Corbyn reneges on vow as activist is to become peer

JEREMY CORBYN has appointed an activist who once criticised the police over the Tottenham riots in the Eighties to the House of Lords, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Martha Osamor, the mother of Leftwing Labour MP Kate Osamor, and Iain Mcnicol, the former Labour Party general secretary, are to join the Lords, despite the Labour leader having pledged not to recommend any more appointments.

A former Democratic Unionist Party MP who once shared a platform with a feared loyalist, and nine Conservatives, including at least two former Cabinet ministers, are also to become peers. An announcement is due shortly.

Ms Osamor criticised the police for the way they reacted “very badly” over the death in 1985 of a woman who lived on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London, which led to riots and the death of Pc Keith Blakelock.

More recently, she has campaigned about the treatment of Mark Duggan’s family by the police. Duggan was shot dead by armed officers in Tottenham in August 2011, triggering more disturbances in the area. Ms Osamor was also barred from standing to become Labour MP in Vauxhall in 1989.

Labour had been at the time “flogging the idea that a black person couldn’t win a by-election and certainly not a person like me, who was defending people who had smashed up the Farm and all that”, she later said.

Ms Osamor, who is in her late seventies, was described as the “unsung hero of Britain’s black struggle” by the Institute of Race Relations in 2015.

Mr Mcnicol quit as Labour’s general secretary in February after what was described as a “tumultuous” sevenyear tenure, amid claims he had been forced out by allies of Mr Corbyn.

The appointments will mean that Mr Corbyn has apparently breached a pledge he made in 2015 not to create more peers if he became Labour leader.

Mr Corbyn will have appointed three peers – Ms Osamor, Mr Mcnicol and Shami Chakrabarti, the former Liberty director.

Asked directly in 2015 if “as leader” he would ever appoint any peers, Mr Corbyn replied: “I don’t see any case for nominating peers at all – I see no case for it, that is my position.”

Among other appointments are the Rev William Mccrea, a former Democratic Unionist Party MP who once shared a platform with the sectarian murderer Billy “King Rat” Wright.

In 1996, Mr Mccrea stood at a Portadown rally alongside Wright, a commander in the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Wright, who helped wage a bloody campaign against the Catholic population in the Portadown and Lurgan area in the mid-eighties, was murdered in 1997 in Belfast’s Maze prison.

Nine Conservatives are also to join the House of Lords, including former Cabinet ministers Peter Lilley and Eric Pickles, who was also chairman of the Tory party.

Andrew Tyrie, the respected former chairman of the Treasury select committee, is also being made a peer. Confirmation of the appointments is expected shortly. All three Tories quit Parliament at last year’s general election.

Mr Lilley’s elevation could raise eyebrows after he was caught up in a Channel 4 Dispatches sting this year.

A former deputy leader of the Conservative Party, he told undercover reporters he sat on two advisory groups with influence over the Brexit process.

Mr Lilley accused Channel 4 of a “tawdry attempt at entrapment” and insisted he had done nothing wrong.