Betrayal comes in many forms: David Lammy says I regret nominating Corbyn for leadership.
Speaking at this year’s Limmud festival, a Jewish event, the shadow foreign secretary said he “never believed” Corbyn would become leader and that his nomination was “a mistake”.
“I regret nominating Jeremy Corbyn and if I knew what I do now, I never would have nominated him,” Lammy told an online audience of about 300, in comments first reported in Jewish News.
“I never believed he would become leader. That was a mistake and I am sorry for that.”
The MP for Tottenham, whose constituency is home to part of the large North London Charedi community, told viewers at the Limmud on line event, “It was a mistake and I’m very sorry for that mistake”.
He said, “If I knew how I feel now, I’d never have nominated him.”
Mr Lammy explained that he had not supported Mr Corbyn but had nominated him to enable more debate in the leadership campaign at the time when there was talk that the other candidates were “all a bit samey”.
But he said he had never believed Mr Corbyn would be elected leader and that he had already begun to regret nominating him before taking part in the Enough is Enough protest against antisemitism outside Parliament in 2018, which he described as “a very emotional experience”.
Of course, David Lammy is a politician and like most politicians, his treachery comes easily. As the Labour party move more and more to the right, becoming indistinguishable from the Tories, we are seeing more and more distance between the PLP and its members. Members who in the main belong to the mass influx created by Jeremy Corbyn. Members who joined at a time when the Labour Party offered the country an alternative, not just an alternative Tory Party.
David Lammy is a man of firsts, he was the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School; there he studied for a Master of Laws degree and graduated in 1997.
In March 2016, he was also the first politician fined for authorising nuisance calls. Slapped with a fine of £5,000 for instigating 35,629 automatic phone calls urging people to back his mayoral campaign without gaining permission to contact the party members concerned. Lammy apologised “unreservedly” for breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations.
Sometimes a short Tweet can say it all: Fascinating Lammy apology… from a man who lobbied regularly to be brought into JC’s shadow cabinet… called him “a man of immense integrity”… introduced his final speech as leader with “I can’t wait for every single sentence”… yet can’t bring himself to say sorry for Iraq.- Alex Nunns
Fascinating Lammy apology… from a man who lobbied regularly to be brought into JC’s shadow cabinet… called him “a man of immense integrity”… introduced his final speech as leader with “I can’t wait for every single sentence”… yet can’t bring himself to say sorry for Iraq. pic.twitter.com/ttDKKUwUsv
— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) December 28, 2021
Recently Labour MPs have not only distanced themselves from their former leader but more tellingly have dropped every policy that separated them from the Tories. Gone is the hope of returning Rail, Mail and utilities back into the hands of public ownership, gone is the fight for free education from cradle to grave, no more does the party push to tax those with the broadest shoulders or fight for a deserving pay rise our NHS staff deserve. There is even hypocrisy in the £20 universal credit cut, while Labour condemns the action they have no plans to reinstate the loss and refuse to make any commitments on the issue.
Again we are seeing a pattern from the extreme centrist, pumping out more “Newspeak” and “doublethink.” Their duplicity in support for Labour’s former leader Jeremy Corbyn shows their weak moral fibre but just as disturbingly if not more so, the constant dropping and moving away from of any and all socialist values and policies, ironically the same socialist values and policies placed in the manifesto these centrist were elected on.
In 2017 David Lammy had a different view on Jeremy Corbyn who received a standing ovation from his fellow Labour MPs as he returned to a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party for the first time since Labour’s unexpectedly strong results in the General Election.
That support was echoed by Tottenham MP David Lammy, who wrote: ‘Never leaked from the PLP before but 1st time for everything..standing ovation for Jeremy. Colleagues united and ready to take on the Tories.’
Never leaked from the PLP before but 1st time for everything.. standing ovation for Jeremy. Colleagues united & ready to take on the Tories
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) June 13, 2017
It wasn’t so long ago Sir Keir Starmer backed Jeremy Corbyn 100 per cent and staunchly refused to accept Corbyn was a danger to the Jewish community, this was when he needed the support of Left-leaning Labour members during the leadership race, of course, there is no longer a leadership race and Starmer has had the whip withdrawn from his former boss for over 12 months, then again come to think of it there are hardly any Left-leaning members of the Labour party anymore either, not after Starmer’s promise of unity turned out to be a mass expulsion of socialist and Left-leaning members.
Watch in 2022 as the Labour Party attempt to scrub history while reinventing itself not as an alternative to the Tory Party but an alternative Tory Party…
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