Meet Andrew Gwynne:
A UK Labour MP who has served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health and Prevention from 2024, Gwynne is not exactly a friend of Israel (despite supposedly being a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel)
So it won’t come as a huge surprise to learn he has been exposed as engaging in antisemitic banter (among other sh*tty behavior):
A Labour Minister has been sacked after The Mail on Sunday exposed his racist and sexist messages, including one vile post saying he hoped a pensioner who didn’t vote Labour would die before the next election.
Andrew Gwynne also made anti-Semitic slights and ‘jokes’ about a constituent being ‘mown down’ by a truck.
Keir Starmer stripped Mr Gwynne of his job as Health Minister and suspended his membership of the Labour Party when he was told about the content of the WhatsApp messages yesterday. Meanwhile, the MP himself apologised for his ‘badly misjudged commments’.
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In one particularly shocking comment, the Gorton and Denton MP says he hopes a 72-year-old woman will soon be dead after she dared to ask about her bins.
The Stockport resident wrote to her local councillor saying she hadn’t voted Labour, but added: ‘As you have been re-elected I thought it would be an appropriate time to contact you with regard to the bin collections.’
After the councillor shared the letter among fellow Labour figures in the WhatsApp group, Mr Gwynne wrote a suggested response: ‘Dear resident, F*** your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.’ ‘All-outs’ are elections at which every council seat is contested at once.
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The messages were exchanged in a group called Trigger Me Timbers, which Mr Gwynne shares with more than a dozen Labour councillors, party officials and at least one other MP, all based on the outskirts of Manchester.
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The politician also made offensive remarks about Jewish people.
Discussing an upcoming Labour meeting, a member of the group asks if Marshall Rosenberg would be there, in apparent reference to a late American psychologist whose conflict management techniques might have been useful in heated debates. Mr Gwynne responds: ‘No. He sounds too militaristic and too Jewish. Is he in Mossad?’
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But months later, he was taking part in anti-Semitic banter in the WhatsApp group, including taking an apparently mocking tone to those who thought it inappropriate. ‘Geoffrey the Giraffe says don’t be nasty to the Jews,’ he posted. It’s not clear who he was referring to, but Geoffrey was the logo of the Toys R Us stores.
As I said, nothing too surprising given the antisemitic rot within UK Labour (worse than the rot inside Jeremy Corbyn’s mouth). But here’s where the story gets more interesting.
You see, Gwynne has portrayed himself as someone who abhors and fights antisemitism:
In addition, in 2018, Gwynne made headlines when it was revealed he was in a Facebook group called Labour Supporters in which anti-Semitic messages were shared. At the time he responded: ‘I was added to this Facebook group without my knowledge or permission. I DO NOT support the posts and I ABHOR anti-Semitism. It has absolutely NO place in the Labour Party or in society. End of.’
It seems Gwynne likes the phrase “end of” – which perhaps seems an appropriate one to apply to his Labour career.
