With his super-majority in the Commons, Keir Starmer isn’t afraid of losing the odd MP or two. Back in July he was was willing to remove the whip off seven of his colleagues after they had the effrontery to dare vote against lifting the two-child benefit cap. So the case of Dawn Butler – the gaffe-machine otherwise known as the Honourable Member for Brent East – offers a useful test case for how seriously Sir Keir takes matters of discipline.
Butler yesterday shared a social media post accusing Kemi Badenoch of representing ‘white supremacy in blackface’ and suggesting her election amounted to a ‘victory for racism’. It also called the new opposition leader ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s collaborator class’. Butler has since deleted the post – but not before it triggered an outcry. Kwasi Kwarteng, Britain’s first black Chancellor, put it neatly thus on the Camilla Tominey Show earlier today:
She’s got form on this. On a personal level, I’ve always got on with her [Dawn Butler] but her race-baiting is completely crazy and you can imagine, if had Kemi lost, she’d have said exactly the same thing. She’d have said “Oh Kemi lost because the Tories are racist and Britain is racist”. Now that she’s won, she’s saying it was racist… In their logic, they put everything through the prism of race-baiting and divisiveness.
Kwarteng added that ‘given what she said, she should have the whip removed’ for spreading ‘this really hateful divisiveness’. Back in 2022, Starmer took action against Labour MP Rupa Huq after calling Kwarteng ‘superficially black.’ But, according to Kwarteng, ‘what Dawn has said is worse because she’s accusing Kemi, unbelievably, of being a kind of front for white supremacy.’
Will Labour now take action? Don’t hold your breath…
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