Oh dear. It’s not just Reform UK that has had trouble with party candidates in recent weeks — the Labour party is facing issues of its own. Candidates for both the local and general elections have been found to have made and shared some rather inappropriate views — which are now coming back to bite them. Only yesterday, one prospective parliamentary candidate was dropped by Labour after being investigated over her social media activity while just last month a Labour councillor quit the party when her Twitter came under scrutiny. When will they learn?
Find the list – so far – here:
Wilma Brown
The Scottish Labour candidate for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy was suspended from the party last month after being accused of liking racist and Islamophobic social media posts. Wilma Brown’s ‘liked’ tweets included one post that told a man wearing a turban that he would ‘NEVER be an Englishman’, another that referred to the former first minister as ‘Hamas Youseless’ and others that shared a prevalent conspiracy theory that says Yousaf gave terrorist organisation Hamas half a million pounds.
She deleted her Twitter account after one of the area’s constituents discovered her old posts, but it was too late. Wilma Brown has now been dropped as a parliamentary candidate for the area, and has been replaced by one Melanie Ward, who is also the CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Audrey Dempsey
Another one bites the dust. Following what Audrey Dempsey described as a ‘character assassination’, the Labour councillor for the Springburn and Robroyston ward, just outside of Glasgow, announced last month that she had quit the party. Dempsey was suspended in April and an investigation was launched into her behaviour online after concerns were raised about the former councillor’s social media activity. The ex-Labour councillor was found to have liked tweets that referred to former first minister Humza Yousaf as ‘Humza Hamas’ and the ‘Pakistani prime minister of Scotland’, while liking another post that claimed to have reported the Scottish Labour Party and its leader Anas Sarwar to the police for an ‘anti-white hate crime’. She had also made comments that there were ‘rising racist attacks on white children and teachers’, which were flagged to both the Labour party and the press.
But, while she was suspended for her social media use, it transpired that Dempsey’s Twitter activity had linked her to the far-right Homeland party — a group related to the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative — by liking their tweets of support for her. Dempsey insisted she is ‘not a regular user of this app’ and ‘not being aware of [the Homeland party] is my honest defence’. She added: ‘I would say I will be more vigilant in future but I will be closing the app for myself altogether.’ Homeland’s leader Kenny Smith criticised Labour’s treatment of Dempsey, saying: ‘Brave councillors like Audrey Dempsey get castigated simply for telling the truth.’
Khuram Majid
Last month, Labour’s council candidate for the Elland ward in Calderdale outside Leeds was found sharing tweets that stated ‘I do not condemn Hamas’ and that suggested that the 7 October attack ‘was inevitable’. Crikey. Another reposted tweet shared a conspiracy theory about how much Israel knew of the Hamas attack in advance of it being carried out. Mr S understands that Majid has since been suspended from the Labour Party, but it was too late to remove his name from the ballot paper before last week’s local elections. Good heavens…
Graham Jones
The parliamentary candidate for Hyndburn (and formerly MP for the area until 2019) was suspended in February after comments he made at a private party activist meeting were leaked. During the meeting — the same one that Azhar Ali attended, the candidate for Rochdale who was subsequently dropped by Labour — Graham Jones criticised British people who have gone to fight for the IDF, claiming (falsely) that it was against the law and that they should be ‘locked up’. He went on to say that: ‘I’m sure when [world leaders] go home, like me, pardon my French [they say] “f***ing Israel” again.’ Charming.
Azhar Ali
And all this comes, of course, exactly three months after Labour’s candidate for the Rochdale by-election, Azhar Ali, lost the formal support of the party over comments he made about the 7 October attack. At a local Labour meeting, Ali was reported to have said that ‘people in the media from certain Jewish quarters’ were ‘giving crap’ about Andy McDonald — a Labour MP suspended for using the phrase ‘between the river and the sea’ during a pro-Palestine rally. Ali was also reported to have claimed that Israel planned to ‘get rid of [Palestinians] from Gaza’ and ‘grab’ some of the land.
But Labour was too late to withdraw its support for Ali (as well as facing accusations of being too slow to act on the issue generally) and so his name remained on the ballot paper — paving the way for the controversial politician George Galloway, who campaigned almost exclusively on the issue of the Israel-Gaza conflict — an issue that caused Sir Keir more than a few issues during the recent local elections — to return to parliament.
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