The director of one of the main groups involved in preventing the Rwanda flight taking off is, to no one’s surprise, standing to be a Labour candidate at the next general election. Bella Sankey is the head of Detention Action, a group who, as well trying to prevent the Rwanda deportation, previously led a campaign to stop the deportation of convicted rapists, murderers and attempted murderers. Now she’s standing to be the Labour candidate in Hastings and Rye…
I'm excited to say that I'm standing to be the next @UKLabour MP for Hastings & Rye.🌹
— Bella Sankey (@BellaSankey) June 14, 2022
I've got the Sussex roots, motivation & credibility to win here, stand up for local people & help put Labour in power at the next General Election. /1 pic.twitter.com/F97yoFayxl
It’s not the first time Bella’s stood as a Labour candidate. In 2019 she stood in the Tory safe seat of Arundel and South Downs, receiving an endorsement from none other than… Keir Starmer:
Good luck @BellaSankey - another great @UKLabour candidate #VoteLabour2019 https://t.co/lilahmxWER
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) November 14, 2019
Eight days ago, Labour claimed they had nothing to do with the legal actions to frustrate the deportations, telling the Mail “As the Government well knows, Labour is not involved. This is desperate lashing-out for a party that’s in chaos.”
Despite this denial from Labour, Keir Starmer was happy to describe the woman leading the legal frustrations as “a woman of principle and integrity. She has a strong track record of successful campaigns for justice.” As well as opposing deportations of murderers, Bella’s “track record” of “integrity” includes saying terror attacks are a “price we should be willing to pay” to protect us from being snooped on by GCHQ; lobbied to remove the blanket ban on prisoner voting; is against the freezing of assets of suspected terrorists; and was against the introduction, and then strengthening, of anti-social behaviour orders. A more perfect CV for a prospective Labour MP couldn’t exist…
Former Labour candidate Bella Sankey has returned to Sky News to once again score political points against the government, this time over the Ukraine crisis. Having previously appeared on the channel to call Priti Patel’s asylum seeker policy “cruel, illogical, incoherent”, this morning she attempted to link the Ukrainian refugee programme to Brexit, claiming the government “can’t let go of that [Brexit] ideology” and has had to be “dragged kicking and screaming to make even the most minor commitments” to Ukrainian refugees. Apparently this is all a part of a “xenophobic sentiment” at the core of government. At no point did Sky point out that Sankey ran as a Labour Party candidate in 2019…
I'm Bella Sankey, the Labour candidate for Arundel & South Downs. A vote for #Labour is the strongest statement you can make against austerity. 🌹 We doubled our vote share here in the last election and we are fighting to win! pic.twitter.com/AZ9d7kBa1l
— Bella Sankey (@BellaSankey) November 23, 2019
Given Sankey previously claimed Jeremy Corbyn was “honest, has principles and integrity and is visible and accountable in the media himself”, this is clearly a relevant contextual detail for Sky’s viewers. Of course Sankey is entitled to say whatever she likes about the government, and Sky News is entitled to broadcast them. Doing so without drawing attention to her political activism is just disingenuous…
Picking up where the BBC left off this morning, today Sky News invited Director of Detention Action charity Bella Sankey onto the programme to lambast the government’s planned overhaul of asylum seeker rules. She proceeded to condemn the government. Â No disclosure that she stood as the Labour candidate for Arundel and South Downs in the 2019 general election…Â
For the second time in a day, ‘expert’ activists have opined on government policy without revealing their personal partisanship. Sankey took the opportunity on Sky to label the Home Secretary’s plans as ‘cruel, illogical, incoherent, [and] unlawful’, which certainly stands in contrast to how she described her former party leader, saying that Jeremy Corbyn is ‘honest, has principles and integrity and is visible and accountable in the media himself’. Honesty certainly is a virtue…
