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25/11/07 : Tory councillor "must go"
David Sutton and Anneliese Dodds say Rob Wilson's "Chief of Staff" must go over his defence of white minority rule.
Reading Tory Councillor Richard Willis, who works as "Chief of Staff" for Reading East Tory MP Rob Wilson, has been outed by the Press Association (see below) as an admirer of Ian Smith, the white supremacist who led Rhodesia in a rebellion against the British Government, and as a supporter of white minority rule.
Mr Willis, who has also taken responsibility for Reading Tories' election manifesto for next year's Borough Council elections, wrote on the politicalbetting.com website this week "I refuse to submit to the prevalent ideology that a government that delivers stability and economic success is inherently evil just because the elite were of a racial minority. Rhodesia was the breadbasket for southern Africa under (Mr Smith's) wise leadership."
Labour Leader Cllr. David Sutton says: "It is astonishing and disgraceful that a politician in modern multicultural Reading should come out with a statement like this. The Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia was openly racist and was committed to denying black people their political rights. The fact that the present-day Mugabe regime is brutal and repressive is no excuse at all for a Reading councillor to justify racism. It is essential that David Cameron should move quickly to suspend Richard Willis's membership of the Conservative Party, and that the Reading Conservative Group should similarly suspend him and remove all his public responsibilities. For the Conservatives, nationally and locally, to do less than this would amount to their acceptance of these deeply offensive racist remarks."
Rob Wilson's opponent in Reading East, Anneliese Dodds, is also writing to David Cameron about Councillor Willis. She says: "Reading is a very mixed community with good community relations to which all parties are committed, at least in public. Reading is certainly no place for supporters of white supremacy, or of any other kind of racial supremacy either, and I am calling on Rob Wilson now to acknowledge that and give his chief of staff his marching orders. Or else be for ever associated with Richard Willis' racist views."
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