Labour shadow treasury minister Clive Lewis has landed in hot water after being filmed pretending to shoot himself, imitating the shape of a gun with his fingers and placing them in his mouth, and then laughing at his own joke.
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The gesture was made after a Tory MP interrupted Lewis’s colleague, Annelise Dodds, as she delivered a speech during a House of Commons debate on the Finance Bill.
After the footage was unearthed online, Lewis became the subject of significant criticism, with many social media users pointing to the suicide statistics in the UK:
The majority of netizens dismissed his antics as ‘beyond sickening’ and suggested that he should resign for poking fun at suicide:
Nonetheless, some people said that Lewis was not mocking suicide, but was rather making a figurative joke:
Lewis is no stranger to controversy: during a 2017 event, organised by Labour- and Jeremy Corbyn-supporting group Momentum, he was filmed telling actor Sam Swann ‘Get on your knees, b**ch’. He apologised for the language he used, saying it was ‘offensive’ and ‘unacceptable’.
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According to the Mental Health Foundation, 5,821 cases of suicide were recorder in Great Britain last year, with 75 percent of these being men.