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September 13, 2024 - 11:30am
Labour politician Diane Abbott has claimed that her party is guilty of “institutional racism”. Speaking at the Southbank Centre in London yesterday evening, the Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP said that “there is no doubt that there’s institutional racism in the Labour Party,” adding that “Labour takes black members and supporters for granted.”
Abbott was in conversation with the writer Afua Hirsch about her new memoir A Woman Like Me, and also criticised Keir Starmer’s management of his party. According to Abbott, the Labour leader “pushed out the Left starting with Jeremy Corbyn and ending, he hoped, with me”. She was suspended by Labour in April last year, after she wrote a letter to the Observer which claimed that Jewish and Irish people “experience prejudice” but not racism, and compared their treatment to that of people with red hair. Having had the whip reinstated, Abbott suggested in May that Starmer had blocked her from standing for Labour in the summer’s general election.
The former shadow home secretary accused Starmer of being “harsher than Tony Blair” in his treatment of the Labour Left, stating that “the Left of the party is on the downturn at the minute.” She also warned that “it’s corrosive if you’re not willing to listen to your members, your MPs and the public”, asserting that “the idea that you have pliant voters” is “very wrong”.
One example Abbott provided of this disconnect between the Labour leadership and members was on Gaza, where Starmer initially refused calls for a ceasefire in the conflict and even dismissed eight members of the then-Shadow Cabinet for going against the party line. The Prime Minister has since adapted his position to demand an immediate ceasefire, though he is still viewed by the Labour Left as being insufficiently tough on Israel. “We have an all-party consensus on Gaza,” Abbott said last night. “And I think that’s wrong.”
Asked whether there were ethnic-minority politicians in the UK who were, in Hirsch’s words, “anti-black”, Abbott responded that “Kemi [Badenoch] has really advanced her career by saying those sorts of things.” When, earlier this year, the Conservative Party’s biggest donor Frank Hester was revealed to have said that looking at Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”, Badenoch branded the comments “racist”. The Shadow Housing Secretary later dismissed the row as “pure media bubble speculation”.
At the Southbank yesterday evening, Abbott also weighed in on foreign affairs, arguing that if elected, Donald Trump “would be a threat to all of us, not just the US”. She cited “Germany, France and Italy, where you literally have fascists in power”, despite Emmanuel Macron remaining President of France and Germany being governed by the centre-left “traffic light coalition” led by Olaf Scholz. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has attempted to distance herself from her Brothers of Italy party’s fascist past.
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