Row ringleader ‘wants to be Labour MP’
ONE of the ringleaders of the student backlash against Rod Liddle’s speech at Durham University is a Jeremy Corbyn supporter who stood for the Labour Party at the local elections earlier this year.
Sean Hannigan, 22, president of the Junior Common Room at South College, addressed 300 people at a protest on Wednesday, where he backed calls for students to stop paying rent.
He said: ‘The only way that the university will listen is if it hits them financially. This country belongs to us, gay people and black people and every person who lives here.’ Borrowing a slogan from Mr Corbyn, the politics graduate said: ‘We need to stand up for this country and its rights and build a new country for the many, not the few.’
Mr Hannigan was at the dinner at South College where Rod Liddle gave a talk on December 3, covering trans issues, women’s rights and racism.
The student gave his own speech afterwards, condemning Mr Liddle’s remarks, which was greeted by cheers and applause from student attendees, according the Palatinate student newspaper.
Mr Hannigan spent a month working as an intern in the parliamentary office of then Shadow Transport Minister Matt Rodda in 2019 and has ambitions to become a Labour MP. He stood unsuccessfully for Labour in local elections for Oxfordshire County Council in May, winning just 577 votes.
He posted on Instagram: ‘The Labour Party, particularly since Corbyn, has provided people like me with an alternative – and an end to austerity.’
He said ‘families like mine have suffered’ under austerity. His family home is a £600,000 semi-detached house in the village of Crowmarsh Gifford near Henley-on-Thames.
Other hard-Left campaigners are demanding the removal of Professor Tim Luckhurst, the principal of South College, who has been suspended after he criticised students for walking out of Mr Liddle’s talk.
Durham students’ union president Seun Twins, who called for the professor to be sacked and said his position was ‘untenable’, has described Mr Corbyn as ‘the white king’ and suggested that Tories should be ‘dealt with’.