I’d rather vote for a massive filthy, rancid fatberg from London’s sewerage system than vote for the Labour MP Richard Burgon. I cannot see any positives in the man’s politics at all. The man is obsessed with ‘Palestine’, opposed to the re-establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, makes numerous gaffes and has recently been caught out shilling for Communist China by failing to condemn the appalling treatment of the Uighar Islamic minority in that country. With the Uighars being forced into concentration camps and forcibly sterilised the one thing that I would expect a Labour MP to do is to condemn such things. Unfortunately Richard Burgon MP did not.
The political commentator Oliver Kamm has decided to wade into the matter of Richard Burgon, his gaffes and his failure to condemn obvious atrocities over on the CapX blog. Mr Kamm outlined some of Burgon’s gaffes along with his extreme leftism, his lack of geographical knowledge and Burgon’s general failure to be knowledgable about his brief when appearing on television. He then went on to describe his disgust at Burgon’s failure to acknowledge the dire predicament of the Uighars.
Oliver Kamm said:
Yet even knowing all this, I had till this week overestimated Burgon’s intelligence, as I’d looked merely at the evidence of his capabilities rather than anything deeper. On an LBC discussion yesterday, he was asked six times whether he believed the Chinese communist regime had committed genocide against the Uighur Muslim population of Xinjiang. Burgon’s response was that ‘there’s things that the government of the United States has done historically that we profoundly disagree with’, and spoke of Hiroshima. His response was worse than evasive. It was abhorrent.
I doubt that Burgon has given more than a moment’s thought to the Uighurs, but the evidence of grotesque atrocities against them is there if he cares to look for it. Amnesty reports have detailed these for almost 30 years. The statistical evidence of a precipitous collapse in birth rates among Uighurs in recent years confirms a pattern of savage repression, as do accounts of extra-judicial killings and official policy statements aiming at the mass institutionalisation of Uighur children and sterilisation of Uighur women. This is indeed a genocidal assault on a minority population.
Mr Kamm, who is a Labour voter, then went onto point out that too often the progressive Left makes common cause with those who are basically genocidal tyrants. He added that Burgon’s ‘density’ is no excuse for his ‘indecency’ in failing to condemn China’s treatment of the Uighars.
My own view is that the people of Leeds East are being badly served by Richard Burgon. I believe that they deserve better representation than they are getting especially as one of their former MP’s was one of the intellectual giants of the Labour movement the former Chancellor the late Dennis Healey. The people of Leeds East used to have one of the best MP’s to represent them, now they have one of the worst.
Yes of course, but I don’t live in Leeds East so I’m not going to have to make that immediate voting decision. My view is that political parties have a perfect right to be broad churches and the debates are interesting. There are currently many shades of opinion among MPs in our current Conservative administration for instance. The Labour party has half or dozen or so hard lefters. Rather than deplatforming them I would rather they were put to more scrutinies and debates. The Wealth Tax’ for instance? Would it work?
First of all sorry for my delay in reply. My Sabbath intervened. There’s always been some left wing MP’s in Labour but prior to Corbyn Labour leaders did their best to keep the more extreme left from gaining influence. Atlee for example was so appalled by the actions of the Soviets when he was in the wartime cabinet that when he won the 45 election he took great care to keep Communists out of the Labour Party. Corbyn on the other hand allowed extremists to not just enter the party but control major sections of it.
I agree with you that political parties are broad churches and that debate is to be encouraged. Sometimes those elected can be better than the party whose banner they run under. For example I greatly dislike the Lib Dems but I’d happily vote for my local Lib Dem councillor as he’s a decent bloke.
The problem with Burgon is that he’s a sloganeering ideologue. He’s not like an Eric Hefer or a Michael Foot who were principled thoughtful leftists who could make their cases for their point of view, Burgon shouts slogans whether they be about Israel or the economy or anything else, without much thought going into what he is saying or what the implications of what he is saying have.
I don’t believe in deplatforming people like Burgon, on the contrary I want to see him challenged and where necessary mocked.
As for the wealth tax Britain has tried this before in the 60’s and 70’s and all that happened was that those who could earn big money left the UK and often took their businesses with them.