An advert which is "not to everybody's taste"
Here John McDonnell, Labour MP and former shadow chancellor, condemns a Labour attack advertisement which accuses the Prime Minister of not believing that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison
John McDonnell is only one of a number of Labour supporters who have called on the Labour leadership to pull the advert.
The Labour advert concerned is, of course, an egregious smear - in fact the Prime Minister had spoken this week about the measures to be taken to ensure that those who sexually assault children are caiught, convicted after a fair trial, and do face jail. MPs across the political spectrum have condemned Labour’s attack ad against Sunak .
Indeed, to quote the Independent Newspaper, it turns out that the statistics about prosecution and conviction rates which underpins the Labour claim is based on
"data going back to 2010, when Sunak was yet to even become an MP and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was serving as Director of Public Prosecutions."
Even the hapless Lucy Powell MP, Labour's shadow culture secretary who was put up to defend the ad could only bring herself to do so pretty halfheartdly and admitted that it was not to everyone's taste.
Twitter has added a context warning to Labour party tweets of the advert.
The Labour advertisement has also been condemned my a number of people not directly involved in party politics. For example, the Campaign group Compassion in Politics condemned Labour’s tactics.
Jennifer Nadel, the organisation’s co-director, said:
“This kind of political discourse poisons the water that we all must drink from. It drives up hate and drags down standards.
“Sir Keir Starmer has rightly identified that the public want to see politicians act with respect, dignity, and decency. He can start by pulling this ad from circulation and issuing an immediate apology.”
John Rentoul of the Independent points out that Labour was furious when Boris Johnson accused Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile and this is an example of exactly the same tactic.
He wrote that is is "low politics" to use "the emotive subject of child sexual abuse in such a misleading and hypocritical way."
John Rentoul added:
"Starmer’s admirers praise his ruthlessness, and say that he is much tougher than his critics think. But this attack, which he must have approved, isn’t tough. It is an admission of weakness. By publishing it, Starmer is in effect saying that Johnson was entitled to use the Jimmy Savile slur against him.
Savile wasn’t prosecuted while Starmer was in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service, meaning that the words Johnson used in that disgraceful session of Prime Minister’s Questions were factually accurate. But the implication was as offensive as it was clear.
The same applies to this attack on Sunak. Nobody thinks that the prime minister is responsible for decisions made by the courts up to 12 years before he took office, and it is offensive to imply that he doesn’t care about crimes committed against children. On this occasion, the Labour Party has got it wrong."
There have been too many instances of this sort of politics from every part of the political spectrum. In my humble opinion this sort of attack is corrosive, damaging to democracy and wrong whichever party does it, or whether it is done by private individuals not directly connected to any party.
Comments
If the Labour Party hadn't launched this wholly disgraceful advert, would you have continued to remain silent about that toxic episode?
I am certain that Rishi Sunak did say that he would "not have said it" and my recollection is that at some point I had been asked about the comment and had referred to that response and said that I would not have done so either.
Unfortunately I do not have an absolutely perfect memory of every word I wrote or uttered even last week, never mind a year ago, and I can't remember when and where I made that response - whether it was online, in the council chamber, or on one of the occasions I was doing the weekly politics show which BBC Radio Cumbria used to do and which I occasionally was invited to take part in.
Whether or not I have correctly remembered what I said at the time, it is my position that neither side ought to indulge in this sort of attack. I agree with John Rentoul that although the words Boris Johnson used were literally true, the implication was clear and offensive.
For the Labour party, who screamed the house down when Boris made that attack, to now make an attack themselves which is so similar is hypocrisy of the most egregious kind. IMHO the Labour advert was if anything even worse because firstly I don't accept that the allegation was literally true, secondly because the statistics which supposedly support it include a period when Rishi Sunak was not even an MP but Sir Keir Starmer was a member of the sentencing council.
It's just very unfortunate that, on this blog at least, you let one of those two despicable statements pass entirely without comment.
It's doubly unfortunate that you're unable to put your finger on ANY critique from yourself on this matter.
And trebly unfortunate that, of your condemnations of these two disgraceful attacks, it's the one distancing yourself from your own party leader's vituperative outburst across the Commons despatch box that has disappeared without trace.
But there we are - as you rightly say, you can't be expected to remember every word you've uttered, even on a matter so corrosive to our democracy as this.