Show caption Sarah Champion: Labour’s northern heartlands are different from London’s ‘tolerant, multicultural world’. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Labour Sarah Champion: Labour’s ‘floppy left’ falls silent when issues touch on race MP for Rotherham, who resigned from Corbyn shadow cabinet over grooming gang remarks, says London colleagues don’t understand northern heartlands Press Association Sat 2 Sep 2017 03.08 EDT Share on Facebook

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The Labour MP Sarah Champion has declared the “floppy left” is afraid of speaking out on issues such as sex grooming gangs for fear of being branded racist.



Champion last month quit her frontbench role as shadow equalities minister after a backlash for saying “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”.

The Rotherham MP has now used an interview with the Times to highlight what she says are differences in attitudes between the capital and Labour’s northern heartlands.

After her resignation, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – an MP in Islington, north London – said his party would not “blame” or “demonise any particular group”.

Champion told the Times: “If I’m on the floppy left, to be accused of racism is probably the worst thing you can call me. That fear will motivate me to step away from a lot of topics I’d maybe tackle head on if I didn’t have that phobia.”

Her constituency was the scene of a grooming scandal and she said many Labour members and politicians based in London had “never been challenged by a reality that’s different” from their largely “tolerant, multicultural world”.

“London is not representative of the UK and it’s definitely not representative of the north of England in relation to race,” she said. “Rotherham and many post-industrial towns are still segregated.”

“[The] multicultural policies that I, through my working career, grew up with, and which Jeremy Corbyn grew up with, need a translation to come outside London.”

Champion stressed: “It’s not that Yorkshire’s racist, it’s that Yorkshire is very blunt and doesn’t sugar-coat anything.

“In Rotherham, people’s frustration is that if they all knew what was going on, why didn’t the people who were meant to protect them do anything about it?”

Champion’s comments about “British Pakistani men” came in a Sun column last month, leading to her resignation and an apology for her “extremely poor choice of words”.