One of Britain’s most ambitious politicians, who is lined up to launch a leadership challenge against the Prime Minister as soon as today, previously said he was considering founding a vigilante organisation “to push nasty people under trains,” including prominent Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
Dutch populist Geert Wilders, the so-called “kingmaker” in the last Dutch government and the leader of the Party for Freedom, one of the Netherlands’ largest political parties, responded to the emergence of British Labour politician Wes Streeting as a likely candidate to be the next Prime Minister by recalling Streeting’s publicly expressed fantasies of political murders.
Wilders wrote: “Look what [Streeting] wrote about me in 2009. He wanted to push me – a Dutch MP – under a train”. Wilders published a screenshot of a now-deleted Twitter post where Streeting fantasised about murders, writing of Wilders and a British journalist: “Considering starting my own vigilante org to push nasty people under trains. First up Jan Moir, followed by Geert Wilders…”.
While some may attempt to rationalise away such rhetoric as harmless, death threats towards politicians are not trivial in the Netherlands. Wilders’ predecessor as the figurehead of the Dutch anti-mass migration movement, Pim Fortuyn, was assassinated by a left-wing extremist citing the defence of Islam during the campaign for the 2002 general election. Mr Wilders himself has lived under 24-hour armed police protection since 2004 over frequent threats and actual plots against his life by extremists.
The 2009 threat from Streeting was in response to an article by Jan Moir that some alleged was homophobic, allegations that led to a police and Crown Prosecution Service investigation at the time. Looking back to the episode in a 2024 article, Moir stated that police investigation found the column was not in fact homophobic and that no crime had been committed and decried Streeting’s eventual apology for the repeated threats to throw her under a train as a “pompous, self-serving non-apology… a third-person apology by proxy… a chancer’s masterstroke”.
Noting how Streeting had used violent threats against a great many other political and social opponents, Moir recalled:
…he has come under pressure to apologise for his alarming history of abusive tweets, against me and others.
In no particular order, he has threatened to punch people, to slap people, to ‘use a rifle’ on tax dodgers and to burn down the flat of someone who annoyed him… He has a way of apologising without apologising, of appearing contrite while actually doubling down…
British tabloid newspaper The Daily Express reported in 2022 that when Streeting made that “apology” referred to by Moir, he was first asked to apologise for ‘abuse’ in the House of Commons chamber, but he declined, later releasing a statement through a spokesman, which said in third-person that the “bad taste” posts had been deleted. Nevertheless, it was said he had not changed his mind about Jan Noir or her column, and apologised only for “the way in which his anger and upset at this piece was framed”.
No apology to Geert Wilders is known to have been made over including him on the vigilante hitlist. The Express noted at the time the level of concern about Streeting’s intemperate remarks had prompted a Conservative Party spokesman to add: “There is a clear pattern of threatening, abusive and in some cases misogynistic language used by Wes on social media. He is touted as a future leader of the Labour Party but he needs to apologise for his use of such deeply shameful language.”
Today, leadership challenge speculation continues to swirl in Westminster after the disastrous performance of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in last week’s nationwide local elections. Several contenders are understood to be preparing to challenge him for the party’s leadership, which, under Britain’s Parliamentary system, would also make the winner of that challenge the Prime Minister.
Britain’s newspaper of the left, The Guardian, notes in its summary of the state of play among the various plotter camps that Wes Streeting’s challenge is expected to launch first, perhaps as soon as today. Streeting, who could be Britain’s first openly gay leader, is said to be aligned with the Blairite right of the Labour Party and is a sometimes-confidant of disgraced party grandee Peter Mandelson.
Streeting needs 81 Labour Members of Parliament to put their names behind his to trigger a leadership challenge, and The Guardian‘s report cites sources who state “he thinks he’s got the numbers” to bring down Starmer, and that “he’s going for it”.
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