Margaret Hodge · Vinony

Margaret Hodge · Vinony

“They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry [...] When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many - eight out of 10 of the white families - say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not.”
“What has happened in Barking and Dagenham is the most rapid transformation of a community we have ever witnessed.Nowhere else has changed so fast. When I arrived in 1994, it was a predominantly white, working class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton. That is the key thing that has created the environment the BNP has sought to exploit. ["Mrs Hodge claimed the anger is not down to racism"] It is a fear of change. It is gobsmacking change.”
“At this moment of grave danger, we simply cannot allow the party to flounder, become utterly irrelevant to the political debate and disintegrate into a second-rate pressure group. Make no mistake — unless we listen to our voters, our party faces political oblivion.”
“Within the Labour Party, we now have a culture which sadly has become embedded, which was allowed to drift from the fringes of the Labour Party into the heart of the party, which enables people to express anti-Semitism.Probably my talking to you this morning will fill my Twitter with abusive tweets which are basically anti-Semitic.”
“The terrible truth is that [Mr Corbyn] constantly makes himself the centre of the argument.What we need to root out is anti-Semitism, and for as long as he is one of the individuals who refuses to accept the extent of anti-Semitism in the party, who constantly says that people like me have been politically motivated and are attacking him personally instead of attacking the anti-Semitism that he expressly tolerates, and has allowed to spread right through the party - that's really the problem.”
“It was only because of his actions and his words that I came to the decision in 2018; this man was an antisemite and a racist.”