Diane Abbott’s remarks show Labour still has a long way to go on antisemitism

Just as the Conservative government struggles to extricate itself from the Dominic Raab bullying sandal, along comes Diane Abbott to land herself and her party in another ugly row about antisemitism.

Ms Abbott has made her fair share of gaffes over her political career, but it is astonishing that she chose gratuitously to write to the press to make her plain wrong and highly offensive remarks. Once again, she denied the racist nature of antisemitism and suggested that Jewish people had not experienced racism.

Ms Abbott argued with appalling callousness (and, frankly, ignorance) that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people had “undoubtedly experienced prejudice”, but added: “This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.” She even drew a ludicrously ill-judged comparison of the lived and historical experiences of these groups with “white people with points of difference, such as redheads”. What was she thinking?

Ms Abbott implied that only Black people endured racism through their lives. The backlash against her remarks strongly suggests otherwise and adds the irony that she herself was making the kind of casually racist remarks she otherwise condemns.

The episode is doubly unfortunate because Ms Abbott has been the victim herself of a vile and racist campaign of hate ever since she became a pioneering person of colour in parliament in 1987. She’s displayed personal bravery in standing up to the bullies, online and elsewhere. Yet her latest statement has given her enemies – some not entirely sincerely – another reason to abuse her. Nonetheless, she was wrong, as she formally acknowledges.

For her part, perhaps as a result of a swift and decisive intervention by the Labour whips, who’ve expelled her from the parliamentary party, Ms Abbott issued an apology. If anything, this made matters worse. Her excuse – and it is no better than that – is that the letter was an “initial draft”.

Yet if that is the case, then the basic structure of, and thinking behind, her intervention must have intended all along to be on the lines eventually published; the all-too-familiar notion of a hierarchy of racism, as if different peoples were engaged in some grotesque competition of victimhood.

In doing so Ms Abbott denied the very existence of antisemitism, and its nature as defined in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In the context of the debate she was responding to, and the way the Labour left drifted, it seems more likely than not that her published letter reflected her opinions, and, indeed, those of so many on the left of the Labour Party who did so much to disfigure it during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader.

After all that Sir Keir Starmer has done to extirpate antisemitism in the Labour Party and win back the trust of the Jewish community, it is deeply dismaying to see Ms Abbott doing a very good job of reminding the world of one of the party’s most shameful episodes – adding some insults and disrespect to Irish and Traveller people as well.

It shows how much work Labour still needs to do to win the deeper trust of the British people, beyond the wide but rather shallow support expressed in opinion polls. Labour has not yet repaired itself after the problems caused by Mr Corbyn and Ms Abbott during their period of ascendancy in the party.

Sir Keir and his top team seek to present themselves as a serious government-in-waiting, and have made commendable efforts to do so. However, the voters will be concerned that people such as Ms Abbott and Mr Corbyn on the left of the parliamentary party will exercise an undue influence on the prospective Labour government if it only achieves a small majority in the Commons.

Even if Mr Corbyn and Ms Abbott are prevented from standing as official Labour candidates at the next election, there will still be a bloc of around 30 or so members of the Socialist Campaign Group, always ready to defy the Labour cabinet, as so often during past Labour administrations. Having seen what the extremist European Research Group has inflicted on successive Conservative leaders, that is not a happy vista.

Of course not every MP in the Socialist Campaign Group and on the left of the party subscribes to the abhorrent views on antisemitism exposed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report in 2020 (and it is possible that Ms Abbott at least may think again); but evidently some in the party are still prone to some bizarre ideas, and it would help these MPs and their movement if they followed the national party and endorsed the IHRA depiction of antisemitism, as well as displaying a little more loyalty and discipline in the run-up to the general election. Sir Keir’s work is not over.