Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Labour’s worrying descent into communalism

Labour candidate for Batley and Spen Kim Leadbeater (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, Kim Leadbeater, reportedly pulled out of a hustings featuring George Galloway over the weekend. This makes sense. Not only is Galloway a master of bluster whose pompous bombast has a steamroller quality in a debate, but Leadbeater would have been debating the person of whom she is currently doing a dubious impression. If the organisers were concerned about getting Labour’s perspective, they could have stuck a mirror in front of Galloway and given it equal time.

The no-show came as Leadbeater, whose sister Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing extremist five years ago, told the Independent:

I think sadly there are a number of people who are going to come here and try and sow division and cause problems for our community, and actually this area needs an MP who can bring people together. And on the back of the work I’ve done over the last few years, I think I’m that person. We need to build bridges, not cause division.

Labour has run a communalist campaign in this by-election, attempting to drive Muslim voters to the polls along sectarian lines

Hardly subtle, yet during this campaign it is Leadbeater who has posed with pro-Palestinian activists wearing T-shirts depicting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza as Palestine. Leadbeater who produced a leaflet denouncing ‘the illegal occupation’, characterising Israeli police efforts to control rioting on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount as ‘attacks on protestors and worshippers in the Holy Al-Aqsa mosque’, calling Israel’s limited and targeted air strikes in response to Hamas rocketing ‘unacceptable’, and pledging to be ‘your strong national voice on Palestine in parliament, to government and within the Labour party’. Leadbeater also sent a letter to voters vowing to be ‘a strong voice for Palestinian human rights and statehood’, condemning ‘the violence perpetrated by Israeli security forces at the Al-Aqsa site’, this time rebuking Israel’s riot-policing tactics as not only ‘unacceptable’, but ‘outrageous’.

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