Wes Streeting should be ashamed of his white supremacist Tory jibe

Over the past few years Wes Streeting has established himself as one of the more open-minded and reasonable members of the shadow cabinet. Rather than nodding along with his party’s traditional worship of the NHS, and utilising the usual, false campaigning tool of trying to claim that the Tories have some secret plan to privatise the health service, he has been frank about its weaknesses.

A tweet put out by Streeting yesterday afternoon, however, points in a rather different direction: blatant opportunism. He wrote: ‘A win for Susan Hall and the Conservatives is a win for racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes the world over. Susan Hall’s campaign has been fought from the gutter with dangerous and divisive politics.’

Streeting’s comments fit the standard Labour playbook: no matter what, Conservatives are always ‘pandering to racists’ and they are forever ‘drifting to the right’ (even when lumbering us with the highest tax rates since the 1940s).