It would be churlish to rain on the parade of a newly elected MP, especially one who has made history as the first black MP to represent her city.
Paulette Hamilton has every right to feel proud of her accomplishment today, and she will undoubtedly receive much support from her party as she seeks to fill the void left by her late predecessor, Jack Dromey.
But (and of course there is a “but”) her selection as a candidate in the first place raises some awkward questions for the Labour Party and its leader, Keir Starmer. I do not suggest, as much of social media has done, that Hamilton is some sort of unreconstructed Marxist revolutionary whose election will devastate Starmer’s ambition to recast his party as a moderate, centre-Left vehicle that will attract former Conservative voters. Her sudden rise to national prominence is an occasion for the raising of questions, not condemnation. Yet.
It’s a pity that Hamilton’s seven-year-old comments about extra-parliamentary direct action were not revealed earlier in the Birmingham Erdington by-election, instead of less than 48 hours before polling. With a few weeks to consider her comments during a meeting entitled “The Ballot or the Bullet: Does Your Vote Count?”, we might have heard a more in-depth explanation from her and her party as to why it was acceptable to answer the headline question by saying: “You talk about the bullet or the vote. I’m not sure, although I believe in the vote and I believe in our right to use that vote or destroy that vote. I’m not sure we will get what we really deserve in this country using the vote.”
Whatever claims from the Labour Party that Hamilton’s comments were taken out of context, it can hardly be denied that they are at the very least problematic. She may, as she learns the ropes as a parliamentarian, successfully distance herself from her own words. After all, only the very obtuse do not allow their political views to develop and mature over time, and it is quite possible that she already looks back and shudders at the naïveté and irresponsibility of her words.
But it is reasonable to ask the question. Does she disown her comments? Why was she even speaking at an event that drew some sort of equivalence between violence and democracy? Does she really believe that the central case against violent uprising is that “I don’t know if we [the black community] are a strong enough group to get what we want to get if we have an uprising. I think that we will be quashed in such a way that we would lose a generation of our young people.”
I can think of more convincing arguments against revolution, chief among them that in a functioning liberal democracy it would be unconscionable and as anti-democratic as it is possible to be. But sure, the potential failure of an uprising to take control of the nation could certainly be taken into account before the final decision is made.
Let’s remind ourselves that Hamilton was Labour’s preferred candidate, selected, presumably, after a reasonable amount of due diligence by the party organisation. At my own interview at party HQ when applying to be accepted onto the national panel of approved candidates, I was asked if there was anything in my past that, were it to come to light, might embarrass the party. I briefly considered admitting that I had gone to see Buck’s Fizz live in concert, twice, but sensibly decided that now was not the time for levity. Hamilton will have been asked the same question. Either she judged that her historic comments would never come to light or she decided that even if they did, they were perfectly acceptable. Either way, it seems certain that the party was unaware of them before Tom Harwood, a journalist for GB News, uncovered them earlier this week.
And if Hamilton was the party’s “safe” candidate, what does that say about those who didn’t make the cut?
One of the biggest challenges Labour faces in the next two years is forging a broad appeal to centrist voters and former Conservatives who might be open to Starmer in a way that they would never countenance with his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. And although the current leader might prefer to avoid culture war issues, like Black Lives Matter, critical race theory and trans ideology, it’s unlikely he will be entirely successful. At some point he will need to reassure the country that a Labour administration will not be in hock to radical race theorists who want to “defund the police” (a phrase utterly meaninglessness in a British context, which has not prevented BLM supporters from parroting it) or who hold nothing but contempt for a society they imagine, wrongly, is founded on “white supremacy” and institutional racism.
Where are the candidates who can be trusted by the voters in delivering that message? A generation ago, Labour’s candidates were drawn from the trade unions and the professional classes, people who had campaigned on bread and butter issues like homelessness, the poll tax, apartheid, unemployment and even nuclear disarmament. Today, what gets Labour activists’ pulses racing is promises to “decolonise” school curricula and demonising former (white) national leaders.
Unless Paulette Hamilton can reassure us to the contrary, we can add violent revolution to the score card. Labour was lucky that this controversy happened too late in the campaign to make any difference to the result. But that is not enough. They need to be clear about what is acceptable and unacceptable for prospective candidates (and ordinary members) to discuss and support.
Starmer has already made it clear that drawing a false equivalence between Russia and Nato is an expulsion matter. Good for him. Now he needs to be just as tough on those who think that any talk of “bullets” as a way of achieving domestic political change is remotely acceptable.
And perhaps he needs also to re-examine the effectiveness of whoever’s job it is to carry out due diligence of party candidates.
