Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Why won’t the left speak up for Sarah Champion?

Where’s the concern for Labour MP Sarah Champion? Where are the leftists demanding that this female MP stop being harassed merely for expressing her views? Where are the tweets drawing attention to Ms Champion’s plight — the fact that she now needs an actual security team because people who hate her political views want to physically harm her? In this post-Jo Cox era, I thought we were all meant to have the backs of elected politicians who are under threat from extremists. And yet when it comes to Champion — just such an elected politician — people seem to be looking the other way.

It isn’t hard to work out why. It is because Champion’s persecutors are largely Muslims, and Champion’s ‘crime’ is an unforgivable one in the eyes of the new left: she criticised the behaviour of certain parts of the Muslim community. Champion, the MP for Rotherham, committed the political and social faux pas of suggesting that Muslim grooming gangs are a bad thing, and that we should speak honestly and frankly about their existence. And so it seems that, to some on the left, she is fair game for harassment and threats. ‘Screw her’ seems to be their attitude.

Last week, it was revealed that Champion has had her security detail ‘beefed up’ after she received death threats for her comments on Pakistani grooming gangs. In an article for the Sun, Champion had made the indisputably correct statement that there is ‘a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls’ in her Rotherham constituency. This is a reference to the Rotherham grooming scandal, which has been followed by other similar scandals, in Telford, Oxford, Rochdale: situations where gangs of mostly Muslim men exploit and abuse vulnerable working-class white girls.

For pointing this out — for expressing concern about the safety of white working-class girls — Champion was subjected to hateful abuse.

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