”

Mr McDonnell was speaking at the event, celebrating International Workers’ Day on Monday.

Mr Kurlak added: “In 2017 it is 90 years since the massive terror of 1937/38, tens of thousands killed by Stalin. It is the 85th anniversary of the Holodomor (the Ukrainian holocaust) where millions were starved to death by Stalin.

“Today, when it is well known the facts that Joseph Stalin was as big a tyrant as Adolf Hitler, if not greater, it makes it appalling and shocking.”

Many Ukrainians settled in the UK after the Second World War, with large numbers centred on the towns in and around the Lancashire coalfields, including Rochdale, which has its own Ukrainian social club.

Mr Danczuk added: “Every year in Rochdale we remember the Holodomor, we remember that every year, we lay wreaths in memory of that. Joseph Stalin killed thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians.

“They will be absolutely appalled to see the shadow chancellor of the exchequer stood next to and celebrating Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror over their ancestors’ lives.

“Insensitive does not begin to describe it.”

An estimated seven million Ukrainians starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as a result of Stalin’s disastrous policies, with some historians claiming the famine was deliberate to snuff out Ukrainian independence from the Soviet empire.