the brilliantly leaping gazelle

 Diane Abbott is certainly a great many things to a great many people but to me, she is the first politician in this election campaign to have called upon the services of the irony police. 

To deny a claim of racism made against her, many of her supporters have claimed that her suspension from the Labour Party and its subsequent treatment of her by them, was itself motivated by racism with the wholly predictable result that the original offence has been largely forgotten. 

The issue that now preoccupies the media and has engulfed The Labour Party is the both disingenuous and dangerous falsehood that she is the victim.

Lest we forget, the original charge of racism against her and which led to her suspension from the Labour Party was a letter she sent to the Observer newspaper in April 2023. For reasons unknown, she made the incredibly offensive claim that ‘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.’.

I’m not even going to bother to explain why I think what she wrote is so offensive because I trust that anyone reading this post knows why. But the notion of her being a victim of racism, that her suspension from the Labour Party is itself essentially motivated by racism, being both disingenuous and dangerous I will explain.

The former Labour leader, Corblimey had the Labour whip withdrawn in 2020, after he said anti-Semitism within Labour during his leadership had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’, following a damning report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. 

That’s why its disingenuous. Corblimey’s entire leadership was, it seemed to me, forever being assailed not just by accusations of anti-Semitism within the party but accusations about the way those accusations were dealt with. 

Its dangerous because by suggesting that racism is a contributory, if not the primary reason that has motivated her treatment, then it not only calls into question the motives of those who are only too eager to find examples of racism everywhere, but it additionally creates a culture whereby that thinking takes root, allowing other racist incidents to be all too easily dismissed.

On a more obvious note, there was a headline in The Observer on Sunday ‘ Starmer on Abbott: ‘I’ve actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises’, which to me seems like a back-handed compliment, if the starting point was way less than zero anyway.