Labour has betrayed Rosie Duffield
It has sided with an abusive, threatening mob over one of its own MPs.
The Labour Party prides itself on being a broad church. A commitment to diversity and inclusion lies at the very heart of its constitution. But news that Rosie Duffield is to miss this year’s Labour Party conference because of threats to her safety exposes such claims as utterly vacuous.
I live in Canterbury and Rosie Duffield is my MP. Back in 2017, she was feted for turning a century-old blue seat red. After scoring her second electoral victory in 2019, Labour-supporting pundit Owen Jones shared a snap of himself proudly standing alongside Duffield in a constituency rally he had organised. Less than a year later, Jones dug out the picture once more, this time to ‘apologise publicly’ for his actions and to say that he was ‘genuinely mortified’ about having ever shared a platform with Duffield. He’s not the only one to have had a change of heart. For simply stating biological facts, like ‘only women have a cervix’, Duffield has been hounded and abused on social media. Now, it seems, online abuse has turned into offline, real-life security threats.