It’s sometimes said that there’s a tweet from the surrealist Twitter user @dril to cover everything. So it has proved with Diane Abbott, whose screeching U-turn on a letter to today’s Observer immediately put me in mind of this 2017 classic: ‘issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. You do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’’
That captures the comical extent of Ms Abbott’s course correction. The letter as published took issue with the writer Tomiwa Owolade for a piece in which he’d argued, under the headline ‘Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue’, that Irish, Jewish and Traveller communities all suffered from racism. Oh no they didn’t, she declared:
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.
Well, y’know: it’s a point of view. Before most of us had finished our breakfast marmalade, the social media howl-round (above all, from Ms Abbott’s natural allies on the Left), had reached the sort of pitch that causes wine glasses arranged on dusty dressers to go off like grenades. And by the time the mid-morning coffee was being plunged, she had issued her climb down. Contrary to the misleading impression given by a letter which unambiguously stated the opposite, she wished to affirm that: ‘Racism takes many forms, and it is completely undeniable that Jewish people have suffered its monstrous effects, as have Irish People, Travellers and many others.’
It’s a marvel, isn’t it? Ms Abbott crossed the street, as it were, to issue an ex-cathedra public correction to any definition of racism that didn’t reserve the term exclusively to anti-black prejudice – perhaps, buried deep down in her thinking, was some attempt to link the notion to its origins in 18th century racial taxonomies through the joys of linguistic pedantry, though I kinda doubt it. In doing so various things that you’d think might have impinged on her awareness, given her own place in public life – among them the decades of anti-racist coalition-building on the left, the Labour party’s multi-year recent nervous breakdown over antisemitism, and the difference between the Holocaust and playground teasing of kids with ginger hair – seem to entirely have slipped her mind.
And then the correction, which was even more extraordinary. Having entirely and unconditionally disavowed the contents of a letter she wrote for publication in a national newspaper (‘I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them’), she claimed the problem was that: ‘The errors arose in an initial draft being sent’. I don’t know about your drafting process, but mine tends not to be to say in a first draft the exact opposite of what a final draft is going to say. It seems to me that if she really wants to clear the matter up, she should let us see the text of the letter she claims she intended to send.
Because as it stands, it’s very hard to imagine what it could have said, given that the published letter, wrongheaded and offensive as it may have been, had a clear rationale. It took direct issue with the central argument of Mr Owolade’s published piece. Is she currently asking us to believe that she intended to send a letter wholeheartedly agreeing with the article (‘excellent analysis of racism: no notes’) but that she accidentally sent a first draft which said the whole premise of the piece was wrong. It’s not as if Ms Abbott hasn’t had her entire political career – much of it concerned with anti-racism, much of it blighted by racism – to arrive at a clear view on what she means by those terms.
The only remotely plausible way of reading this situation is that she has indeed arrived at a clear view, and that it is the one set out in her published letter: that racism is a privileged category of prejudice that only applies to black and brown people, and that – as argued in David Baddiel’s stinging recent book – Jews (and gypsies and Irish people, as whites or white-passing people) don’t count. This wasn’t an unfortunate error of phrasing, or a regrettable ambiguity that would have been ironed out in a careful re-draft. It was the crystal-clear expression of that view, backed up with historical examples which took the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa as the defining paradigms of racism but found no place in the mental map for 1940s Germany.
Sir Keir Starmer, or someone very close to him, has presumably twisted her arm right up to the back of her brass neck to see this statement of apology released. That doesn’t go nearly far enough. The Labour party is still struggling with the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn’s inability to see antisemitism as morally comparable to anti-black racism. Ms Abbott has now gone out of her way to make clear that that’s just the way she still thinks even if she shouldn’t say as much in public. If she regains the whip, we’ll be entitled to conclude that Sir Keir’s Labour has chosen to change what it says about racism, rather than what it thinks about racism.
For a long time, I suspected that buried racism was behind the widely held view that Diane Abbott is as thick as mince. No longer. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to her.
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