‘Shoot Terrorists, Ask Questions Second’ Says Labour Deputy Leader

Angela Rayner was one of the few Labour MPs loyal to left-wing former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and won the 2020 deputy leader election with the backing of the party left. So her authoritarian comments during a guest appearance on a podcast were a real surprise to the woke brigade.

Fellow left-wingers have laid into Labour Party deputy leader Angela Rayner after she said police shot shoot suspected terrorists without warning.

The second-in-command of the official opposition surprised listeners to comedian Matt Forde's The Political Party podcast when she gave her own take on her leader Sir Keir Starmer's latest bid to win votes from the ruling Conservatives with a focus on law and order.

“I would describe myself as soft left,” Angela Rayner said. “But you know what, on certain things I’m not though, because on things like law and order I’m quite hard-line. I am like, shoot your terrorists and ask questions second.”

“Sorry, is that the most controversial thing I’ve ever said?” She said in response to laughter from the audience.

“You can’t pigeonhole me, you know what I mean?" Rayner added, saying she had warned former party leader Jeremy that she had a mean streak. "I said don’t ever put me in that position, you won’t like me."

Rayner seemed to rival Home Secretary Priti Patel, who regularly accompanies police on dawn raids on 'county lines' drug gangs, when said she wanted to see police "beat down the door of the criminals and sort them out and antagonise them."

“That’s what I say to my local police, you know, three o’clock in the morning — antagonise them," she continued. "Because it’s the usual suspects. We all know, if you grow up on a council estate, you know it’s the usual suspects, they think they can get away with it."

“No, I want the police to annoy the hell out of them until they realise that disrupting ordinary working people’s lives is not OK and these people deserve protection."

Left-wing figures in the Labour Party were quick to condemn Rayner's comments

"Is Angela suggesting a mandatory death sentence for suspected (but not convicted) 'terrorists'?" tweeted Labour MP and former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott.

"This approach has been tried and tested. It led to Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man, being repeatedly shot in the head," posted Guardian columnist Owen Jones. "This macho posturing by politicians is childish and helps create an atmosphere which costs innocent lives."

"What’s even more risible about Angela Rayner’s 'shoot first and ask questions later' comment is that I bet she doesn’t even believe it," wrote Novara Media editor Ash Sarkar. "But she thinks it’s what other people want to hear, and that’s enough to suspend the most basic moral interrogation of that position."

Rayner has courted controversy in the past, twice publicly referring to the Conservatives as "Tory scum" and reportedly claiming that voters who abandoned Labour in the disastrous Hartlepool by-election last year were "anti-immigrant" racists.