Red light district: but it seems some MPs are treating the Parliamentary estate in a worse way than a brothel, as the alleged shenanigans here are not necessarily consensual.
Four years after the so-called ‘Pestminster’ scandal, the UK’s Parliament is still packed with perverts.
That’s the obvious conclusion to draw after it was claimed that 56 MPs have been accused of sexual misconduct under the Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme (ICGS).
Three of them are apparently members of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet – and two are alleged to be in Keir Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet.
Allegations range from making sexually inappropriate comments to criminality.
The ICGS was set up as an independent process with cross-party backing in 2018 after Pestminster when, if I recall correctly, it was claimed that Theresa May had details of sexual misbehaviour by dozens of Tory MPs.
This Writer wants to know how many of those on her list then are also on the ICGS list now – and if they are, why haven’t they been arrested?
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Recused: Chris Bryant can’t chair the Commons Privileges committee while it examines Boris Johnson’s behaviour because he has already called the prime minister a “proven liar”.
The House of Commons Privileges Committee – that will decide whether Boris Johnson deliberately lied to MPs about Partygate – could be temporarily replaced with an entirely new membership for the job.
Committee chairman Chris Bryant has already recused himself because he has publicly accused Johnson of being a “proven liar”.
The Labour Party must now appoint a new chair, and is said to be looking for a ‘grandee’ to take Bryant’s place.
And there are concerns that that three of the four Tories on the committee – Laura Farris, Alberto Costa and Andy Carter – are on the Government payroll as ministerial aides.
It is entirely possible to replace the whole committee in order to ensure fair process – as happened for the Parliamentary inquiry into Tory former Cabinet Minister Damian Green.
The process may be slightly disrupted if, as is being reported, seven Conservative MPs defect to Labour over Johnson’s Partygate criminality and alleged dishonesty (Dehenna Davison is the only possible defector to have been named).
Obviously they could not be nominated onto the committee but defections would make it harder for the Tories to find candidates.
— Rachael Swindows 85k (@Rachael_Swindon) March 15, 2022
Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed £2,588 last year for heating oil at his Suffolk home, where he lived with his wife.
Just when you thought you couldn’t dislike him much more.
You get a £200 loan.
— Rachael Swindows 85k (@Rachael_Swindon) March 15, 2022
Conservative MP Virginia Crosbie claimed back more than £2,600 to cover her gas and electricity bills last year.
Again, you get a £200 loan.
— Rachael Swindows 85k (@Rachael_Swindon) March 14, 2022
These are just three examples. Want to know how many MPs are sponging thousands of pounds from you – that’s right, you personally – this way?
340:
How much more prodding are the people of this country going to take before they finally react and fight back?! pic.twitter.com/vi5NJlXNdP
— Paul Gibson 💙💛🇺🇦🇵🇸✊ #GTTO (@Paulgibson69) March 15, 2022
Connected to this, here’s a good question:
If MPs on £81,932 need a pay rise of £2,212 to cover the cost of living increase, then by the same logic, minimum wage earners on £17,374 need a pay rise of £66,770 to cover the cost of living increase
In fact, the pay rise is supposed to cover extra work that MPs have to do now – and RD Hale’s argument still works.
By the same logic, if MPs deserve £2,212 to cover the value of the extra work they’re having to do, then minimum wage earners deserve £66,770. And their heating costs paid by the government.
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Rolling in it: MP pay has increased by nearly one-third since 2010, while the rest of us have become thousands of pounds worse-off, in real terms, because of austerity restrictions imposed by Boris Johnson and Tory prime ministers before him.
We’ve had some daft excuses for MPs’ pay rises before now but this one takes the biscuit: they’ll have £2,212 extra from the beginning of April because their responsibilities are said to have “dramatically increased”!
What utter dribble.
MPs’ pay will increase to £84,144 (for backbenchers) – a rise of almost £20,000 from the £65,738 they were getting when the Tories slithered into office by the back door in 2010.
The rise is being represented by the so-called Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), which was established in 2009 after that year’s infamous scandal over the expenses claimed by MPs.
In 2015, IPSA recommended a massive 10.9 per cent salary hike for MPs – to £74,000, justifying it by saying it would be offset by new tougher rules on parliamentary expenses, higher pensions contributions and the end of pay-offs to MPs who retire or voluntarily step down.
David Cameron was prime minister at the time. He said it was “simply unacceptable” – right up until his backbenchers decided they wanted to grab as much cash as they possibly could and threatened to rebel.
Amid public outcry, 69 MPs later said they would give the amount of their pay rise to charity – but research by The Sun (of all places) subsequently revealed that only 26 actually did so. The other two-thirds, it seems, only paid lip-service to the idea.
In April 2016 IPSA lined up a 1.3 per cent pay rise for MPs – more than three times the national average – to £74,962.
The following year saw an increase of 1.4 per cent to £76,011. The reason in both cases was said to be the annual change in average weekly earnings across the public sector.
How odd, when most public sector workers had been subjected to austerity restrictions since 2010 and hadn’t had a pay increase at all!
And, of course, the comparison would have required parity between MPs’ working conditions and those of public sector workers, meaning nurses, teachers and so on could enjoy the same rules on working hours, the same workers’ rights and make the same kind of expenses claims.
They don’t, so the claim is impossible to justify. But MPs had their £1000+ pay rise all the same.
In 2018, the pay rise had increased to 1.8 per cent, meaning MP salaries rose by £1,368 to £77,369. Again, there was no parity with the pay and conditions of other public sector workers, despite the rise being linked to any rise in their earnings.
By 2020, MPs’ pay was being increased by an inflation-busting 3.8 per cent to £81,932. I commented at the time that this was after the Tory government had created a massive increase in in-work poverty for the rest of us; eight million working-age people, 60 per cent of whom had jobs.
Oh, and MPs were also awarded increased expenses, to rub our noses in it still further.
Now IPSA has announced that MPs are to receive £2,212 extra in the financial year starting in April. And, like all the other excuses, the current claim isn’t being swallowed by the general public:
MPs to get a pay rise of £2200, for ‘dramatically increased duties ‘ last year . I think the same could be said of NHS staff and other keyworkers 😡
— #hellomynameis ..💙#wear amask #VaccinesWork (@nixbee13) March 2, 2022
Yes indeed, especially as MP pay has been linked with theirs so often!
Some have made light of it with humour…
BREAKING: A Conservative minister has confirmed it was necessary to give MPs a pay rise because they are no longer allowed to accept money from Russia 😭
— Laura Kuenssberg Translator (@BBCLauraKT) March 2, 2022
… but it is time to accept that IPSA doesn’t work.
MPs can’t go back to proposing – and voting on – their own pay rises because there simply wouldn’t be enough money to keep the current crop of greedy money-grubbers in cocaine (or whatever else they may choose to buy with it).
Personally, This Writer thinks MPs should be given a very massive pay cut.
The average salary in January this year was £29,600.
If the rest of us have to cope on that (and many of us have to manage on much less) then there’s no reason MPs can’t – and we all have to deal with increased pressures that the Tories in government have heaped on us.
Maybe the Tories would think differently about heaping extra costs like the 10+ per cent rise in National Insurance contributions and massively increased energy bills if they themselves have to cope with them in the same way we do.
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For the many? Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories are expelling people for being socialists. So much for their ‘broad church’!
What a rotten day for democracy in the Labour Party.
The ruling National Executive Committee of Keir Starmer’s Tepid Tories has voted to continue expelling people retrospectively for having anything to do with organisations that the party has since proscribed.
These people would have had no idea that they were doing anything wrong by their contact with these groups.
Indeed, at the time they weren’t doing anything wrong at all.
And in many, if not all, cases there is no reason to believe these groups have done anything to justify being proscribed, even now.
… And that means there is no reason to believe these now-former Labour Party members have done anything to justify the party expelling them.
On the other hand, there is ever reason to believe that Keir Starmer – and those others of his ilk who are responsible for this travesty – have done wrong.
But they can’t be expelled because they twist Labour’s rules to mean anything they want.
I find myself agreeing with a tweet I’ve just read, although I would paraphrase it slightly:
It’s a bad day for democracy, but a great day for corruption.
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Data theft: the Labour Party has admitted that details of members – and FORMER members, that it handed to a ‘third party’ without telling us, have been stolen. This includes information the party should not have had. Should we take the party to court over it?
The Labour Party has informed This Writer – and many others, it seems – that my data may have been hijacked after it was given to a “third party”.
This is very concerning for several reasons:
Firstly: I am no longer a member of the Labour Party and it should not be holding any information of mine, for any reason at all.
Secondly: I have not given permission for any data held by me to be passed on to any third party, and it is illegal for the Labour Party to have done so.
Next: The Labour Party has not passed on details of the identity of this mysterious third party. Why not? Is it embarrassing? Is it potentially incriminating? I want to know, and I reckon thousands of others will want to know as well.
Finally: Why am I hearing about this on November 4, possibly an entire week after the incident took place – and a day after many other victims were informed? Why were we not all informed at once?
According to Labour’s letter to affected people (which the party is apparently asking us not to share, although that part seems to have been cut from mine), party officers were informed of the incident on October 29.
This implies that the data was hijacked on a still earlier date, meaning that we went uninformed that our illegally-held data had been held by wrong-doers for a longer time than Labour suggests and that we have been vulnerable to cyber crime for all of that period without even knowing about it.
The crime itself seems to be a ransomware incident in which data is rendered inaccessible to a user unless it pays the hijacker some form of remuneration. If such payment is refused, the hijacker may go on to use the stolen data to harm the people to whom it belongs. Labour doesn’t mention this in its email.
Nor are we informed of the nature of the data that was stolen. It may include personal information that could be used for identity theft or blackmail, and/or financial information that could result in plain theft from our bank accounts. We don’t know because Labour hasn’t told us.
The email goes on to say that Labour has reported the incident to authorities including the National Crime Agency (NCA), National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). No doubt those organisations are busy doing very little about it (I have experience of the ICO’s dawdling with regard to Labour Party data breaches; it says it has received so many reports about the party that it is swamped).
And we are told that the Labour Party “takes the security of all personal information for which it is responsible very seriously”, which seems plainly untrue, considering the fact that it should not have had any of my personal information at all.
Members – old and current – are up in arms about this:
Labour was in possession of data that should have been deleted years ago.
It is possible to confirm this because tonight they are emailing old email accounts long discarded by members who left years ago.
That on its own poses and exceptionally serious legal question.
Given I resigned from @UKLabour over a year ago via the correct process I'm angry to receive an email from [email protected] telling me my data may have been breached
The fact Labour *still* had my info on file is surely a data breach in itself
i got one too BUT truth is they’ve been leaking my data for YEARS. i complained to ICO who said they had received so many complaints about Labour they were snowed under AND theyn they employ an allegedly ex Mossad spy to oversee Members!!!! these mother f***ers!! https://t.co/6WOKNTs6rR
Just received an email from the Labour Party telling me they have been hacked and that my data has been compromised. I left the Labour Party a year ago. Are they allowed to hang onto my data without my permission?
I’ve just had the email informing me of this data breach but very little detail of what information was leaked or who the third party provider was. #labourdataleak2021@PeterStefanovi2@MidWalesMike
— Aaron M AMUK #SOA #Standup #fairness #equal (@mnet_stratford) November 3, 2021
If the @UKLabour Party need to retain my data- despite expelling me- for future reference, ok, but why have they given it to a “third party”?
It is the Labour Party I was a member of & the Labour Party which I was expelled from.
We do need to know the identity of the “third party”. For one thing, it might be an organisation we would not want to have any of our information at all.
I would also be concerned if my information had been handed to the Jewish Labour Movement, the organisation Labour has said it would task with providing training to members on the nature of anti-Semitism and indoctrination against it.
That organisation is highly prejudiced, in the experience and opinion of This Writer, and I would not trust it with my personal details in any event.
One final point: Labour Party members may have no choice on who receives their information because party secretary David Evans and the leadership helmed by Keir Starmer demand that they automatically agree to everything the party does with it, as a condition of membership.
But I am no longer a member.
I think a class action lawsuit on this case may be appropriate, don’t you?
I would certainly be interested in hearing from anybody who feels the same way and is interested in taking the matter forward (although I would not want to be the principal claimant as I am already involved in a highly time-consuming court case, as is well known).
Who’s interested?
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Bottomley: the Father of the House of Commons doesn’t think MPs earn enough and says they should have as much as GPs. In the interests of “levelling up”, perhaps Boris Johnson should consider making their £100k-a-year the National Living Wage?
What an inconsiderate narcissist Peter Bottomley is!
On the day Universal Credit – the main unemployment benefit but also the subsidy paid to working people to make up for the failure of businesses to pay them a living wage – was cut, plunging 4.4 million people into poverty, he complained that his £82,000 MP’s salary isn’t enough.
Tory MP Peter Bottomley asks for a pay rise because he can't manage on his £82k a year. So insulting & insensitive considering the £20 cut to UC. Who are these people?!
— SueHsy #BDS💙💜Cult member 054- (@Thehopper7) October 7, 2021
He thinks he should get around the same amount as GPs – slightly more than £100,000 a year. Average salary – which is skewed upwards by the top 10 per cent of earners – is £31,000.
Strangely, he admitted that he is not suffering financially himself:
Although he said he currently is not struggling financially, he believes the situation is ‘desperately difficult’ for his newer colleagues.
The representative of Worthing West in West Sussex added: ‘I don’t know how they manage. It’s really grim.’
That didn’t stop people like his former colleague Michael Portillo leaping to support him on TV, with what can only be seen as a false argument:
Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley says some MPs are finding it “really grim” to live on a salary of £82,000 and their annual salary should be higher.
Ben points out these comments may not be welcomed especially at a time where the cost of living is increasing dramatically. pic.twitter.com/UwzvKEVSlz
Portillo was saying it must be hard for older MPs to put up with receiving the same amount as their younger colleagues, when Bottomley was saying it must be harder for younger MPs.
They can’t even get their story straight!
And the comparison with GPs doesn’t work, either, because doctors are paid according to the amount of time they work and MPs aren’t:
An MP gets paid over £6000 a month even if they only work one hour MPs pay should be paid by the hour like the rest of us.
— Jen Wood – est optimum simpliciter (@unojen_wood) October 7, 2021
This Writer doubts it would work if we paid MPs by the hour; it would just give them another opportunity to submit false claims (expenses scandal, anybody?).
Bottomley deserves all the sympathy he received from satirical songwriter Mitch Benn:
For most of the rest of us, £82,000 a year is an impossible dream. That’s why Bottomley has received a huge amount of criticism for his selfish words. Here’s one of the milder rebukes.
Still, Boris Johnson likes to talk about “levelling up” and he’s currently waffling about wages to anybody who can still be bothered to listen.
So, what about it, Boris? The Father of the House thinks wages should rise.
How about accommodating him, and increasing the National Living Wage to £100k all around?
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The flag and the faker: Keir Starmer has revealed his true – blue – colour in an 11,500-word rejection of Labour Party values, and is attacking party members both electorally and psychologically. He must be stopped before he does any more damage – and could face a challenge to his leadership if he pushes ahead with these vicious plans.
This Writer was practically salivating with anticipation about what I might read on BBC News after discovering the following on Twitter:
🚨 | NEW: During a key meeting between Trade Union leaders and the Labour leadership today, Keir Starmer was told in no uncertain terms that he needs to stop trying to rig rules in his favour, and instead "refocus the Labour party on the country and concerns of working people".
If this is what he stands for then it could have been done in far fewer than 11,500 words – and that’s down from his original claim that it would be 14,000 (let’s thank providence for small mercies)!
The short version is that Starmer has abandoned all Labour Party values. He proposes a “contribution” society – not in which contributions go from those according to their means, to those according to their needs – but (if I’m reading this right) from those who can be made to work the hardest to the UK as a whole (by which I’m presuming he means rich people like himself).
And he’s suddenly fully in favour of privatisation:
So, after everything that has happened today, LOTO now briefing that Starmer’s pamphlet marks a shift away from re-nationalising railways, water, Royal Mail and broadband providers. He writes “the role of government is to be a partner to private enterprise, not stifle it.” Mad.
And there’s a nasty return to the old “strivers v skivers” rhetoric that demonised a generation of people with disabilities and long-term illnesses and sent many of them to early graves because of benefit refusals on the basis of trumped-up excuses.
Some commentators have referred to fascist language that is reminiscent of Vichy France.
Others were more visual in their condemnation:
Keir Starmer’s 11,500 word essay has been released.
Personally I think that, if it’s supposed to be an essay, we should give it a mark and a comment:
D-
Needs improvement.
The BBC story unaccountably neglects to mention the meeting with the unions, so let’s see what we can get from elsewhere.
It seems that not even one union supported Starmer’s plan to return to an “electoral college” system of voting in Labour leadership elections, that would steal a huge amount of power from party members by depriving them of their individual votes altogether, and hand a huge amount to MPs – the party’s 200+ elected representatives would have one-third of the vote.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise – Starmer’s offer would not have benefited the unions in any way so they were able to reject it without any qualms:
Even under the electoral college, trade union members have one member one vote in their section. They have minds of their own. Often, they don't vote for the candidate their union recommends (e.g. they voted for Blair). This change won't give union leaderships any more leverage.
Because of that, over about a decade, trade unions, including, importantly, the GMB, worked hard to unshackle themselves from this system so leadership and deputy leadership candidates more responsive to their members' needs had a chance. This rule change undoes all that work.
Starmer's change also reintroduces some ridiculous anomalies, which several of the people who seem to be supporting it used to say were intolerable. Because this has been sprung on the party, none of this has been considered…
Will, horror of horrors, supporters of proscribed groups who have only just been expelled from Labour get a say over the next Labour leader through their trade union?
There's no answer, because it's just a factional power grab.
And of course, handing veto powers to 200 high-earning middle-class MPs will do nothing to make Labour relevant to working-class people.
Now: we had understood that, if he didn’t get enough support from the unions (or indeed any, as has happened), Starmer would scrap the plan and would not take it to the NEC for inclusion in the agenda for the annual conference at the weekend.
It seems that claim was a lie.
So my understanding is Starmer is bringing his leadership stitch up plan to the party's National Executive Committee on Friday, despite it having being rejected by unions, and his team are not even looking for a deal, but as one source says, "doubling down".
I think Starmer is panicking. He reckons this will be his only chance to force through the changes he needs to secure his position as leader.
You see, Starmer’s hired guns at the Governance and Legal Unit have apparently been busily despatching notices of suspension to constituency party delegates, in order to ‘fix’ the result of conference votes.
What kind of 'democratic reforms' have to be forced through by anti-democratic means?
Recipients of these letters are being told, it seems, that the reasons for the suspension of their membership will only be revealed after the conference, in what must be a breach of investigatory rules that is also attacking them financially (because they’ll already have paid for transport and accommodation at the Brighton-based conference) and psychologically:
To understand, you’d have to walk in the shoes of activists who’ve dedicated their lives to making the world a better, more equal, more peaceful place; to facing down racism, often at great personal cost & given countless hours to educating the next generation. (2/6)
Of course, this has always happened to good people. Socialists & trade unionists have always faced attack – some physical, some mental – but in a world where social media captures everything, that shaming is now both context-free & public at the same time. (4/6)
I’ve said it many times before, but the Labour Party as an organisation cannot go on exposing their members (unpaid volunteers for the party, remember) to this reckless, vicious treatment, whilst remaining silent, or worse, complicit. It’s beyond unacceptable. (6/6)
As a victim of this treatment, I can confirm the truth of Mr Sellers’s words.
So Starmer has launched an attack against the Labour movement, on several fronts: against the trade unions, by snubbing them and ignoring their wishes; against party members, by pressing on with his plan to disenfranchise them while also subjecting them to the torture of the disciplinary process; and to the wider Labour-supporting electorate by betraying everything the party should represent, in his scummy little screed.
Fortunately it seems he’s not going to have it all his own way.
The unions will oppose his plans – and that’s half the conference vote against him before he has even made his first proposal. More than half, if he has deliberately suspended a significant number of delegates.
The remaining delegates – if they’re worth a farthing – will want to reject his plan in solidarity with their wronged colleagues. Right, delegates?
And even some Labour MPs are preparing to rebel against this insult to democracy. Starmer may think this is bad enough:
Strange to think that these shenanigans all started because Starmer was worried about losing the vote to confirm his despotic acting general secretary David Evans in the role that has made him despised across the UK.
Whatever happens, Evans is toast.
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Apt: Keir Starmer reckons he was named after original Labour leader Hardie – but can anyone doubt that his illustrious forerunner might have said these words, if confronted with evidence of Starmer’s abysmal performance.
What else is NuLabour’s suit-in-chief lying about?
Starmer is on the record as saying he opposes ‘fire and rehire’ – the practice of firing employees, only to offer them their old jobs at a significantly reduced pay rate and/or with worsened working conditions.
But at yesterday’s (July 20) meeting of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, he pushed through a plan to axe 90 full-time jobs, while also taking on 30-50 staff on short-term contracts.
That’s ‘fire and rehire’ because you know some of the axed staff will have been doing the same work that the new employees will be asked to do – and some of these jobs will be occupied by the same people.
And what work will they be doing?
They will be identifying members of the Labour Party whose left-wing/socialist tendencies make them likely candidates to be victims of Starmer’s next purge.
But Starmer promised he would not attack party members too – didn’t he?
We already have such a man making a complete mess of running the UK.
Nobody is going to vote for Labour if it is only offering a Hobson’s Choice of the same evils with a different face.
POSTSCRIPT: You’ll notice that the 90 Labour staff who lost their jobs were the lowest-paid. This is because Labour refused to take a single penny from the salaries of its overpaid elite senior apparatchiks:
If there’s one quote that captures liberal ideology it would the one below. They choose to make 25% of their staff redundant (almost all the lowest paid) but won’t take a single penny off the bloated salaries of their senior management. pic.twitter.com/qDuPbmpWvg
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Maureen Lipman: this is an old image from 2018 because she honestly doesn’t rate the time it would take me to get a new one.
Once upon a time, Maureen Lipman was best-known as a legend among her fellow actors. Oh, and as Beattie from the British Telecom ads.
Now she’s best known for quitting the Labour Party – multiple times, apparently – and today for quitting actors’ union Equity.
Here’s Metro:
Coronation Street actress Dame Maureen Lipman has resigned from Equity, the actors’ union, after the organisation urged members to join a pro-Palestine march, it has been claimed.
‘I’m going to resign and I’m also going to ask for my £1000 a year membership fees to be given back to me, and I’m going to send it a charity for the victims on both sides,’ she told [The Telegraph].
‘I didn’t join a political union. I joined a union to protect its members. You don’t dictate to artists what they believe in, and don’t incite them to join a mob.’
This Writer is sure that the 200,000 people who took part in the “mostly peaceful” event in London last weekend will be nonplussed to learn that Lipman has branded them a “mob”.
And while some may say she is right to ask, “Where is [Equity president] Maureen Beattie on the Uyghurs, Rohingyas, the Sudanese, the Yemenites?” some of us applaud the decision to take a stand on a topical issue.
And when there’s a major demo for Yemenites and the others, I for one will look forward to seeing Equity representatives standing alongside everybody else.
A few misguided souls have supported Lipman’s stand:
Congrats to Dame Maureen Lipman for quitting the actors' union Equity after 54 years following the union president urging people to sign a petition calling for sanctions against Israel. Lipman says the union is "stacked full of Corbynistas".
I wonder whether she feels validated by the support of a former journalist who, as editor of The Sun, falsely accused Liverpool supporters of responsibility for the Hillsborough disaster?
And, as she is falsely accusing Equity of drumming up support for a “mob”, I can only surmise that she does.
Perhaps she prefers the statement by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which falsely claimed that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza happened because that overwhelmingly better-armed nation, supported as it is by the weaponsmiths of the UK and the USA, needed to defend itself against some home-made fireworks that mostly rebounded from the so-called Iron Wall.
Before reading this, let’s remember that the violence happened because Israeli soldiers had been attacking residents of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, turfing them out of their homes in what’s known as ethnic cleansing, and had invaded the Al Aqsa Mosque, hitting worshippers there with rubber bullets and stun grenades:
Equity have taken a moral stand against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) May 25, 2021
Strangely enough, accusing Jews in the UK of being more loyal to the people they know in Israel, has been described to us all as an anti-Semitic trope. Draw your own conclusions on what this says about the Board of Deputies.
Would you appreciate some more rational responses?
Some have reminded us that Lipman spent the last few years threatening to quit Labour over the false claims that the party had become a hotbed of anti-Semitism:
What with Maureen Lipman leaving the actors union Equity presumably its that time of the year when she leaves the Labour party again? Or is that twice a year now?
In fact it seems this isn’t the usual time of year for Lipman to quit Labour – that’s October or November, as far as I can tell.
Others have pointed out that Lipman’s stand is a contradiction: by opposing Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, she supported anti-Semite Boris Johnson’s racist Conservative Party back into power…
Maureen Lipman doing her comedy routine again. Supporting anti-Semites. Who knew? pic.twitter.com/yND94YVoXc
(If you don’t think Johnson is an anti-Semite, you need to read his novel 72 Virgins – or at least those parts of it that he stuffed with anti-Semitic tropes.)
… and by supporting apartheid Israel, she supported – well, read it for yourself:
This week, Israel has begun rounding up a new generation of Palestinian activists who led recent mass protests – a clear message from the Israeli state that resistance to apartheid will not be tolerated. https://t.co/ntQQevS5Du
As a Jew I'm disheartened that the likes of Maureen Lipman & #Israel do not seem to understand that a free, economically viable #Palestinian state living in peace with its Israeli neighbour is in everyone's best interest, including Israel's. Thankfully they are a dying breed.
— Bruce Paley Cofiwch Dryweryn #Corbyn 3.5% 🎸🏴☠️ (@ObrovskyTC) May 25, 2021
But the message that people have taken from her announcement is all too clear:
How the mighty have fallen. Lipman has brought a once-glittering career down to end in ashes.
Postscript: There is some good news:
Breaking news.
National treasures Maxine Peake and Miriam Margolyes will *not* be resigning from Equity because, unlike Maureen Lipman, they strongly oppose Israeli soldiers shooting 9-year-old Palestinian girls in the back in the name of "self defence".
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥🥀🇵🇸 (@WarmongerHodges) May 25, 2021
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