Campaign news

Make Labour a racist-free zone

17th November 2010

It is time for Labour to make clear that someone prepared to, as the election court heard, “stir up racial tensions”  in their campaigning is not fit to hold high office and not welcome in our Party.

The Labour Party should never again be associated with such campaigning, and members and affiliates must be vigilant in challenging racism at every level within the party and in society. Labour needs to run an explicitly anti-racist campaign in the forthcoming by-election in Oldham to restore the Party’s standing in that community and in the country.

The main problem with the literature produced by Phil Woolas’s election campaign was not that it lied about his opponent, but that it was a disgusting racist attack on an entire community.

The fact that such a negative campaign was run by Woolas also highlights how little positive Labour had to say at the 2010 election. We need wholesale policy renewal that rejects the underlying racism of New Labour’s imperialist wars and attacks on civil liberties and asylum seekers.

We must also recognise that it was a mistake for Ed Miliband to have appointed Phil Woolas to the post of Shadow Immigration Minister, knowing the views that his election campaign had espoused.

LRC Executive Committee