Remember when Labour claimed “This isn’t factional. We just aren’t insulting voters with piss poor candidates anymore.”
WhatsApp group chat has been exposed with Labour MP’s and Councillors often posting abusive, ableist, sexist and derogatory comments.
Several MP’s, including Health Minister Andrew Gwynne, whose office caseworker had setup the chat, have now been suspended.
Unsurprisingly, the group chat contains lots of ire for the left wing of party (what’s left of it anyway…), including the usual thing of naming everyone even marginally to the left of them as “trots” ( short for Trotskyists). Although this is just inline with what was already exposed in the leaked report intended to investigate the handling of antisemitism complaints, before also finding internal emails and WhatsApp group chats that exposed the same sort of racist, sexist, and highly factional abuse from the right wing of the labour party. A literal conspiracy within Labour to deliberately undermine the complaints process, to then use against Corbyn in the media, which included people who had presented themselves as “whistleblowers” against Labours supposed antisemitism.
Gwynne, 50, had managed to dodge most controversies during his near 20-year stint in parliament, although rose to brief fame for calling Boris Johnson a “pillock” on live television in 2017.
The real political danger, it seems, came not from Westminster but from his constituency 200 miles away on the edge of Manchester, where long-simmering Labour party divisions have now burst into the open.
The WhatsApp group where Labour figures posted racist, sexist and homophobic comments was centred on Gwynne’s power base in the town of Denton in Tameside, where he was elected as a local councillor almost 30 years ago at the age of 21.
Labour insiders said the local party’s “toxic” fallouts were well known in the region. They were not surprised that Gwynne’s inner circle was the subject of the highly damaging leaks, which first emerged in the Mail on Sunday.
“You would turn up at an event and they would be slagging off the other side,” said one senior Labour figure in Greater Manchester. “Any time we were in a party setting with Andrew Gwynne and some of those people, they would just be slagging off the people they didn’t like.
“You get a bit of that in politics but they were probably the worst at it in terms of the Greater Manchester scene.”
The Guardian has seen more than 1,000 pages of WhatsApp messages, spanning 2019 to 2022, in which the sacked minister joked about the death of an elderly voter and a cycling campaigner, who he hoped would be “mown down” by a lorry.
He also said someone “sounds too Jewish” and “too militaristic”, apparently from their name alone.
In newly disclosed messages, Gwynne described a constituent as “an illiterate removed” and a fellow councillor as a “fat middle-aged useless thicket”. He called neighbouring MP Navendu Mishra, a “splitter” for forming a group of leftwing Labour MPs in 2022.
The group, named Trigger Me Timbers, was set up by Gwynne’s office caseworker Claire Reid in January 2019. At its height it had 44 members, most of whom were local councillors and activists.
The forum was initially set up to discuss routine party business, such as local events and campaign literature. But it soon turned “nasty”, according to one Labour figure.
The group’s ire was reserved for leftwing Labour activists, whom they refer to more than 100 times as “trots”.
When Christian Wakeford defected from the Conservatives to Labour in January 2022, Ryan – then a local councillor – joked about “all the trots exploding on socials”.
Gwynne said “the nutty wing” of a local party “is going bonkers that we’ve let a Tory have the Labour whip and not Jezza” – a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended by the party.
Reid, now a senior official on Labour’s national policy forum, said of the party’s leftwing membership: “Aside from anything else today it’s very good for the internal Party! Hopefully they’ll all leave”, to which Gwynne replied: “Yep.”
While Gwynne and Ryan are the most high profile to be suspended by Labour, Reid and two other senior councillors – George Newton and Jack Naylor – have stepped down from their cabinet positions on Tameside council amid an investigation by party HQ.
Gwynne’s wife, Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.
As first revealed by the Mail On Sunday, Gwynne was accused of posting messages containing racist and sexist comments. The cache of thousands of messages spans a period from 2019 to 2022.
Gwynne is also alleged to have sent messages suggesting a local cycling campaigner should be “mown down” by a lorry, and hoping a pensioner who didn’t vote Labour “croaks it” before an election.
[…]
One senior member of the Tameside Labour group said the party was “in chaos” and some were “fuming” at being suspended.
“I know from talking to councillors some of them are fuming because they’re being associated with those vile posts. Just by their suspension it looks like they’ve been involved but they’ve never posted anything on that group,” they said.
“Tameside Labour is in chaos now. We’ve got to consider the position of the leader because she appointed those people [Gwynne’s allies] to cabinet positions just a few months ago, with the blessing of the national party. This is completely untenable.”