Owen Jones: Jared O'Mara Needs To Educate Himself, But So Does Boris Johnson
24 October 2017, 15:55 | Updated: 24 October 2017, 18:08
Owen Jones told Shelagh Fogarty that there were double standards at play in the way Conservatives were treating Jared O'Mara.
Labour MP has been found to be posting homophobic and derogatory comments online.
Mr O’Mara suggested fat people did not “deserve our respect” and said it would be “quite funny” if jazz pianist Jamie Cullum “died of a sore arse” after being “sodomised with his own piano,” in online posts to music fan forums.
On Tuesday afternoon the Labour Party announced it had launched an investigation into the MP's "comments and behaviour".
Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston tweeted: “Hard to see how anyone with his views was selected and retains the UK Labour whip.”
Owen Jones told Shelagh Fogarty this amounted to a blatant double standard.
He said: "The key test is have you repudiated what you've said? Have you worked on your behaviour?
"I will say though I'm not going to take lessons on this from the Conservative party, because at the moment our Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has made a litany of bigoted comments.
"Saying black people are piccaninnies with water melon smiles, saying if we have equal marriage why don't two men marry a dog, attacking Barack Obama for opposing Brexit because of his half-Kenyan ancestry, what he said of course about Libya last week and dead bodies.
"He didn't face an onslaught of attack from Tory MPs, he hasn't apologised, he hasn't gone on any sort journey - instead he's the representative of Britain to the world.
"It's very difficult to take lessons from these people."
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