The local Waltham Forest paper is reporting that the national Labour Party has agreed to fund Miranda Grell’s appeal against her conviction after she smeared a rival as a paedophile.
For more details, see my post from yesterday.
The thing is, even what she admitted to doing – telling voters that her LibDem rival, Barry Smith, was gay and had a teenage Thai boyfriend when she knew Smith’s partner was actually 39 and Malaysian – is bad enough to warrant the party distancing herself from her. It is clear that she was playing into a regrettably popular prejudice that gay men have paedophile tendencies, and the invocation of a fake “Thai” boyfriend twenty years younger than Smith’s real partner’s age was transparently to gain an electoral advantage from this prejudice.
Even her running-mate testified against her and said she had “a disgusting attitude”.
So why is the national Labour Party backing this behaviour?
