It’s never a good idea to issue a spur of the moment press release as inevitable you will live to regret it. That’s what happened to Labour MP Barry Gardiner today. In the prep for our show on LBC today, we noticed a tweet from a Labour council candidate, Matthew Kercher. It read: “Uniformed UK Border Agency officers “randomly” searching anyone none-white at #kensalgreen station this morning. Follow up to #racistvan?” Our interest was pricked, but when we spoke to Matthew he admitted that he had only stopped for a minute and saw two Asian people being stopped. And, er, that was it. So we decided to move on and cover something else. At about 4.45 into my email box pinged a press release from Labour MP for Brent North, Barry Gardiner. he was fulminating about this UKBA operation and accused them of “seemingly” only targeting people of a non white skin colour. By that time the UKBA had given us a statement saying they had arrested three people in the operation – a Ukrainian woman, a Brazilian woman and an Indian man. I was curious to see how Barry Gardiner could justify the accusation that UKBA border officials had only targeted people of colour. Listen…
listen to ‘Barry Gardiner on UKBA Operation at Kensal Green Station’ on Audioboo
And this is what Matthew Kelcher had to say…
Coincidentally, although both denied talking to each other, both were on House of Commons phone numbers. I’m sure it was pure coincidence.
Anyway, a listener then emailed to say he had seen pictures of the operation and that one of the UKBA officials was himself black and they had also stopped white people. So Mr Gardiner thought it fine to smear the UKBA and Theresa May without checking his facts and relying on what he himself described as “hearsay”. He couldn’t even spell Theresa on the press release and dated it June 30. As my mother used to say, more haste, less speed!
