Oh dear. Just when Keir Starmer looked like convincing voters that Labour had changed, along came an unwelcome reminder of the party’s not-so-distant Corbynite past. Diane Abbott, the onetime Shadow Home Secretary, has popped up in the Observer letter pages today to offer her (unsolicited) musings on the issue of, er, antisemitism. There’s a first for a Labour politician…
Abbott took issue with a column written in last week’s newspaper headlined ‘Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated’ and wrote to set out her own view:
Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from ‘racism’. They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable. It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.
If only there was an example in recent history of Jewish people and Travellers experiencing systematic discrimination. Abbott’s comments are perhaps especially tone-deaf, as her home borough of Hackney experienced more than two antisemitic attacks a week last year. It follow incendiary other tweets by Abbott including her claim that Suella Braverman was responsible for migrant rapes and her willingness to frequently spout Stop the War talking points.
Abbott is now claiming that she sent the wrong draft letter and completely rejects everything she wrote. Sure thing Diane. And her weekend has got even worse as Sir Keir Starmer has just removed the Labour whip from her. A party spokesman said that:
The Labour party completely condemns these comments which are deeply offensive and wrong. The Chief Whip has suspended the Labour whip from Diane Abbott pending an investigation.
Fat lot of good that apology did…
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