Dawn Butler: Labour MP complains about racial profiling; Jews forced out of Labour nod
Labour MP Dawn butler says racial profiling led to police stopping a car she was travelling in. The MP for Brent Central recorded the incident in Hackney, east London. She says police must “stop associating being black and driving a nice car with crime”. It’s the Guardian’s lead news story.
The Guardian reports that Butler says the car was being driven by her male friend, who is black. She says officers said the vehicle was registered in North Yorkshire. It wasn’t. And so what is it was? Apparently police were looking at people travelling into the area. But when did driving over a certain distance become a crime?
So who was in the car? The Standard writes:
After details of the incident emerged, some Twitter users claimed that Ms Butler had flipped her camera to make it look as though she was the driver of the car. Some also said she had blurred out the driver’s face because he is white.
Insisting she did not flip the camera and confirming that her friend is black, Ms Butler said: “It was quite interesting to go onto Twitter late last night and then start seeing all these sort of conspiracy theories.
“And it just made me think… the length that people will go to just to excuse racism away, or discrimination away, or injustice away.”
Ms Butler had earlier told Channel Four News that there was “no other reason” for being stopped “apart from the colour of our skin and we were driving a nice car.”
The Metropolitan police say an officer had entered the registration number wrongly into a computer system. They have apologised.
“I had no intention of speaking about this until the officers became very obnoxious,” says Butler, who made a video recording of the incident on her phone. “I just felt that if I don’t use my platform to talk about this, I’m doing a disservice to everyone who gets wrongly stopped and searched, and all the black people who are constantly unjustly profiled.”
Well said.
One note: Butler was a shadow minister under Jeremy Corbyn. She campaigned for Corbyn to be made PM. Writing in The Critic, Nick Cohen looks at the Left’s little problem:
As for the Labour relationship with Jews, the story changes so fast it’s as if we are back in the USSR. Yesterday’s far-left line was that accusations of racism were “smears” by right-wing “Zionist” enemies. All of a sudden, the smears turn out to be true or at least plausible charges that anti-Corbyn Labour officials deliberately ignored as part of a plot against the very party they were duty bound to serve. ..
We are meant to forget too that Corbyn might have decided to combine support for Palestinian rights with a recognition of Israel’s right to exist. He might not have befriended terrorists who wanted to kill Jews for being Jews. He might have defended Jewish MPs, and stopped the left driving them from his party. He might have refused to become the willing and paid servant of the Iranian state’s propaganda service. He might have recognised racist caricatures straight out of fascist Europe and denounced rather than defended them. He might have refrained from descending into the banter of every saloon-bar bigot and not scoffed that, despite “having lived in this country for a very long time” Zionists “don’t understand English irony”.
Some Labour MPs left the party over its attitude towards Jews. Dame Louise Ellman left the Labour party because, “Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, antisemitism has become mainstream in the Labour party. Jewish members have been bullied, abused and driven out. Antisemites have felt comfortable and vile conspiracy theories have been propagated. A party that permits anti-Jewish racism to flourish cannot be called anti-racist.” Labour stands accused of being institutionally racist.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission is due to announce the findings of its formal investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party. It set out to determine whether the party “unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish.”
Butler has spoken about anti-Jewish racism in the Labour Party. “I believe that Labour has badly let down the Jewish community,” she wrote on her site.
Racism is disgusting. Call it out when you see it. And above all, don’t vote for it. Before the last election, The Jewish Chronicle published a cry for help: “If this man is chosen as our next prime minister, the message will be stark: that our dismay that he could ever be elevated to a prominent role in British politics, and our fears of where that will lead, are irrelevant.”
Helen Lewis put it well: “Britain’s Jews are used to feeling that their safety is provisional, that they are not fully accepted, that they will always be treated as outsiders. The Labour Party now joins a long list of those who have let them down.”
Posted: 10th, August 2020 | In: News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
