Long serving Labour MP and Brexit supporter Kate Hoey was subjected to a torrent of “bile” from Hard Left trolls and EU loyalists for sharing a Breitbart report covering Shadow Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner’s commitment to a clean Brexit from the EU’s Single Market and the Customs Union.
Ms Hoey, 71, was recently reelected to Parliament with a greatly increased majority by her constituents in Remain-supporting Vauxhall, who evidently accepted that her open and consistent support for Brexit was a matter of principle.
A keen sportswoman and former High Jump champion in her native Northern Ireland, she once served as Minister for Sport in the Tony Blair administration, and has worked tirelessly for her party despite her differences with the leadership over the question of EU membership.
After sharing Breitbart’s report on the Remain-voting Shadow Trade Secretary’s conceding that a clean Brexit must be carried out in order to deliver the changes to immigration policy which the British public expect following their historic vote to Leave the European Union, Ms Hoey was branded a “vile woman”, “traitor”, “fascist” and “the lowest of the low” by dozens if not hundreds of trolls, many of whom demanded her deselection or immediate resignation.
The Shadow Trade Secretary’s seemingly iron-clad commitment was thrown into question by Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, who indicated that membership of the Single Market and Customs Union should not be “swept off the table” after all.
Ms Hoey’s most aggressive detractors indicated that their anger hinged upon baseless and unsupported assertions of Breitbart’s status as a “Neo Nazi” or “White Supremacist” outlet.
Breitbart was, in fact, was conceived in Israel by Jewish-American co-founders Andrew Breitbart and Larry Solov, and its London bureau is led by Raheem Kassam, an ex-Muslim whose family hail from the Gujarati Indian diaspora community in Tanzania.
Euroscepticism was at one time mainstream within Ms Hoey’s party, with the late Labour heavyweight Tony Benn setting aside his differences with Tory rival Enoch Powell to lead the campaign to leave the European Economic Community — as the EU was then known — in 1975.
Mr Benn believed British democracy was ultimately based on the sovereignty of the people, who lend their powers to MPs duty-bound to return them intact at subsequent elections.
The process of European integration, in Benn’s view, eroded that principle, as it involved politicians to permanently transferring various sovereign powers to EU officials and institutions between elections.
https://twitter.com/rjcrabtree/status/890559570824896512
Tony Blair, now a leading figure in the fight to sabotage Brexit, once stood on an explicitly Eurosceptic platform, with his election leaflet in the 1983 general election pledging “a withdrawal from the EEC which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs”.
Labour figures like Ms Hoey, along with other party stalwarts like Frank Field and Dennis Skinner, represent a continuation of that tradition — as did party leader Jeremy Corbyn and key lieutenant John McDonnell, before their elevation to the party leadership.
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