Labour MP Dawn Butler reignites old Militant controversy at Party Conference

Dawn Butler is a British Labour Party politician who has been the MP for Brent Central since the May 2015 general election, having sat for Brent South from 2005 to 2010. Ms Butler stirred opinion when she paid a glowing tribute to law-breaking by Liverpool’s Militant Tendency in 1984.

The MP gave a speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, where she spoke admiringly about the Militant Tendency that dominated the council, which ran the city in the 1980s. She greeted the example of previous councillors who tenaciously introduced an unlawful budget in 1985 in protest against central Government funding cuts.

Appearing at Labour’s Women’s Conference in Liverpool, she spoke affectionately about those who were fighting against cuts imposed by the current Conservative Government.

She stated: “Local councils have seen nearly 50 percent of their funding cut; I want to give a shout out to all the councillors fighting every day against these Tory cuts.”

However, Baroness Thornton, a Labour peer, slammed Ms Butler for her sympathetic words for the rebellious councillors.

Writing on Twitter, she said: “Great to be at Women’s conference, but am surprised that Dawn Butler has just praised a Liverpool council in the past, that of Derek Hatton, which issued redundancy notices to their own public sector employees, and failed to protect services too. We should not be praising them at Labour’s Women’s Conference.”

She added that Mr Hatton’s Militant colleagues were “misogynistic bullies”.

Richard Angell, the director of Progress, Labour’s centre-left movement, said:
“Dawn Butler’s speech is like a lesson from the Ken Livingstone academy for revisionist history. The Militant Tendency did break the law, left the bills to be picked up by the poor and kept the Tories in power for 12 years more.”

The Militant Tendency did break the law, left the bills to be picked up by the poor and kept the Tories in power for 12 years more.

Militant controlled Liverpool of the 1980’s boasted it was better to ‘break the law than break the poor’ but ran out of money and was forced to sack its own workers.

Once again Labour is splitting itself down the middle, thanks to crazy far-left extremism, and it shows.