Yahoo News Candidate for Brexit Party ‘stoked hostility to immigrants’ online
A Brexit Party candidate posted online messages from Islamophobes and highlighted calls for a ban on Muslim immigration, the Standard has learned.
Rosamund Beattie has been accused of stoking “hostility to immigrants” with the posts on social media.
The former Cheltenham Ladies’ College pupil standing in Ealing Southall, which has a big Muslim population, posted comments from Dutch far-Right leader Geert Wilders urging some Muslims to move from the West to “Islamic nations”.
Ms Beattie, 45, advocated the “internment” of Muslim terror suspects and spoke of “halal-style slaughter” of Britons in the London Bridge terror attack.
She wrote that the UK should “remove citizenship” and “intern & deport the threats to our lives and lifestyle”.
Ms Beattie, who backed banning the burka, made the posts while campaigning in West Ham for Ukip in the 2017 general election. She posted a message from an apparent Brexit supporter, David Jones, who said: “Pointless speech by [Theresa] May — nothing on stopping jihadis returning, closing down radical mosques or banning muslim migration.” News reports at the time said analysts believed “David Jones” could be in the pay of the Russian government in a disinformation campaign.
The candidate wrote that she wanted the police and Army to “round up the 23,000 extremists identified by MI5”, adding: “Internment and deportation.”
The posts on her Twitter and Facebook profiles were identified by anti-discrimination group Hope Not Hate. A spokesman said they were examples of Nigel Farage’s “nasty politics”, adding: “[Ms Beattie’s] social media history clearly shows that she has endorsed and promoted crude anti-Muslim racism, and stoked hostility to immigrants … it shows exactly what [the party] think of the people who live in the constituency.”
Ms Beattie did not respond to requests for comment. A Brexit Party spokesman said: “Hope Not Hate has been calling Nigel names for years now. We won’t be commenting on them.”
The Facebook and Twitter pages in question were taken down.
Update (16/12/2019): Ms Beattie denies stoking hostility to immigrants or advocating for the mass deportation of Muslims. She condemns terrorism by any individual or group regardless of religion or ethnic origin.
