The Labour Party is platforming an avowed climate crisis denier as a candidate in the upcoming general election. As it drops Faiza Shaheen for liking Green Party posts on X, the staggering hypocrisy of Starmer’s Labour is plain to see with Graham Stringer.
Graham Stringer: climate science denier
Graham Stringer has been the Labour Party MP for Blackley and Broughton since 1997.
But significantly, Stringer is a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – a notorious climate denial group. As investigative news site Desmog details:
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a UK-based think tank founded by former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson with the purpose of combating what it describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change.
What’s more, the GWPF is located on 55 Tufton Street, home to a menagerie of “free market, pro-Brexit thinktanks and lobby groups”.
Stringer himself has routinely peddled in climate science denial. For instance, after joining the GWPF in 2015, he took to the air on BBC Radio 4 to spread climate misinformation. Specifically, Stringer disparaged the links between the UK’s devastating 2013 and 2014 floods and the climate crisis.
Unsurprisingly, Stringer is also a die-hard fracking-head.
Notably, in March 2022, the climate science denier penned an op-ed for the rightwing shit-rag the Daily Mail. In it, Stringer jumped on the disaster capitalism bandwagon, using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to call for the government to overturn the UK’s moratorium on fracking. What’s more, in the article, the seeming fossil fuel fanatic also threw his weight behind the controversial coal mine in Cumbria.
So when on 31 May, the local party in Greater Manchester launched MP Graham Stringer’s re-election campaign, people on X were quick to call this out, including Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski:
Just the Labour Party here relaunching the campaign for Graham Stringer.
Curiously no mention that he’s a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organisation which promotes climate change denialism.
Care literally about the future of our existence?
Vote Green. https://t.co/w1R2ls7vdy
— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) June 1, 2024
Out with the socialists, in with the climate deniers
Naturally, people on X were appalled that the party would select Graham Stringer for re-election. For one, the timing of his campaign launch couldn’t be more ironic:
This is pretty shocking even by their standards, the day after they announce their flagship big green deal or whatever it’s called https://t.co/kZz4unP6DM
— Vicky Pea (@VickPea_) June 1, 2024
However, as the Canary previously reported anyway, its flagship green power scheme ‘Great British Energy’ is in fact:
little more than a smokescreen for propping up corporate capitalism, dressed up like climate justice.
Moreover, the disparity between Stringer’s selection and its recent treatment of minority and left-wing candidates wasn’t lost on people either:
Another case of “you block Faiza Shaheen (and other left-wingers) yet you are ok with *this* man”. https://t.co/Moq0tHNGV5
— Dave Chapman (@Daveofanewcity) June 1, 2024
In short, Faiza Shaheen likes a couple of posts from Green Party members and Labour shows her the door. Meanwhile, Stringer sits as a trustee on a prominent science denial thinktank and he’s golden.
Evidently, Starmer’s Labour will hold its nose for climate denial. By contrast, it continues its wholesale purge of socialists. Green Party MP candidate Jack Lenox also pointed this out:
I thought this couldn’t possibly be true. Even I assumed the Labour Party was better than this.
Ideologies that get you barred from being a candidate for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party:
❌ SocialismIdeologies that are just fine:
✔️ Climate change denial https://t.co/SC6ePdrppx— Jack Lenox for Lancaster & Wyre 🌍 (@GreenPartyJack) June 1, 2024
Of course, none of this is exactly any wonder with a Labour Party bought and paid for by corporate capitalists. As I previously wrote for the Canary after Labour flooded its annual conference with a veritable smorgasbord of vested capitalist interests:
When it comes down to it then, Labour is a far cry from climate justice champion. Instead, its corporate connections confound its climate ambitions. Ultimately, the party will readily throw working class and/or minoritised communities – and the planet – under the bus.
Now an election is upon us, we’re witnessing corporate-captured Labour doing exactly that, in real-time.
Standing with far-right bigots and Zionists
On top of this, others noted that the GWPF isn’t science denier Graham Stringer MP’s only controversial affiliation either.
For one, Stringer is an ardent and hardline Brexiteer. One poster underscored the fact he’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with right-wing racists like Nigel Farage:
Hardline brexiteer Stringer, who also denied the existence of dyslexia, calling it “a cruel fiction” is happily accepted by Starmers Labour.
Liking a sketch by a US comedian is unacceptable but agreeing to stand with far-right bigots is fine, apparently? https://t.co/RjyW50Qzle pic.twitter.com/ysTtscUkOO— Brenda Gough 🌱🤝 (@BelfastBre) June 1, 2024
Contrast this too with Starmer’s blatant misogynoir over Diane Abbott, and it’s clear where the Labour Party is heading.
Perhaps most predictably, Stringer is also a raging Zionist:
@gstringermp is also a #LabourFriendofGenocidalIsrael
#NeverVoteLabourAgain https://t.co/DyLFOg9a5M pic.twitter.com/QXgvyT4Azx— Andrew Saunders (@AndrewS78169455) June 1, 2024
Crucially, he is among 73 former MPs that sat as officers or parliamentary supporters of the Zionist lobby group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). What’s more, Stringer is in fact one of just over thirty MPs that LFI has funded to visit the apartheid settler colonial state.
However, at the end of the day, this is Starmer’s Labour writ large. This is the party that welcomed hard-right Nathalie Elphicke, and has parachuted in self-professed “Zionist shit-lord” Luke Akehurst for the election.
Ostensibly, Labour is quite ready to look the other way on a candidates’ history of mingling with racists. Or a past pumping out climate science denial.
Ultimately, it appears anything goes, so long as you’re a remorseless apologist for Israel, or a treacherous sell-out to big business interests. Better yet, be both.
With friends like these, who needs Tory enemies? Because now more than ever, they’re one and the same. That is, they won’t do a jot for marginalised communities across the UK who desperately need genuine change.
Feature image via Oxford Union – Youtube
