Helen Catherine Goodman has been Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland since 2005 representing the Labour Party.
When you engage in persecution, preventing people from having honest jobs that allow them to have a legal source of income, you are looking for trouble and I am starting to think that this is one of the reasons that got Jo Cox MP killed.
As long as they do not engage in criminal activities, regardless of political beliefs, people must be allowed to pursue any lawful interests. The fact that he could no longer work as a public school teacher, Adam Walker had to find an alternative source of income working as Karate Instructor, discipline that he perfected while living in Japan and being married to a Japanese citizen which, incidentally, puts into question statements made by the Labour Party MP about racism since the man accused of being a white supremacist is married to an Asian lady. This is not news. Many members of the so called Far Right have multiracial families so the title 'racist' doesn't apply but individuals like Helen Goodman MP that judging from her credentials has had an opulent background doesn't seem to pay attention to facts that are in the public domain.
From The Guardian:
The leader of the BNP is working as a children’s sports coach despite having been banned for life from teaching.
Adam Walker was given the ban three years ago by the former education secretary Michael Gove after he received a suspended jail sentence for verbally abusing three schoolboys, chasing them in his car and slashing the tyres on their bikes.
The incident happened following a BNP march in 2011. Walker, who replaced Nick Griffin as the leader of the far-right party in July 2014, subsequently lost a legal challenge against Gove after claiming that the decision to impose a lifetime ban was “prejudiced” because of his BNP membership.
It has now emerged that Walker, 48, continues to teach karate to about 30 children at Kyokushin Karate in Spennymoor, County Durham, where he is described as the “chief instructor”.
The local Labour MP, Helen Goodman, who has been campaigning for the club to be shut down for four years, says she has written numerous letters and has met a government minister in an effort to force the authorities to take action against Walker.
According to Sport England, when an individual is self-employed and his work is not governed by a national body, as is the case with Walker, the responsibility lies with parents to ask to see the coach’s Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check.
“I have been trying to get the government to take action on this for four years but they have failed to do anything,” Goodman said. “They have created a loophole in the law which allows people with criminal convictions to continue teaching, and my concern is that there are other people running sports clubs who are similarly unsuitable.”
Goodman believes that Walker, who posts anti-immigration videos on his Facebook page, may be using the club as a platform for his extreme views and to groom the children.
The MP says she first wrote to the Department for Education about Walker in February 2013 and has followed up with letters to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the DBS and Sport England. “My worry, of course, is that these children are being exposed to extreme views and he is grooming them to become racists,” she added.
Walker has denied using the club to recruit BNP members and points out that he is not doing anything illegal.
“Does Helen Goodman not believe in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act? She has a personal hatred for me which supersedes anything,” he said. “She needs to wind her neck in and concentrate on the real problems in her constituency rather than trying to close down my club, which makes a real contribution to the local community.”
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