Michael Fabricant has (unsurprisingly) attracted much criticism for this tweet about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:
I could never appear on a discussion prog with @y_alibhai I would either end up with a brain haemorrhage or by punching her in the throat
There was a particular nastiness in the way he didn’t just say he’d end up punching her, but punching her ‘in the throat’. That’s quite graphic. His initial apology was poor, as it was simply an assertion that he would never dream of actually hitting her. I don’t suppose those complaining imagined that he would – that wasn’t really the point.
It was perhaps still more worrying that he also chose to retweet this:
@Mike_Fabricant @Channel4News @y_alibhai why cant her hate speech be prosecuted? She disgusts me. Should be deported.
It seems pretty disgraceful that an MP should be implicitly approving this kind of comment.
