Boris Johnson’s Conservatives haven’t had the best start to a general election campaign. Still, Thursday was astonishingly bad for Britain’s Labour Party.
It involved three separate absurdities from three separate Labour candidates for Parliament.
Let’s start with Kate Ramsden, who stepped down after The Jewish Chronicle reported on her blog post which asserted that “the Israeli state is like an abused child who becomes an abusive adult … Like child abuse it has to stop … as we intervene with child abusers the international community needs to intervene with Israel.”
Right.
Next up was what a BBC journalist described as “one of the most extraordinary few minutes of radio I ever heard.” This involved one Labour candidate, Jane Aichison, defending another Labour candidate, Zarah Sultana, for Sultana’s assertion that she would welcome the death of various leaders. Sultana included former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in that list.
Aichison responded to this by equivocating on whether it’s bad to welcome the death of innocent people, then saying it is bad, then finally concluding that it’s something people do and we should accept it from a prospective parliamentarian. But it was Aichison’s concluding example that really topped things off. “For instance,” she said, “they celebrated the death of Hitler.” The BBC anchor was left speechless.
Alongside this lunacy, the left-wing Daily Mirror‘s political editor, Pippa Crerar observed, “Labour chiefs locked in debate about who replaces Roger Godsiff in [Birmingham] Hall Green. Salma Yaqoob, who stood for Respect and defended homophobic school protests vs local councillor Sharon Thompson who faced probe for liking homophobic comments. Where do they find these people?”
Where indeed?
