How long is it acceptable to talk about calls for an MP to be killed?

Tory business minister Kemi Badenoch reckons everyone needs to stop talking about the Tories' biggest donor calling for Diane Abbott to be killed, because it's "a story from last week"

How long is an appropriate length of time to talk about a millionaire political donor calling for an MP to be killed?

According to the Tory business minister Kemi Badenoch, a week is more than long enough for everyone to "move on" from the Tories’ biggest donor calling for Diane Abbott to be killed.

In fact she’s so outraged that the story hasn’t already been memory-holed she’s portraying the Tory party as the main victims in this whole scenario because some people in the media have the temerity to keep asking them about it!

This is extremely odd given that Rishi Sunak cited the absurd Lindsay Hoyle conspiracy theory in his sinister Downing Street address on "extremism" a week after Hoyle cited unspecified threats, from unspecified people, against unspecified MPs as his reason for binning parliamentary protocol to hand the SNP’s opposition day over to Keir Starmer so he could rewrite their ceasefire motion to remove reference to Israeli war crimes.

Apparently the outrage over completely unsubstantiated allegations of threats and abuse for unspecified people is supposed to last more than a week, but a specific individual calling for an MP to be killed is so trivial that everyone should just "move on"!

Badenoch asserted that "everyone has moved on" because Frank Hester has supposedly "apologised", but if you actually read Frank Hester’s statement, he absolutely does not apologise for calling for Diane Abbott to be killed, and tries to pretend that his clearly racist and misogynistic comments were not motivated by racism or misogyny!

It doesn’t matter a jot if the Tory party have accepted Hester’s statement as an apology and decided to move on.

Surely the only person who gets to say if the statement constitutes an acceptable apology is Diane Abbott?

To put Kemi Badenoch’s performance into perspective, just try a thought experiment.

Say a significant Jeremy Corbyn ally had said that a Jewish Tory MP makes them want to hate all Jews, and that they should be killed.

And then say Corbyn had sent one of his shadow ministers onto the telly a few days later to say that everyone should just stop talking about it now because it’s 'last week’s news', before making out the media are victimising Labour because they’re still asking questions about it.

How do you think a performance like that would have been received by the media, political class, and commentariat?

If you’re not imagining a howling tornado of condemnation, I’m not sure you could have been paying any political attention whatever between 2015 and 2019.

Despite nobody around Corbyn ever saying anything remotely as extreme as Frank Hester’s call for Diane Abbott to be killed, the media kept the Labour antisemitism furore going for literally years, and multiple people were turfed out of the Labour Party for (correctly) stating that the issue was being exaggerated for political purposes.

It’s astonishing how hardly anybody seems to be raising the important context that the Tory government created unlawfully racist "hostile environment" legislation to destroy the lives of thousands of black and Asian British citizens, many of whom were actually deported.

Are we really going to accept a political party with a proven track record of implementing racist policies telling everyone to "move on" from the fact their biggest donor is a racist who called for a black MP to be killed?

The Tories are a racist political party, that brought in unlawfully racist legislation, which is bankrolled by a racist who called for a black MP to be killed, and yet Sunak can send Badenoch out to insist that their racist and abusive donor has been forgiven and they’re keeping all the money he gave them; tell the media to stop talking about it; and portray continued attention on the scandal as some kind of unfair anti-Tory vendetta … and somehow this remarkable performance gets a total free pass!

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