by Sunny Hundal

Out of all the shadow cabinet appointments, it’s having Phil Woolas back at the Home Office that is the most disappointing. No actually, it makes me angry given recent revelations.

And it’s worth pointing out once more, properly, why Phil Woolas is unsuitable to be in the Labour party, let alone a shadow minister.

During the recent Labour party conference I went to a debate on immigration that featured Woolas as one of the speakers. He sounded perfectly sensible at the time.



One of his main points, I recall, was that immigration itself was sometimes conflated with debates on race and extremism.

In other words, it was perfectly possible to have a debate about the level of immigration the UK could handle or needed, without being racist or xenophobic. I agree, and it’s in all our interests to keep these issues separate.

What was pernicious about Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech wasn’t just that it warned about rising immigration, but it did so exclusively in racist terms by talking of how “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.

At the Labour fringe debate, I raised my hand to ask a question, and I said this: How did Phil Woolas’ claim that we must separate these issues out, in order to have a sensible debate, square with what his election agent and campaign manager said during the recent general election?

1. During the campaign, according to emails obtained by the Telegraph, Woolas’s election agent Joseph Fitzpatrick went out to exacerbate racial divides by saying in an email:

We need … to explain to the white community how the Asians will take him [Woolas] out … If we don’t get the white vote angry he’s gone.

2. This was an election leaflet Phil Woolas put out. As far as I understand it, this is not subject to a legal complaint in the ongoing case.

I mentioned the leaflet specifically because it refers to “extremists” who want to “punish Phil” for “being strong on immigration”. It goes on to attack Libdems for their stance on amnesty for illegal immigrants.

But the picture of Muslim extremists has nothing to do with immigration. They were protesting against the Danish cartoons. The leaflet implies that increasing immigration or giving amnesty would lead to more Muslim extremists.

It conflates immigration with extremism and bigotry – the precise opposite of what Woolas warned against earlier.

3. (I couldn’t make this point but add it here anyway) The Telegraph reported recently about emails exchanged recently between Woolas’ team:

Mr Fitzpatrick emailed Steven Green, the MP’s campaign adviser, to say: “Things are not going as well as I had hoped … we need to think about our first attack leaflet.” He proposed publishing a newspaper-style mailshot, called The Saddleworth and Oldham Examiner, with the alleged main aim of persuading Tory voters, many of whom disliked the fact that the Conservative candidate was Muslim, to vote Labour rather than switching to the Lib Dems. “Tory voters are talking of voting Lib Dem,” wrote Mr Fitzpatrick in an email to Mr Green on April 25. “If we can convince them that they are being used by the Moslems it may save [Woolas] and the more we can damage Elwyn the easier it will be to stop the Tories from voting for him.” A twin-track approach was allegedly adopted: Mr Watkins would be portrayed as a friend of Islamic extremists, while Mr Woolas would be painted as a fearless opponent of militants. Mr Fitzpatrick suggested to Mr Green: “We need to go strong on the militant Moslem angle,” and suggested the headline: “Militant Moslems target Woolas.” This would send out a message, he suggested, that Muslim extremists wanted to “take down” Mr Woolas for standing up to them. “Like it!” replied Mr Green in another email. “It’s going to be hard to write to minimise offence to some though.”

Does that sound like the campaign of someone senstitive to the issues of keeping immigration, race and religion separately?

At the fringe, Woolas replied by saying it was bigoted to assume that Muslims did not want to oppose extremism within their own communities. But that isn’t the charge here. The charge here is that his campaign went out to mix race, religion and immigration to win an election. That, in an area like Oldham and Burnley, has long been used by the likes of the BNP to stir up trouble and and incite racial violence.

This is why he should not be in the shadow cabinet*, let alone within the (shadow) Home Office team or an MP.

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I’ve amended the headline to reflect the technicality. I knew he wasn’t in the cabinet as such, but just didn’t use the correct term