Labour have treated Rosie Duffield terribly

Should a candidate feel forced to pull out of public hustings events because of concerns about their safety? No, of course not, though that’s exactly what our current political culture has caused Rosie Duffield to do. One of her own Labour party colleagues, Lord Cashman, had the whip suspended after he suggested she was ‘frit or lazy’ for doing this. He has since apologised, but this is just the latest in a whole series of incidents where Duffield has been attacked by her own side side.

Duffield spoke to Andrew Neil on Times Radio today. She spoke about an ongoing failure from her own party leadership to, until relatively recently, give her much support. She explained her decision to pull out of those hustings: 

I knew that a particular group of mostly former Labour members were going to stage a few noisy protests against me and they did when I had my campaign launch and that’s their right, that’s ok, the police and my security team kept me and my guests safe but it just got to the stage where this sort of incitement was just too much, people saying “let’s get Duffield at this event” or whatever.