Oh dear. It seems that James O’Brien has slipped up again in his ceaseless quest for truth. The hard-of-thinking LBC star is always able to spot a winner and now, having so spectacularly lost the arguments on Brexit and Covid classroom closures, he has turned his attentions to Labour, riding high in the polls after last week’s election win. O’Brien seems to have become something of a Keirleader – unsurprising perhaps given both men’s shared enthusiasm for a second referendum.
And it was in that spirit that O’Brien fearlessly tackled one of his own callers who complained about David Lammy telling LBC that Labour will not repeal the Public Order Act – the new law which hands extra powers to the police to handle protests. Lammy said on Sunday that ‘We can’t come into office, picking through all the conservative legislation and repealing it. It would take up so much parliamentary time. We need a positive agenda.’ Case closed, no?
Not according to O’Brien, who took issue with a caller who phoned in yesterday to express their disappointment in Keir Starmer for ‘not saying he’s going to overturn this latest bit of legislation.’ At once, the Old Amplefordian interrupted him and corrected his errant listener:
No, that’s unfortunately a misapprehension. I think that was a consequence of David Lammy saying something on LBC over the weekend. And what happens is, I’ll explain this to you because it’s actually quite important, and it’s a mark, of course, of how far LBC has come in recent years. You have some very strange people out there who spend their days desperately trying to resurrect the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn. So David Lammy says something off the cuff and out of context on LBC. And one of these weirdos clips it up and puts it out as proof that the Labour party isn’t going to be repealing any of this and they’re not going to be doing anything at all to remove legislation that they actually voted against in the first place. But Labour have since clarified that that is not the case at all. Not that it will get tweeted by all the clowns who came across your path or whose path you came across over the weekend, because they’re too busy trying to pass electric shock therapy through the corpse of Jeremy Corbyn’s political career. But hey ho, it’s up to us to get the truth out there.
Foolish listeners, falling for the Corbynite spin. O’Brien delivered that little paean to truth and justice shortly before 11 a.m yesterday; by 5 p.m Starmer was confirming to ITV that, er, he would not be repealing the Public Order Act.
Robert Peston: ‘You won’t repeal the Act?’
Keir Starmer: ‘I think we need to let it bed in, we need to look at how it operates in practice. Very often with public order legislation, as you know, there’s a period of bedding in, just because the power have got a power, it doesn’t mean they have to use it in every situation. Guidance emerges so we haven’t even got to that stage yet and I think we need to get to that stage.’
The perils of spinning for Starmer chameleon eh? Sadly, the Labour leader’s confirmation that his party is not intending to repeal the legislation has not (yet) been shared on O’Brien’s overactive Twitter account – let alone a mea culpa or apology to the caller he chastised. Steerpike looks forward to O’Brien correcting the record and highlighting Labour’s volte face to his listeners.
After all, it’s good to get the truth out there, isn’t it James?
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