Sad that MP failed to condemn Boris rant

I WAS saddened to read in a local newspaper last week that Rossendale MP Jake Berry wasn’t condemning the language used by his parliamentary colleague Boris Johnson to describe women who wear burkas.

The man who was recently our foreign secretary said women who wear the burka look like ‘letterboxes’ or ‘bank robbers’.

In a local newspaper article, Pendle Tory MP Andrew Stephenson called on Mr Johnson to apologise for his comments, while Ribble Valley Tory said Boris should have ‘moderated his language’ although he then used the catch-all excuse of ‘this is Boris being Boris’ as though that’s somehow okay.

Hyndburn MP Graham Jones was right to say: “People discuss these issues and it is right to do so.

“I think very few people would discuss this in the way Boris Johnson did.

“Describing people as looking like letterboxes contributes nothing to that discussion other than calling people names.”

Mr Berry was reported to have declined to comment.

Regularly described as a close supporter of Mr Johnson - and infamous for angry tweets he sent when Michael Gove killed Boris’s leadership campaign by standing against him - Mr Berry is better placed than most to, as Mr Evans suggests, moderate his language. There is a difference between free speech and name-calling, as Mr Jones points out.

For a senior politician, admittedly one without a senior job at the moment, to think it’s acceptable to name-call the clothing people wear on the basis of their interpretation of their religion is a worrying low for politics in this country. It’s saddening that, locally, Rossendale’s MP doesn’t feel the need to join his East Lancashire colleagues in saying so publicly.