SOCIALIST Emma Dent Coad today warned the main political parties have “lost their humanity,” with the war in Gaza a “very personal” issue for voters in her west London constituency.
The former Labour MP and now independent candidate for Kensington and Bayswater said the majority of its constituents were not white British and that Palestine was coming up”pretty much everywhere” she canvasses.
She said: “From the Palestine families that I know, 300 local people have lost family members in the war. That’s really shocking.”
Ms Dent Coad, whose candidacy has been endorsed by The Muslim Vote pressure group, added: “You have people from all over the world from war-torn countries coming here — which they are entitled to do — and they are feeling that as well.
“It’s very very personal to them because they have an immediate connection with people being bombed out of their homes and murdered indiscriminately, so it’s really shaken people and comes up all of the time.”
The long-serving councillor for Chelsea and Kensington added 54 per cent of the borough has a migrant or refugee background.
“I know people who carried their children 300 miles over mountains and others who were tortured,” she said.
“Anybody who’s been through that kind of experience really feels it because it’s so much worse, what’s happening in Palestine.”
She said Labour and the Tories’ refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was “unspeakable” and shows that British “politics is in a really dark place.”
Despite this, Ms Dent Coad said she was “very optimistic” about the re-emergence of a new socialist voice or party after the July 4 general election.
“Something will emerge which is better than what we have now and it will certainly be better than anything imposed from any ego — we have plenty of them on the left,” she said.
“I think it’s got to evolve naturally and it’s going to come from the ground up.”
She called on trade unions to “step up” and facilitate left-wing debates and panels in what she predicted will be a “messy period” for left politics.
Ms Dent Coad resigned from Labour in April last year after it emerged that party leader Sir Keir Starmer had accepted football ticket donations from a company implicated in the Grenfell Tower disaster in her borough.
