Labour’s Kate Hoey MP has lamented that her party has become “a party of the metropolitan bubble” destined for “disaster” due to its abandonment of working-class Brexit supporters.
Ms Hoey, who represents Vauxhall in London but is originally from Northern Ireland, is well known for her independence of mind and straightforward patriotism — increasingly unusual in the Marxist-led Labour Party of 2019 — and one of only a handful of Labour parliamentarians still carrying the torch for its once-mainstream tradition of euroscepticism.
Writing for the Express — traditionally a Brexit-supporting, right-wing newspaper, but recently taken over by a left-liberal Remainer — the former Sports minister appeared to praise Tory leader Boris Johnson for a “blistering start on his promise to get us out of the European Union by October 31st” after “three years of drift and half-hearted malaise under Theresa May”.
With the change to a genuine Leave government can we have a change in the depressingly negative reporting of journalists who believe everything the EU says and seem to relish in doing our country down @BBCNews @SkyNews @Channel4News
— Kate Hoey (@KateHoeyMP) July 25, 2019
Her own party colleagues in the House of Commons, she noted with regret, have made it “their mission in Parliament since 2016 to undermine and overturn the decision of the British people” — despite claiming they would respect the result of the EU referendum before the leave vote was cast, and standing on a manifesto which promised to deliver Brexit in the 2017 snap election.
“The key marginal seats that Labour need to win to form a Government voted Leave and those voters have NOT changed their minds,” the veteran MP stated bluntly.
“If a general election comes [the Liberal Democrats] will hoover up the votes of Labour Remainers and the Brexit Party will take the votes of Labour Leavers. That way disaster lies for the Labour party,” she explained.
She also lamented the way Labour MPs had “plotted to force Jeremy Corbyn to move further and further towards a Remain policy that now includes another referendum on any deal the Conservatives achieve” — with the aging party leader having once been with Ms Hoey in the party’s eurosceptic rump, voting against joining the EEC, as the EU then was, in the 1970s, and opposing all the European treaties which have extended its power and remit over the last four decades.
A lifelong eurosceptic, Jeremy Corbyn voted in favour of leaving the European Economic Community — the EU's predecessor — in 1975.
Here he is in 1996 tearing into a “European bureaucracy totally unaccountable”: pic.twitter.com/ORASZTHiLd
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) May 27, 2019
“We are now a Party of the metropolitan bubble, shaped by those who see the values of family, community and patriotism as old fashioned and ‘right wing’. Those, like myself who voted Leave are regularly called racist and fascist,” she observed sadly, predicting that Boris Johnson would now “reach out to our disillusioned voters.”
“After all it is not that they are abandoning Labour,” she concluded. “[I]t is that Labour is abandoning them.”
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