Don’t call Leave voters ‘thick’! Labour MP’s fury at ‘patronising’ colleagues
ONE of Tony Blair’s former Ministers has angrily accused fellow Labour MPs of calling her Yorkshire constituents ‘thick’ because they voted for Brexit.
Pro-Brexit Don Valley MP Caroline Flint lashed out after a fellow ex-Labour Minister mocked her as ‘Labour’s Jacob Rees-Mogg’.
Ms Flint spoke out at a meeting of Labour MPs as tempers flared over the party’s growing split over Brexit.
Witnesses say the dispute started when Welsh MP Stephen Kinnock, son of former Labour leader and EU Commissioner Neil Kinnock, turned on MPs who backed Brexit. ‘You are destroying the jobs of your own constituents who desperately need jobs, because that is what Brexit is going to do,’ he said. Mr Kinnock’s message was echoed by anti-Corbyn MP Chuka Umunna. Ms Flint, whose Doncaster constituency is a former mining area, is said to have lambasted ‘patronising’ anti-Brexit Labour MPs, saying: ‘You are talking total nonsense. I care about jobs as much as you so don’t lecture me.
‘You are basically saying that my constituents are thick. They aren’t. They are intelligent and knew what they were doing and I am sick of them being insulted.
‘You don’t like it because they voted Brexit and you can’t handle it.’
The row came after a series of bitter ‘Remain versus Leave’ exchanges among Labour MPs. Anti-Brexit MP Chris Leslie stunned colleagues by comparing Ms Flint to Tory Brexit cheerleader Mr Rees-Mogg, saying: ‘Caroline is beginning to sound a little bit like Jacob Rees-Mogg with the notion that we should almost go for Brexit at all costs.’