A pro-Brexit RMT activist has been “no-platformed” by two prominent journalists, who are among the so-called "left" EU supporters.
Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones had been due to speak alongside Eddie Dempsey at a People’s Assembly demonstration in London this coming Tuesday (3 September), but the two journalists pulled out in protest of Dempsey’s support for a no-deal Brexit.
This is not the first time that Dempsey, a former member of the RMT executive, has been publicly attacked by the pro-EU establishment. After Dempsey spoke at the Leave Means Leave rally in London on 29 March, Labour MP Clive Lewis made defamatory allegations against Dempsey that suggested he was “far-right”.
Lewis’s comments were widely condemned by the RMT – which responded by removing him from the RMT’s parliamentary group. Delegates at the RMT conference were reported as saying Lewis was “unfit” to represent the union.
Smear
But it appears the smear campaign against Dempsey and other Brexiters continues. Fire Brigades Union executive member Paul Embery was recently suspended by the union just for speaking at the same rally.
Despite insisting in a recent live TV interview with Piers Morgan that she is “literally a communist”, Sarkar bizarrely opposes a no-deal Brexit, despite the fact that this would be a significant blow the EU’s imperialist policies, and allow a future British government to re-nationalise its railways and throw away the EU’s anti-union court rulings.
Owen Jones, meanwhile, has made efforts to portray Brexit and those who voted for it as being facilitators of a coming fascist dictatorship, despite there being no evidence supporting this portrayal.
On a positive note, a plethora of well-known trade unionists and activists have loudly condemned this recent slander against Dempsey, and some have compared him to the late Bob Crow, a fierce opponent of the EU who served as the general secretary of the RMT from 2002, until his death in 2014.