Lisa Nandy has warned that "something has changed" as she described otherwise decent people being preyed on by the far-right. The Culture Secretary told an event hosted by The Mirror at the Labour Party Conference that while her Wigan constituency has fought off fascists in the past, people from there have become vulnerable to racist agitators.
She joined calls for people to disagree in a respectful way, backing this newspaper's Britain Talks campaign. Brendan Cox, whose Labour MP wife Jo was murdered by a far-right terrorist in 2016, said Britons should be "less relaxed" about the way hatred is taking hold in our streets.
Wigan's history with the far right
Cabinet member Ms Nandy said that while she believes most people are decent, far-right influences have spiralled in the last 15 years. The frontbencher told delegates that Andy Burnham is alive to the dangers, but said good people must "fight for the country we believe in".
She said: "We are a working-class town where for over 100 years we've always been targeted by the far right. It's a very white working-class town predominantly, where people are warm and welcoming, and where working-class, white, British people have fought off the fascists over and over again every time they've tried to get a foothold in our town."
'Something has changed'
"So I know that people are decent, because I see it every day with my own eyes. But something has changed, because a couple of years ago when we had the riots in Southport, a lot of my constituents were down there in Southport out on the streets."
"People who 10 years ago, 15 years ago, when I first became the MP, would never have gone near a demonstration like that. And it worries me, because they're not the same as the racist thugs who've always come to towns like mine and try to cause trouble. They're people who don't see themselves heard in our national story. They don't see their contribution is recognised or valued."
Calls for a 'more fundamental response'
She described this year's conference as "probably the most important of modern times", telling delegates: "Thank goodness for all of these people on the panel who've been fighting for that country that we believe in, the better country that we know that we are, who've been fighting for it to be heard. It's the country that George Orwell once said lies beneath the surface and must be heard, because we are a better country than the one we've been led to believe in, and we're a better country than the one that's been on display."
Mr Cox told the fringe event: "There's something fundamentally gone wrong in our country when we have blackshirt paramilitaries on our streets in balaclavas, when Jewish people are too scared to identify themselves as Jewish in case they are attacked in the street, when our Muslim friends face not just hostility from extremists, but increasingly from mainstream politicians who even question whether they should be able to pray. When you are responding to awful events like the killings in Southport and the response to that is to try to burn asylum seekers and refugees to death in a hotel. When you're seeing on the streets of Belfast people going street to street and burning down the houses of those people with a different skin colour. I think you do take a moment and think that is the country that we now live in, I think it does require a more fundamental response. I think we need to be less sanguine, less relaxed."
Mayor of West Yorkshire Tracy Brabin, a former Coronation Street actress, said she is inundated by online hatred. But in a message of defiance, she told the event: "If we are afraid, they win. We have to find a way to mock and diminish. I know that the majority of the hate I get online is bots. The rest of it is losers in their Y-fronts in their mum's back bedroom eating Pot Noodles. You know, they would never say that to my face."
