No Conferring

The Conservative Party is the party of the Windrush scandal and the party that, assisted by the Liberal Democrats, relegalised caste-based discrimination. Boris Johnson calls black people “piccaninnies”, Muslim women “letterboxes”, and gay men “bumboys”. 

His Home Secretary is a close ally both of Narendra Modi and of Benjamin Netanyahu. Modi’s Education Minister has slashed scholarships for Dalits (so-called “Untouchables”), while Netanyahu’s Education Minister has described marriage between Jews and non-Jews as “a second Holocaust”. 

A Conservative Party Conference under Johnson’s Leadership would therefore pose a threat to the physical safety of Black And Minority Ethnic people, of Dalits, of Muslim women and their children, of Jews with non-Jewish partners, of those partners and their children, and of gay and bisexual men. 

Meanwhile, the Labour Party has adopted the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, a silencing of BAME, refugee and migrant voices redolent of Windrush and of Grenfell Tower. Labour submits to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which sacks its black and disabled staff first, which exonerated the Government in relation to Windrush, and members of which profited from Windrush and from blacklisting. 

A Labour Government evicted the Palestinians. A Labour Government evicted the people of the Chagos Islands, at the same time as it was repressing demonstrations in Hong Kong far more brutally than is happening at the moment. A Labour Government sought to banish the Chagossians permanently by creating the “Chagos Marine Protected Area”. And Labour supports gender self-identification. 

A Labour Party Conference would therefore pose a threat to the physical safety of BAME people, of refugees and migrants, of Palestinians and Chagossians, of disabled people, of working-class people, of trade unionists, and of lesbians and bisexual women. 

Accordingly, both the Conservative Party Conference and the Labour Party Conference ought to be cancelled, by court order if necessary.