The deputy leader of Britain’s main opposition, the Labour Party, has refused to apologise for calling Prime Minister Boris Johnson “scum”.
During the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Angela Rayner, an acolyte of socialist Jeremy Corbyn who took the Marxist Black Lives Matter-inspired knee with Keir Starmer last year, was caught echoing the common far-leftist phrase, ‘Tory scum’.
“You cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic [inaudible] Banana Republic, vile, nasty, Etonian [inaudible] piece of scum,” Ms Rayner reportedly described Boris Johnson and other senior Conservatives during a reception on Saturday evening.
Confirming she had called the prime minister “scum”, Rayner said she would only apologise to Prime Minister Johnson if he apologised for comments she claims are offensive, likely to include remarks when Boris Johnson described women who wore full-face Islamic veils as looking like bank robbers and “letterboxes”. The deputy leader told the BBC on Sunday: “I think he needs to apologise for comments he has made in the past… I will apologise when Boris apologises for saying the comments he has made, I will retract that he is scum.”
Far from a robust response to the kind of language being used by the second-most powerful figure in Labour, party leader Sir Keir Starmer told the broadcaster’s Andrew Marr: “I wouldn’t have used those words, and I’ll talk to Angela about it later on.”
Starmer declined to say whether he thought Rayner should apologise to the leader of the government, saying: “Angela said those words. She takes a different approach to me.”
Rayner then doubled down on the comments, telling Sky News on Sunday: “Anyone who leaves children hungry during a pandemic and can give billions of pounds to their mates on WhatsApp, I think that was pretty scummy.”
The 41-year-old grandmother later claimed that she was just using the language of her Northern, working-class background to express herself.
Some senior figures in the Labour Party suggested Rayner should not have used the language, with one shadow cabinet minister telling The Times: “She’s an imbecile and until she realises that the party will never be credible.”
But she received support from the far-leftists who held power under the Corbyn years. John McDonnell, who had once called for capitalism to be overthrown to give way for a “socialist society”, said that while he did not approve of the language, “deep down she’s expressing the anger many of us feel”.
While former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended from the party last year over his reaction to a report on antisemitism in Labour, told LBC: “Angela uses her own words, she’s absolutely right to attack this government for the way it’s treating people in our society… I don’t think she has anything to apologise for. She speaks from the heart, she’s saying it like it needs to be said.”
Labour has been losing ground in Britain since the December 2019 General Election, where it suffered its worst defeat since 1935, thanks to the Conservatives picking up swathes of traditional working-class Labour-voting areas after promising to deliver Brexit, whereas the Corbyn-led Labour Party had backed a second referendum.
The embarrassment for the party continued under Starmer’s leadership, when Labour lost Hartlepool to the Tories in a May 2021 by-election, and only managed to hold on to the multicultural Batley and Spen by just 323 votes in a July by-election — not even one-tenth the number of votes her party predecessor gained to maintain the seat in the last General Election.
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