Chakrabarti: Apologise for leaflet
LABOUR peer Shami Chakrabarti has said the party should be “ashamed” for using a leaflet featuring British prime minister Boris Johnson shaking hands with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi during the Batley and Spen by-election campaign.
Several critics complained the leaflets were designed to appeal to Muslim voters and to exploit divisions between voters originating from India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
An image of Modi and Johnson shaking hands is featured along with a caption which said: “don’t risk a Tory MP who is not on your side.”
In a column for the Guardian last Saturday (3), Baroness Chakrabarti urged the party to apologise for its “mistake”.
She wrote: “What was this photo and its caption, ‘the risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear’, supposed to indicate? That a Labour prime minister or foreign secretary would never shake such a hand or attempt to negotiate trade, or peace, or a shamefully belated vaccine patent waiver with one of the largest nations in the global south?”
Slamming the Labour party’s tactic to use the leaflet to attract some 8,600 Muslim voters, mostly of Pakistani origin, Chakrabarti said the party’s choice of photograph and the caption suggest that it assumed people vote solely on communal lines.
“There is no point in proclaiming zero tolerance for antisemitism and all forms of racism among party members if Labour undermines attempts at trying to explain the nuances of modern racism and stereotyping come election time,” said Chakrabarti, the former shadow attorney general for England and Wales.
“Let the Battle for Batley of 2021 be remembered as a nadir in national discourse from which we learned and recovered, if only in the Labour party,” the 52-yearold added.
Chakrabarti also slammed George Galloway over his “toxic” campaign stoking “homophobic sentiment” when he described himself as a “straight white man with six children” who would not “stand for the BBC trying to teach our young children that there are 99 genders”.