The modern Labour Party has for many years now adopted a holier-than-thou posture of political correctness on all issues, at least for public consumption.
During the 1980s its local government Leftists, especially in London, pursued the ideology now known as ‘woke’ on every available issue, from sexuality to racism. Especially under the leadership of Tony Blair, Labour embraced this set of ideas nationally and at the very top.
In its landmark legislation, the Equality Act of 2010, it embodied it in the law of the land, so transforming the country in many ways, some of them highly contentious and radical.
It has lain behind Labour’s most controversial policy of all, the encouragement of immigration on a scale never seen before in our history, which one Labour operative once unwisely revealed had been designed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
In that case, you might imagine that the Labour movement’s officer class would themselves be paragons of woke, personally committed to the secular religion they work day and night to spread across the country. So they should, given their role in establishing these changes.
So how are we supposed to respond to the behaviour of Labour’s long-term political professional Andrew Gwynne? Until last night he was a Health Minister, having worked for decades in the engine room of the Labour Party, emerging first as a very young councillor and then as an MP.
We are entitled to ask, in the light of what The Mail on Sunday reveals about him today, what this person actually believes.
Many of us remember how the re-energised Blairite Labour Party posed as ‘servants of the people’, a new kind of politician. Even if they hadn’t, decent members of Parliament always pledge to serve all their constituents, not just those who support them.
Andrew Gwynne (pictured) has been sacked as health minister following a foul-mouthed jibe at a pensioner and anti-semitic comments
The PM was right to get rid of Mr Gwynne, but this will not close the issue or prevent questions of how widespread these views are in his ranks
But observe the foul-mouthed, insulting scorn that this servant of the people directed secretly at a pensioner who was candid enough to admit he had not voted Labour.
Mr Gwynne’s comment on the late American psychologist and peace activist Marshall Rosenberg, that he sounded ‘too Jewish’ and ‘too militaristic’, also betrays bigoted ignorance. How can anyone be ‘too Jewish’, except in the mind of an anti-Semite?
Mr Rosenberg’s lifelong commitment to non-violence and anti-racism would surely meet with the approval of modern Labour. This sort of thing is not just a joke, as Mr Gwynne’s supporters might argue. It shows that he just is not what he publicly appears to be.
His sneers at black Labour politicians do not suggest that Mr Gwynne is entirely in the clear on that score. And his crude remarks about Angela Rayner sound like one of those old-fashioned club comedians who nobody nowadays even tries to defend. It is indefensible.
The Prime Minister was right to get rid of Mr Gwynne, and his constituents might be wise to look elsewhere for an MP. But this will not close the issue. How widespread is this sort of thing among the ranks of the woke? How will we ever find out?
In the absence of answers to these questions, we should in future treat the moralising of the Left on such matters with some suspicion, and not allow ourselves to be panicked into cancelling people for far smaller offences, on the say so of men and women who may very well be more like Mr Gwynne than they would like us to know.
