The mainstream media (MSM), Tories and Labour right have been in unison today to portray Labour’s second-best ever local election performance – and the best in almost fifty years – as a catastrophe in order to question (surprise!) Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party.
But in reality the Tories had a bad night while Labour had, well, their best in fifty years. So the Tories have needed ‘successes’ to point to, to shore up the fiction.
And so we go to Pendle council in the north-west of England. This was trumpeted frequently throughout the day as a Tory success, because – they claimed – they had ‘won’ it.
What wasn’t mentioned in these early bulletins was how.
Almost a year ago, the SKWAWKBOX exclusively revealed the racist social media of Pendle’s Tory councillor and former mayor Rosemary Carroll, whose Facebook ‘joke‘ about brown people ‘stinking’ and being lazy had outraged those unfortunate enough to read it.
Ms Carroll was suspended by the Tory party as a result of the revelation.
As a result of the suspension, Ms Carroll was no longer a Conservative councillor, although she remained on the council.
The result of yesterday’s local elections meant that Pendle was a ‘hung’ council, with no party in overall control – until the Tories decided to reinstate Ms Carroll to the party in order to claim a ‘win’ they needed for propaganda purposes.
The news eventually filtered out, to much disgust:
BBC North West – not the national BBC News – tweeted the news and was challenged by outraged Labour front-bencher Dawn Butler, who has been at the forefront of the party’s efforts on behalf of the Windrush generation:
The BBC has, of course, featured Labour’s supposed failure to deal with its ‘antisemitism problem’ at every opportunity today – but when it comes to racism against brown-skinned people a single, regional tweet (plus one a few minutes later providing some sparse additional information about the racist tweet) appeared to be considered sufficient coverage – up to that point – for ‘balance’, compared to day-long mentions every few minutes on the broadcast channel.
Ms Butler’s challenge appears to have shamed the BBC into doing a little more on the topic. Some hours after Ms Butler’s tweet, an article went up on the BBC News website – in the regional politics section – providing some further information. However, the bulk of the article consists of Tories justifying their decision.
The Tories and the BBC have both disgraced themselves today.
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