Labour MP Simon Danczuk, the MP who recently clashed with Owen Jones on the Daily Politics over the Spending Review, has a piece in today's Telegraph in which he writes that the politics of the Labour left "should be viewed in the same way as we view the views of the BNP".
Labour MP Simon Danczuk, the MP who recently clashed with Owen Jones on the Daily Politics over the Spending Review, has a piece in today’s Telegraph in which he writes that the politics of the Labour left “should be viewed in the same way as we view the views of the BNP”.
This is a shame, and it appears frustration has got the better of Danczuk, because putting aside this absurd comparison he makes some good points in the piece.
But no, the Labour left should not “be viewed in the same way as the BNP”. The BNP are a racist party who, amongst other things, would like to forcibly repatriate non-white Britons. If Danczuk had been comparing communists to the BNP then there might have been an academic argument to be had (Stalinists killed more people than fascists, after all), but he only refers to the “Labour left”.
In other words, Danczuk is comparing people who use their time and energy to try to improve the lives of working people – usually for nothing in return – to racist thugs and holocaust deniers who firebomb “P*ki shops”.
As well as being extraordinarily lazy, this is a disgraceful slur on many fine activists.
Sure, some of the Labour left’s ideas about nationalisation may be a little naive; but this does not make them comparable to a party that promotes sinister racial theories and hates people based on nothing more than the pigmentation of their skin.
Danczuk is right to highlight the economic illiteracy of those unreconstructed Bennites who have failed to learn from the failures of the post-war settlement. He is also right to criticise those in the Labour Party who view “Blairites” as the main enemy, rather than the Conservative Party. But comparing the Labour left to the BNP is not the way to make that point.
Being wrong is not the same as being racist, and it’s remarkable that anyone (least of all an MP) should need to be told that.
27 Responses to “Message to Simon Danczuk MP: Being wrong is not the same as being racist”
therealguyfaux
Any fair-minded person would need to recognise and admit there isn’t a fag paper able to be slipped between a BNP’er of 2013 and a Labourite of 1913. Where each faction has gone since– the BNP is a Mosleyite sort of Labour from the early 1930’s not knowing what century they live in, mainstream Labour being a more internationalist Social Democracy party (in theory) which also has failed to turn the page– only makes it look as if they are diametric opposites. Comparing so-called far-Left and far-Right and saying there is some sort of qualitative and quantitative difference in intolerance level, towards that which they have no tolerance for, is the same as saying there’s a difference between Liverpool hooligans and Chelsea hooligans because one wears blue and comes from London, while the other wears red and comes from Merseyside, which as we all know makes all the difference in the world.
Giles Humphry
Mad and evil seems a good description of those who have covered up for industrial scale gang rape by race hate gangs in Rotherham Birmingham, Manchester etc, in the name of community cohesion. In fighting for the victims Danczuk has been a lone voice of reason in the cesspit of moral insanity created by “left” identity politics.