A former Tory campaign manager has been suspended from the party after she called Labour MP Naz Shah a “racist” and asked why she doesn’t “go back to Pakistan.”
Theodora Dickinson has now deleted the tweet in which she shared a video showing Shah speaking about child poverty with a caption calling her “racist.”
In the past Ms Dickinson has been pictured with Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and several other Tory MPs.
She ran as a Conservative Party candidate in the 2019 local election, according to her Twitter account.
And this isn’t the first time she has been accused of Islamophobia.
In March 2019, the Conservative Party was accused of failing to take action against Dickinson when she posted an Islamophobic conspiracy theory video on her Twitter account after the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand which killed 50 people.
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Dickinson claimed to her 17,000 followers that Islamists in Pakistan had burned down a church in retaliation to the New Zealand attack. However, the video was actually recorded in Egypt in 2014 and bore no relation to the atrocity in New Zealand.
Though the Conservative Party said it was investigating the matter, it is not clear what the outcome of this investigation is or whether Dickinson is still a member of the party.
Earlier today Ms Shah told the Evening Standard: “This kind of blatant racism will not deter me from speaking out. Quite the opposite, it just reinforces why it’s necessary to fight vile bigotry and intolerance and makes me more determined. The question for Boris Johnson is, why is this sort of person drawn to him and his party?”
And Harun Khan, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “The Conservative Party’s lack of action for the last 15 months after Ms Dickinson shared an Islamophobic conspiracy theory in response to the Christchurch terrorist attack, shows a serious problem with the Party.
“Now Ms Dickinson tells a Muslim MP ‘why doesn’t she go back to Pakistan.’ Will this latest blatant racism elicit action?
“The Party must reflect and consider why it chooses to ignore widespread concerns about its institutional Islamophobia – if a truly independent inquiry is not enacted with its recommendations implemented, there will be a drip-feed of these stories for a long time to come.”
