The hypocrisy is astounding

The weird thing is that the parliamentary letter about the Julian Assange case would have been absolutely right and proper except for the incredible lapse of judgement by the organisers in letting alleged sex pest John Woodcock sign it.

Diane Abbott's good faith response this letter is absolutely spot on in the way she clearly delineates between the sexual assault allegations against Assange and the fact that he's actually been arrested on trumped up hacking charges designed to punish him for his role in leaking masses of evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Abbott's position is that Assange should not be extradited to the US to face political persecution for revealing the truth about grotesque war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he should be extradited to face a fair trial in Sweden if the authorities there do re-open the sexual assault case against him.

Abbott would have been quite within her rights to point out the absolute hypocrisy of including the signature of an alleged sex pest who then blatantly ran away from the Labour Party in order to evade the internal party investigations into the serious sexual misconduct allegations against him, but she chose to deal with the letter in good faith without raising this issue.

As someone looking at this from outside the parliamentary bubble, I obviously agree with supporting victims of sexual violence, but it's absolutely mind-boggling that the organisers of this letter decided to allow Woodcock to sign it, and that others who knew that his signature was on it decided to go along with it regardless of the hypocrisy.

It seems so obvious that once you've decided to publicly legitimise an alleged sex pest who ran away from investigations into his behaviour, any legitimate point you're trying to make about the importance of showing solidarity with victims of sexual abuse is completely annihilated by the hypocrisy.

In fact, allowing an alleged sex pest to sign the letter trivialised the issue of sexual abuse by making it look like nothing more than an exercise in petty political point scoring.

It makes it look as if you don't actually give a toss about the very real importance of showing solidarity with the victims of sexual misconduct, and you're just using the issue to score incredibly cheap political points against your political opponents.

Allowing an alleged sex pest to sign this letter about the importance of showing solidarity with the victims of sexual abuse just makes you wonder what the hell the organisers were thinking.

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