This is amazingly terrible.
As one social commentator observed : “if I wrote that on social media the police would be at my door before I hit send”.
He called for an MP, to be shot.
Last week, the government promised to act on extremist threats. We can wonder if they will extend this commitment to party donors.
What is happening to us ?
From the earlier report:
The Guardian has learned of a 2019 meeting at TPP’s headquarters in which Hester spoke about an executive from another organisation, saying: “She’s shit. She’s the shittest person. Honestly I try not to be sexist but when I meet somebody like [the executive], I just …
“It’s like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.
“[The executive] and Diane Abbott need to be shot. She’s stupid … If we can get [the executive] being unprofessional we can get her sacked. It’s not as good as her dying. It would be much better if she died. She’s consuming resource. She’s eating food that other people could eat. You know?”
And yet he claims that it wasn’t to do with Abbott being black or a woman… The whole rant is vile and he sounds like a real piece of work in general.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After Frank Hester’s comments about Diane Abbott were published, the businessman who is the Conservative party’s biggest donor said in a statement that he accepted he was rude about her but “the criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.
Shabna Begum, the interim CEO of the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, said she found it shocking that there was any debate that what he said was racist and that it gave the lie to the Conservative narrative that the UK is a “post-racial society”.
But Georgina Calvert-Lee, an employment and equality barrister at Bellevue Law, said – assuming he had said what was reported – that would provide no defence were he to face a civil claim for harassment, which she said he would have “a really hard job” disproving.
Sailesh Mehta, a barrister and founding member of the Bar Human Rights Committee, said Hester’s comments, if as reported, were “capable of fitting the ingredients of the criminal offence [of stirring up racial hatred] created by the Public Order Act”.
He said it was rarely prosecuted, except in the most compelling cases, because of free speech considerations, but added: “Political leaders are increasingly using incendiary language, which appears to give licence to their followers to be ever more shrill in their rhetoric.
“So we’ve got on the one hand, this really heavy-handed, very blunt approach toward black and minority ethnic groups in terms of what they can say when they are committing hate crimes versus here we’ve got this powerful white man making a really baldly racist statement about hating a black woman, wanting her to be shot and we’re still debating whether it’s racist or not.”
The original article contains 795 words, the summary contains 283 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Its clearly racism. Even if unconscious. Plenty of white men do and say shit far far worse then she ever has.
Yet he or any other politician would never say thier actions make them want to hate all white men.
Given the hate for Thatcher. When were her actions last applied to someone’s feeling for all white women.
Even the tories never say truss made all white women look unable to outlast a lettuce.
