Labour MP Dawn Butler put a BBC presenter in his place on Monday morning after he speculatively tried to ‘make excuses’ for the Met Police’s ‘racial profiling’ in an incident in which officers stopped a car in which Butler and a black friend were travelling on Sunday, using the bizarre excuse that they thought the vehicle was registered in North Yorkshire.
Butler’s decision to go public with video of the incident led to a torrent of right-wing racist abuse on social media – and Butler was clearly in no mood to suffer fools gladly after the presenter speculated that the police might have been looking for a similar vehicle in relation to a crime – and her opinion of the question couldn’t have been much clearer:
In spite of the torrent of abuse toward Ms Butler after she released video of the ‘stop and search’ incident, Labour leader Keir Starmer was silent until mid-afternoon on Monday, when he tweeted a watery message of support – five hours after Butler’s appearance on the BBC – so perhaps she was not inclined to take prisoners when her interviewer decided to invent reasons why the police might not have been targeting her and her friend for ‘driving while black’.
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