Didn’t end well for MP selected as ‘left’ but now on Starmer’s front bench
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols suffered a serious dose of ‘ratio’ – considered a sign of a disastrous tweet – last night after trying to defend right-wing colleague Neil Coyle’s wanton attack on left-wing Jews in the party.
Coyle had announced that he wanted Jewish Voice for Labour, the party’s main grouping for left-wing Jews, expelled en masse from the party as part of Keir Starmer’s cowardly purge, triggering a cascade of antisemitism complaints to Labour and to Twitter.
But Nichols decided she would try to defend Coyle – and it didn’t end well. Her tweet was heavily ‘ratioed’, with far more replies than shares or likes and a string of respondents slating her own record on racism:
Many focused on Nichols’s distribution of a racist Labour leaflet during last spring’s local elections, which attacked ‘incursions’ by Gypsy/Roma/Traveller (GRT) people. Nichols tweeted a picture of herself handing out the leaflets and was forced to apologise after a justified outcry – claiming that she hadn’t known what ‘incursion’ meant. Many of the responses were direct, while others quipped on the wording the leaflet had used and her alleged grasp of the English language.
Others
Others focused on Nichols’s recent, ill-advised tweet of a selfie with a Tory MP on a corporate freebie to last weekend’s England football final, paid for by drinks manufacturer Heineken:
All in all, out of hundreds of responses the vast majority were critical – and even the 82 retweets at the time of writing (compared to 300 replies) are mostly critical ‘quote tweets’ attacking Nichols’s original comment.
In case you have the appetite to read more of the ‘ownage’:
Rather than apologise and withdraw her tweet, Nichols has this morning tried to defend her decision – to further anger, including from GRT activist Mikey Walsh, who has spoken previously to Skwawkbox of the pain caused by anti-GRT racism and by Nichols’s leaflet, as well as by other Labour MPs:
It’s been a poor few months by Nichols: apologising for handing out a racist Labour leaflet, tweeting a self-satisfied selfie with a Tory MP on a corporate junket and now this. With a majority in her Warrington North seat of only 1,509 at the last general election and Labour’s popularity collapsed by the vacuum who is Nichols’s boss, she might do better to focus on holding her seat than defending the indefensible and attacking those who stand up to the racism of the Labour right.
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