It's not the first time.
Health minister Nadine Dorries and Tory MPs Maria Caulfield and Lucy Allan have been criticised after sharing a misleading video from a far-right twitter account.
Dorries has previously shared far-right disinformation claiming Muslim men can claim benefits from mutiple wives, confused two British-Asian women, claimed muslim Mayor of London Sadiq Khan had a responsibility for grooming in Telford and Rotherha and told an immigrant journalist to be grateful.
When Boris Johnson said Muslim women looked like “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, Dorries said he “did not go far enough”. Johnson made her a health minister in 2019 and promoted her to Minister of State this month.
In this latest incident, Dorries said “revealing” and Caulfield said “true face of the Labour leader” when quote-tweeting a video of Keir Starmer speaking when he was in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service.
The tweet and edited video implies Starmer didn’t prosecute grooming gangs because their victims didn’t report abuse straight away, their stories weren’t consistent and because the victims had been given drugs and alcohol.
In fact, the unedited video shows that Starmer was explaining the damaging assumptions made by the police and Crown Prosecution Service in the past. “Those assumptions do not withstand scrutiny,” he said, as he announced new guidelines he called a “clean break with the past”.
The twitter account which posted this video has recently said that more BAME people are dying of coronavirus because of a “lack of vitamin D” and because they live in “overpopulated shitholes”.
Labour MPs Wes Streeting and Tonia Antoniazzi criticised Dorries and shortly afterwards she and Allan deleted their tweets and Caulfield deleted her account. None have apologised.
Miqdaad Versi, a spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain said he doubted these MPs would get the amount of negative coverage which muslim Labour MP Naz Shah “made a mistake” re-tweeting something.
Even though, she deleted it after eight minutes, there were dozens of articles and the Equality and Human Rights Commission publicly criticised her, he said.
The former chair of the Conservative Party Sayeeda Warsi has called for an inquiry into islamophobia in the party. She has said the party is institutionally islamophobic and that at least three of its MPs should be kicked out of the party.
Joe Lo is a co-editor of Left Foot Forward
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