AM excluded after racist slur on MP
AUkip Assembly Member has been excluded after using a racist term to describe a Labour MP.
A vote of the whole Assembly approved a motion to exclude North Wales AM Michelle Brown for a week.
Complaints were made after it emerged that during a telephone call with her former senior adviser, Nigel Williams, on May 14, 2016, Ms Brown used the term “coconut” to describe Labour MP Chuka Umunna.
In the call she was recorded as saying: “I don’t say this lightly, right, but Chukka Umuna is a f***ing coconut, he’s got, he’s got as much understanding of an ordinary black man’s experience as I have.”
She went on to say: “He’s black on the outside and white on the inside.”
Later in the same call she added: “And Barack Obama’s exactly the same.”
A recording of the call was released to the Daily Post.
In it she also referred to Labour MP Tristram Hunt as a “t**t”.
Speaking in the Assembly yesterday stand-in chairman Paul Davies AM said the committee had never taken the option before and said it was a “significant sanction”.
Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood said: “I’d just like to ask members to consider one very simple question: how can a member of this Assembly who has been found to be racist safely represent people of colour in her region?
“And the answer is that she can’t and I believe that that is a problem.
“Now, the leader of Ukip and the Ukip member on the panel have accepted that their member was racist.
“Racism is racism. It’s unacceptable – it has no place in this institution or, indeed, this country.”
Ukip leader Neil Hamilton said he could not vote with the motion to exclude his colleague.
“Excluding any member is a serious interference with the democratic rights of the people who elect us.
“All parliaments of course have rules to control unruly members to maintain order in proceedings without which we couldn’t function properly.
“But very few other institutions around the world seek to exclude members for using objectionable words outside the relevant Assembly – let alone, as in this case, in a private telephone conversation.”
There were 38 votes in support of the motion, one abstention, and three against.
Independent AM Neil McEvoy spoke and said he had personally experienced racism but he said as South Wales Central AM he could not vote to suspend a North Wales AM.
“What Michelle Brown said was disgraceful but in private. The way to deal with these people is at the ballot box,” he said.
The committee concluded that while Ms Brown was “entitled to make the socio-political point made, the term used in this instance was a term of racial abuse, and as such utterly unacceptable”.