Henry Dyer’s personal statement shines a light on casual racism in Parliament
Last week Henry Dyer, a staff member in UK's Parliament and a political journalist made a formal complaint against Labour's Neil Coyle MP, resulting in the MP being suspended over racist comments and being banned from the Parliamentary estate for 6 months.
Henry wrote in the Business Insider: "After marking Chinese New Year with my family, I went to the bar where Neil Coyle made racist comments.
"I was made to feel uncomfortable while covering parliament, which led to my lodging a formal complaint."
Some of these racist comments included reference to 20th century trope Fu Manchu as well as inappropriate comments regarding the case of Barry Gardiner and alleged funding from Chinese sources.
Merlene Emerson of CLDs said:
"Blatant racism should not be ignored nor tolerated, and certainly not by a Parliamentarian. We hope the Labour MP having his whip removed would send a strong message that racial prejudice and racist comments should not be normalised".
Indeed the reason for Henry Dyer making the complaint to Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House, was to raise awareness of anti-Asian racism, exacerbated in part by the Covid 19 pandemic and Sinophobia.
Cllr Sarah Cheung Johnson, Chair of CLDs added:
"Labour claim to be in support of racial equality but this incident shows that they have some way to go in eliminating deep-seated racist views and attitudes from within their ranks."
Chinese Liberal Democrats has reached out to Henry to offer our support and to seek his permission to reproduce his statement in Business Insider on our website.