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JME responds to Daily Mail attack

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 18 May 2017

Grime star JME met with Jeremy Corbyn the other day and now the Daily Mail is out to get him. I’m sure this will have a great effect on the Mail readership’s opinion of both him and Corbyn.

After JME met with the Labour leader to discuss why voter turnout among young people is so low, the Mail trawled the musician’s Twitter account for incriminating evidence. It came back with a couple of off colour jokes quoted from other sources, and two comments taken out of context – namely “fuck the Queen” and “bomb the White House”.

The Mail’s move to attack JME is seemingly due to the perception that he, along with several other grime stars, is backing the Labour party in the upcoming General Election. Not so, said JME in response, his aim is merely to get more young people to register to vote, saying: “The Conservative manifesto should get dropped today, so we can read it along with Labour’s that dropped yesterday and decide … Vote for whoever you want, no bias. Don’t vote for someone because a ‘celebrity’ or a ‘rapper’ voted them”.

One accusation that was thrown at him was of anti-Semitism, after he retweeted a tweet reading, “#ImSweatingMoreThan a Jew at a cash machine”. Following the Mail article, he tweeted that he did not believe this to be anti-Semitic, though later said that he now understands that it was.

He also posted screengrabs of a series of tweets from 2012, of which the Queen and White House comments were part, showing that they were part of a discussion about freedom of speech and how words could be taken out of context by the media.

The deadline to register to vote is fast approaching on 22 May. Get yourself set up here.