Oona King says that she was called a "Jewish bitch" during the British election campaign

Jenny Booth:

Oona King, the Labour MP ousted by anti-war rebel George Galloway, said today that she was regularly abused as a "yid" and a "Jewish bitch" during an ill-tempered election campaign.

Ms King lost her Bethnal Green and Bow seat in London’s East End by just 823 votes after Mr Galloway's criticism of the Iraq war won the support of the large Muslim minority in the constituency. The seat had previously been held by Labour since 1924.

In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, she described it as "one of the dirtiest campaigns we have ever seen in British politics" and gave warning of the implications for future elections.

"I was fairly shocked by the levels to which it sank," she said. "The thing that I am proudest of in this country is that we have a political system where political intimidation doesn’t exist. That, actually, for the first time came to the fore in Bethnal Green and Bow, and I think people around the country should be worried about it."

Mr Galloway formed his own Respect party after being expelled from Labour over his outspoken criticism of the war. He chose to fight Bethnal Green and Bow, where 39.2 per cent of the population are Muslim, on an anti-war ticket.

His opponent, in contrast, was a long-time opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime, and voted in favour of the war. Ms King, who is black with a Jewish mother, said that she had faced regular anti-Semitic abuse during the campaign.

"The fact that my mother was Jewish came up all of the time in a quite disturbing way," she said. "As a kid it was always ’oi, you nigger’, ’you wog’ and all the rest of it, and now it was ’yids’, ’you Jewish bitch, get out of here’, all of that sort of stuff."

During the campaign, unknown attackers threw eggs at Ms King at a Holocaust memorial service. She was later again pelted with eggs and had her car tyres slashed by a gang of youths who were protesting against her support for the Iraq war.

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