Diane Abbott has been suspended by Labour… again. The party said that it’s taking “incredibly seriously” an interview she gave to James Naughtie’s Reflections programme on BBC Radio 4 conducted back in May, but only aired on Thursday.
During the interview, the veteran Labour MP said she did not look back with regret on comments she previously made in 2023 in a letter to The Observer, in which she was seen to be downplaying the discrimination received by groups such as the Jewish, Irish and Traveller communities, by comparing it to that experienced by Black and brown people.
She had written that what they suffer from is “prejudice” – which, although similar to racism, isn’t the same – and said that people use the two words as though they are interchangeable. After the outrage, she apologised for any anguish caused by her remarks and claimed that her letter had been a “first draft” and a mistake.
She was ordered to undergo an online two-hour e-training module, which was apparently a two-hour antisemitism awareness course. Her comments concerning the Irish and Traveller communities were not addressed.
I suspect Abbott had been rather keen to clarify the comments in the Naughtie interview and didn’t anticipate this reaction from Labour HQ.
She has posted the excerpt from the interview that is causing all of the controversy to her X account in which she can be heard saying: “Clearly there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know … but if you see a Black person walking down the street, you see straight away that they’re Black. They are different types of racism.”
She added: “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism.”
This is a salient point. There’s clearly a marked difference in how a Black person or person of colour suffers racism compared to someone who is “white-passing”. When there were riots in Southport last year, racist thugs didn’t double-check the identity of the Black or brown people they were attacking – they worked solely on the basis of skin colour.
Naughtie pressed further, saying the effect is “the same if you are going to a synagogue on a Saturday morning and you have to have guards outside because some people might come along and want to insult you or even throw things at you”.
“That’s pretty much the same as the kind of thing you describe in your book is happening to you as a Black person,” he said. “The fact [that] one is a person of colour and one isn’t is neither here nor there. If you suffered it, it’s still damaging.”
Abbott replied: “It is here, because you can spot that person of colour from hundreds of yards away. That is what is different.”
I understand what she means – but I see why the second point she made could be construed as dismissive. The fact is, if you go to the synagogue on Shabbat and are Jewish, and have white skin, the latter is not going to protect you from any antisemitic attack.
We’ve not been able to have a grown-up conversation around race in the UK for quite some time now. For me personally, I felt a significant shift around the time of the Brexit vote, Trump’s first victory across the pond, and Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. This is when, instead of being able to speak about my own lived experiences, I was being called upon to compare them to others – forced to participate in some sort of “oppression Olympics” for which I hadn’t trained or signed up.
I’ve always believed that intersectionality is the way to best understand what other people are going through. You can draw on some of your own experiences, look at the similarities and listen when they explain the difference in order to be able to empathise.
What Abbott is trying to highlight here, however clumsily, is assimilation. I know many people from Jewish families who have anglicised names, and this was a deliberate choice, but it’s important to point out that not all of us can do this successfully. Despite many people from the Caribbean community (which I am from) having anglicised names, it makes no difference to the racism we face. In some cases, it only delays the inevitable.
I’ve heard plenty of stories of our people turning up to a job interview and witnessing the palpable disappointment of the panel when they realise “Jason Davies” is actually a Black man. I deliberated long and hard on what to name my son, and in the end, I decided to give him an unmistakably African name so people knew what they were getting – there would be no surprises.
My friend Iain decided to give his daughter an anglicised name so that she could at least get her foot in the door, knowing that sometimes CVs and applications are thrown away just because you have a Black-sounding name. This is how early we start to worry about these things.
But my experience is also different in other ways. I don’t have to sit listening to people crack racist jokes because they don’t realise I’m Black – that is obvious to them – yet my Jewish friends have had to listen to tasteless Holocaust jokes, because no one realises they’re Jewish. Racism is often doled out due to perception.
Gary Lineker, for example, has discussed being racially abused as a child because of his dark skin, despite being white; yet Meghan Markle has spoken about not suffering the level of racism growing up as she does now because people didn’t realise she was half-Black.
Orthodox Jews are identifiable from the religious attire they wear in the same way that some Muslims are (those who wear thobes or hijabs). But in dire circumstances, such as threat to life, these things can be removed. In Islam, there is something called taqiyya (annoyingly misused on social media), which allows you to conceal your faith in times of danger and persecution. Black people can’t do this. If only Stephen Lawrence or Anthony Walker had been able to run around a corner and remove their skin in order to save their lives.
The GRT (Gypsy, Roma and Traveller) community may able to walk down the street as individuals and blend in to mainstream society in a way that I can’t, but that doesn’t negate the horrendous levels of discrimination they face within the education system, the legislative changes and even just trying to have a drink or a meal.
They are refused service and suffer crude racism in a way Abbott confidently asserts doesn’t happen as overtly to Black people any more. She said that “they may think the same thoughts, but they know it’s not acceptable to express them”.
To my mind, Keir Starmer has either made a serious mistake here, or the disrespect he has repeatedly shown Abbott and the wider Black community since the start of his leadership is set to continue.
His failure to address the findings in the Forde Report (which was commissioned to examine the level of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia in the party) resulted in many leaving the party. Some found a home elsewhere, while other MPs disengaged with politics altogether.
The blind loyalty afforded to the Labour Party over the years since the overtly racist 1964 Smethick campaign where the Tories used the slogan, “If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour”, no longer exists.
Now, a new generation of voters – some of whom are going to be as young as 16 – are looking at how Starmer’s Labour operates a hierarchy of racism; how he gave a speech on immigration that many compared to Enoch Powell and then stood by his comments that the UK risked becoming an “island of strangers”. Downing Street said Starmer “completely rejected” suggestions he echoed Powell. In the words of Professor Gus John, if he didn’t know what he was invoking, he is simply not fit to be prime minister.
Racism manifests itself in different ways. There is nothing wrong with pointing this out. And unless we are able to have difficult conversations around the subject – which includes allowing people to make honest mistakes – we will never even come close to starting to resolve it. But maybe some people just don’t want to.
