Whoops! Diane Abbott gives the game away

Sir Keir Starmer's antisemitism-proof Labour Party suddenly looks exposed

Diane Abbott (front row, right) in protest by Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign against UK visit by Israeli police, June 2022

The Labour party has stripped the party whip from its MP Diane Abbott for making grossly offensive comments about Jews.

To which some of us might well respond: so what took the party so long? 

Abbott has a long history of making deeply prejudiced remarks about Israel. She repeatedly denied that the Labour Party under its former hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn — which the Equality and Human Rights Commission found had acted unlawfully in its treatment of Jewish members — had a problem with rampant antisemitism. She called such claims 

a smear against party members

and she also  supported some of the party’s worst offenders.

This time, however, Abbott went too far. This time, her remarks couldn’t be dismissed as “just Israel criticism”. 

Nemesis arrived in the form of a letter by Abbott published in today’s Observer, in which she objected to an article by Tomiwa Owolade. Under the headline “Racism In Britain Is Not A Black And White Issue”, Owolade argued that Irish, Jewish and Traveller communities all suffered from racism. He wrote:

Anyone who is white is privileged, we are told, and racism only affects people of colour. The problem with this view is that there are certain minorities who are seen as white and yet experience prejudice. 

In fact, the two groups most likely to say they have experienced racist abuse, according to the survey, are Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities and Jewish people. More than 60 per cent of Gypsy and Traveller people reported that they had experienced some form of racist assault. More than 55 per cent of Jewish people report the same.

This rather refreshing take on the left — challenging the shibboleth that only people of colour can be victims of prejudice — raised Abbott’s hackles.  Exhibiting the intellectual and moral grasp for which she is famous, she wrote of the Jews and other groups mentioned by Owolade:

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.

Before readers of this letter had time to clear the mess from the kitchen floor caused by dropping their breakfast marmalade, Abbott had been suspended from the party for her remarks which the party said were 

deeply offensive and wrong.

This had the miraculous effect of causing Abbott suddenly to discover that Jews were the victim of racism after all! Different from redheads!! In a  statement she rushed out, she wrote:

I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and dissociate myself from them…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. Once again, I would like to apologise publicly for the remarks and any distress caused as a result of them.

So how come she had written precisely the opposite in her Observer letter? Said Abbott:

The errors arose in an initial draft being sent.

Remarkable! Let’s imagine the circumstances in which that “initial draft” was sent despite it being the diametric opposite of what Abbott actually meant to say. 

To hit the “send” button while still drafting a letter for publication is certainly a most unfortunate act of carelessness. But how come she wrote in that “initial draft” that “Jews don’t experience racism”, whereas what she actually meant to write was “of course Jews experience racism”? 

Was there a hidden hand guiding her fingers on the keyboard? Was she gripped by an ecstatic vision of her lost leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose ejection from the party for enabling antisemitism she still laments and whose dictated opinion she perhaps reproduced in a trance-like state? Had she in fact written two drafts — “Jews aren’t victims of racism/ Jews are victims of racism” — and accidentally pressed the “send” button while still weighing up which was most likely to burnish her credentials in Sir Keir Starmer’s New Model Labour Party?