Another day and another one bites the dust. Somehow, amongst the slurry and filth of rotten plums and decaying swine of the Tory’s pool of members, Matthew Clarke once rose to the level of lily-leaves and pond skaters atop the quagmire to represent the Conservatives as a Councillor in the Manor Ward of Stevenage Borough Council. Now, he has had to resign.
Posting under the name Matthew Celestine – an online alias suggestive of the archaic, evangelical moralism that has no place in modern British politics – Matthew wrote in now-deleted blog posts with respect to h*mosexuality that “one penalty in the Bible for such deeds” is death.
Good for the Bible, Matthew.
Matthew’s comments join the receipt that local voters are being left with as across the map the Tories’ aromatic dishes of free market fundamentalism and traditional values slowly turn and fester into plain, putrid bigotry and ignorance.
While Clarke said he had never sent death threats to gay people (praise God for the good ones!), he did admit that “in the past I took the view that h*mosexuals should face the death penalty.”
Because stopping a man’s heart for preferring hairy chests is rational.
In full, Matthew is reported as having written:
“When such behaviour is tolerated in a land it can only expect to see God’s judgment. I really must hurry up with my PhD course and get out of here. In my experience, most people believe that such behaviour is wrong and disgusting. They would be ashamed for their children to behave in that way, but they would never admit it for fear of being accused of bigotry. Why should we tolerate such behaviour? If these people think that what they do is decent and good, they are either insane or utterly corrupt morally. If a man would do the awful things that h*mosexuals do, we can only expect that he would steal, take drugs or murder people. There is only one penalty in the Bible for such deeds. Death.”
Matthew can take his place behind the queue of his corrupted Conservative compatriots on their way out of the political sphere as yet another Dinosaur slain by human decency.
He trudges along the corridor of Tory failure behind George Stoakley, who was due to stand in Cambridgeshire. Unfortunately for him, he thought that tweeting that he was “Sweating like a Jew in an attic” was entirely appropriate behaviour for a representative of the people.
Beyond him, Peter Lucey, the former mayor of Wokingham Town, also resigned yesterday due to his penchant for online Islamaphobic rants.
These don’t seem to be isolated incidents, either. As Sayeedi Warsi, the former Conservative Chair, told Robert Peston recently, there are now weekly incidents of Islamaphobia in the Tory party. That revelation, of course, has not been picked up widely at all, and certainly not among mainstream media.
https://twitter.com/alexnunns/status/988037816469815296
Stevenage forms part of Stephen McPartland’s constituency, the sitting Tory MP. 13 of the Borough Council’s 39 seats are up for grabs come the local elections on May 3rd. Matthew’s seat is one of those, and although he will still be on the ballot because they’ve already been printed, the Tories have stated that if he wins, he will not be allowed to be elected as a Councillor.
It is an area that’s faced devastating central government cuts, against which the Labour majority, headed by Sharon Taylor, has been fighting.
