Labour’s newly-elected MP for Birmingham Erdington won a Thursday special election despite last-minute revelations of what appear to be extreme racial views.
Paulette Hamilton was elected as an MP in England’s second city, Birmingham, on Thursday, in a low-turnout by-election with a majority of just 3,266. The vote was triggered after the former Labour MP, Jack Dromey, died suddenly in January from heart failure.
The victory — although perhaps inevitable, given the seat’s history, being represented by Labour since the Second World War — comes despite footage emerging late in the campaign of what appear to be extreme views expressed in the last decade.
Unearthed by upstart British broadcaster GB News, the 2015 footage comes from a panel event titled ‘The Ballot or the Bullet: Does Your Vote Count?’
The discussion was chaired by the controversial ‘Black Studies’ professor Kehinde Andrews on behalf of the Organisation of Black Unity.
The event, which was recorded and is still available online as of the time of publication, was dedicated to radical Islamic black nationalist Malcolm X’s 1964 “ballot or bullet” speech, which was played throughout the session to help provide context for what the term meant.
In his speech, Malcolm X used what would certainly be regarded today as racially charged and provocative language.
Hamilton — who has been a Labour councillor in Birmingham since 2004 — arrived 28 minutes into the session, but after joining the panel she claimed that she had been “isolated” in her life and branded as a “big mouth” as well as “ignorant” because she “stood up for the rights of black people”.
Speaking on the topic of the “ballot or bullet”, Hamilton ultimately came out against violence, but this appeared to be largely on the basis of practicality rather than ideological opposition to using the cited “bullet” to gain advantage.
She said she was “not sure that we will get what we really deserve in this country using the vote. But I don’t know if we are a strong enough group to get what we want to get if we have an uprising”.
“I think we will be quashed in such a way we could lose a generation of our young people. So I am very torn. I went away and I watched the Malcolm X film and listened to a lot of what he’s said to make sure I was ready,” she added.
During the event, the now-MP mentioned she had sat in on a hearing of a mentally unwell “young black man” who she described as “absolutely gorgeous”, alleging that the system was “pumping him up with drugs” as part of a wider conspiracy in British society to destroy black men, explaining that “if you want to destroy a race of people, you destroy their men”.
Hamilton asserted that black men are “overrepresented” in the criminal justice system, mental health system, and in unemployment statistics.
“They’re not represented at all, hardly, in business. There’s just nowhere to be found where they can build a family structure — why is that?”, she demanded, expanding on her belief in an anti-black conspiracy in Britain.
The MP also endorsed a school entryism strategy similar to one detected among Islamic jihadists in Birmingham in 2014. When the plan was uncovered by the authorities, it was revealed a radical Muslim group had plotted to remove senior teachers in Birmingham schools by spreading false allegations about them and replace them with Islamists.
Speaking of minorities redirecting state apparatus to suit their interests, Hamilton said: “We had Trojan horse in the council. Our Muslim brothers and sisters for many, many years put things out there saying that they had made a plan about how they were going to try to not integrate but ensure that their teachings and what have you got into the system.”
“What then happened was many of the schools, inner-city schools in Birmingham, certain schools, the Muslim families, they filled the schools, they then ensured that they took over the governorships, as they took over the governorships they made sure that the heads of those schools were people that they wanted to represent their cause”, she went on.
“What they then did with doing all of this, it made sure that their religious views and their beliefs were taken through the education system. It was also then taken into politics; we have large numbers of Muslim councillors, we’ve got two MPs,” Hamilton said, highlighting the political success of the Muslim community in Birmingham at the time.
Hamilton highlighted how she views the black community as not being “on the map” and said they “live here and many of us will die here and many of us are not liberated even in our minds — we’re in the African way of thinking”.
The MP then called for a movement for the black community similar to the Islamic education Trojan horse strategy, initially saying that “I believe we have to take over some of the structures that are there already” and “I know that we want something of our own but sometimes you have to infiltrate other systems to get change.”
Hamilton suggested that she needed support from the black community for her political ambitions, complaining that “a small group of other people” tried to vote against her selection as a council candidate. After being reminded by another panellist that there was a camera filming, Hamilton apologised and said she would make sure to be “politically correct”.
She then revealed that the people she had alluded to were Sikhs who had attempted to replace her as a candidate with an “English woman” — after a Sikh failed to be selected — which she claimed was because they believed that woman would “be easier to get rid of” and replace with a Sikh candidate.
The Labour Party refused to condemn Hamilton’s remarks or distance themselves from her radical views, instead saying that “Paulette Hamilton is arguing for better representation for the black community in public life and as she is campaigning to become Birmingham’s first black MP she has a point.”