Labour's double standards. Why can some sin while others can't?

 

Steve Reed MP

In 2020, Labour's Shadow Communities Secretary, Steve Reed, referred to a Jewish Conservative donor, Richard Desmond, as a "puppet-master'. He later deleted the tweet and apologised.

Despite using what many considered to be an anti-Semitic trope, Sir Kier Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, didn't withdraw the whip. Although Reed Tweeted: "Is billionaire former porn-baron Desmond the puppet master for the entire Tory cabinet?", a spokesperson for Sir Kier said: "Steve deleted the tweet and did not mean to cause any offence."

There seems to a curious double standard in Starmer's Labour Party. Why is that some can sin and others can't?  Some like Steve Reed get defended while others like the Labour MP, Rupa Haq, who called the Conservative MP,  Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng, "superficially black", get suspended and sent for anti-racism and bias training, after they apologised.

Sir Kier has now suspended Dianne Abbott for a letter she wrote to the Observer in which she said that the Jews, the Irish, and Travellers, were not victims of 'racism' but of 'prejudice'. Starmer quite rightly criticised her stance of there being a hierarchy of racism which he said was not the view of the Labour Party.

Although there's nothing remotely anti-Semitic in Abbott's letter to the Observer, which most people understand to be a hatred of Jews as Jewish people, Starmer has also accused her of anti-Semitism. Since writing her letter to the Observer, Abbott, has now unreservedly apologised for any offence caused and now accepts that the Jews, the Irish, and Travellers, can be victims of racism.