A campaigner long seen as a traitor to Corbyn
DESPITE her brave and admirable campaign to highlight the sex grooming gangs in her Rotherham constituency, Sarah Champion was on borrowed time with the Labour leadership.
She had never really been forgiven for making enemies of Corbynistas by quitting the Shadow frontbench last summer.
Her resignation – along with more than 80 other MPs – was part of what turned out to be a failed coup against Jeremy Corbyn.
Although the 48-year-old returned voluntarily to the frontbench a month later, Champion’s card was marked.
Her fate seems to have been sealed when her name appeared in the Rupert Murdoch-owned red-top tabloid Sun newspaper above an article about last week’s sex-grooming court case involving men of an Asian heritage.
Murdoch is seen as the devil in Corbyn’s world. Not only for The Sun’s history of ridiculing Labour leaders such as Neil Kinnock but for offending the citizens of Liverpool with its crass coverage of the Hillsborough football stadium tragedy.
Another factor at play was that her intervention exposed how the Labour hierarchy has been shamefully reticent on the prevalence of Asian sex-grooming gangs because it fears upsetting the wider Asian community who are traditionally Labour voters.
In the eyes of Corbyn’s Mafia-like henchmen, who are ruthlessly unforgiving of any- one who dares to cross them or who doesn’t share their hard-Left ideology, Champion has long been seen as a traitor.
Most recently, about 50 Labour MPs have been on a hit-list of the pro-Corbyn Momentum group. Tactics to try to destabilise or oust them have included attempts to deselect them as MPs. Blairite MPs such as Chuka Umunna, Stella Creasy and Dame Margaret Hodge have been subjected to hateful messages on social media.
Most shockingly, moderate MP Luciana Berger was viciously threatened with deselection by hard-Left activists in her Liverpool constituency despite the fact she was on maternity leave.
But such are the malevolent values and brutal mindset of Corbynistas.
Like a Cold War Kremlin leader, loyalty is everything to Corbyn. How ironic, though, considering that as a backbench MP, Corbyn was serially disloyal to countless Labour leaders. Indeed, he rebelled against the party leadership more than any other Labour MP.
Certainly, if the zero-tolerance approach to dissident views that currently prevails had been in place previously, Corbyn would have been dumped from the party long ago. Without doubt, he would have fallen foul of the equivalent of a controversial ‘loyalty list’ drawn up last year by his supporters. The list divided Labour MPs into five different categories – ranging from a ‘core group’ of loyalists to hard-line opponents who were ‘hostile’. Even senior Shadow Cabinet members such as Hilary Benn, Lucy Powell and Maria Eagle were categorised in the second most disloyal category, ‘core group negative’. All three are now on the backbenches.
But there has been growing discontent at such strong-arm tactics.
Last year Neale Coleman, who was Corbyn’s policy chief, quit in protest at the ‘bunker’ mentality in the Opposition.
Now, there is no way back for Sarah Champion. A hard-working and respected constituency MP, she once said: ‘People ask if I’m a Blairite or a Brownite. But I’m just here to do a good job.’ But, sadly, doing a good job – and highlighting how senior figures in the police, social services and local government disgracefully ignored the truth about sexual abuse – was not enough to save her from the latest Corbyn witch-hunt.