David Lammy: We should be more like Farage

Brexit has been an odd sideshow to the Labour conference, with pro-Corbyn factions such as Momentum working hard to keep the topic away from any awkward votes on the floor of the Brighton Centre hall. Perhaps that’s why it took more than an hour for anyone to mention it as a potential issue the party needed to think about at tonight’s Fabian Question Time fringe. By this point, we had run over the same arguments for solving the housing crisis that are wheeled out and then packed away without much progress, tax avoidance, and the Labour Party’s problem with anti-semitism (none of the speakers tried to claim this didn’t exist, by the way).

David Lammy was on fine passionate form, which included telling the fringe that after he was accused of ‘playing the race card’ with his report on discrimination in the criminal justice system that ‘I’m not just playing one card: I’ve got a whole deck of cards’.