Labour MPs sit as officers of Stand Up To Racism. That is not a rumour. Diane Abbott is president. Bell Ribeiro-Addy is co-chair. Richard Burgon is a vice chair. Kim Johnson sits on the executive. SUTR still tells the public it is “independent” and unaffiliated to any party. Those two facts do not sit together once SUTR starts treating another party’s canvassing as something to be driven off the street. Restore Britain is a registered party. You can disagree with its programme and still notice the problem. In Holborn and St Pancras, SUTR published an investigation into Restore’s nominators and campaigners, then local activists surrounded a leafleting team, chanted them down the high street and, according to police, one protester punched a Restore campaigner and was arrested. That is not an argument. It is an attempt to stop campaigning. If Restore has former BNP figures, Homeland activists or people making antisemitic claims in its campaign, say so. Print it. Quote the nomination papers. Put it on a leaflet. That is politics. Surrounding canvassers and calling the area an “anti-fascist zone” is something else: a claim that some parties do not get to knock on doors. So the question for Labour is simple. Are these MPs involved in SUTR as private citizens with a hobby, or are they lending parliamentary authority to a group that physically disrupts a rival? You cannot hold formal office in the group, pose with it, speak for it, and then shrug when it chases another party’s campaigners away. Either SUTR is a broad civic campaign, in which case it should not be shutting down legal election activity, or it is a militant operation that decides which parties may appear in public. It cannot be both. Labour can oppose Restore at the ballot box. It already has a candidate in that seat. What it should not do is let its own MPs front a vehicle that replaces persuasion with obstruction. If a Conservative-linked group did this to Labour canvassers, the same MPs would call it an attack on democracy. The principle does not change because the target is Restore. Question the ideas. Expose the associations. Win the argument. Do not pretend that “anti-racism” is a permission slip for sitting MPs to help stop another party campaigning.

Stand Up To Racism’s organised crowding and aggressive confrontation of Restore Britain canvassers in Holborn today is capable of amounting to public order offences under sections 4 and 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and common assault where there is unwanted physical contact. Police arrested one woman last week for punching a campaigner. Why are they not consistently enforcing the same offences against this repeated interference with lawful by-election campaigning?