Diane Abbott misspeaks

Diane Abbott is not a likeable person. A late party colleague (Jewish as it happens, which may or may not be significant) worked at the BBC when Ms Abbott was a regular on Andrew Neil's sofa. He had one word for her: rude. But back in the late 1990s, she was also a forensic questioner when on the Treasury Select Committee, so much so that both major parties felt more comfortable after her removal when Tony Blair came to power. She has also suffered more racist vitriol than any other MP. One result of this was to place her son in a private school rather than put him through the abuse that she knew he would suffer in the state sector, even though this would label her, an avowed socialist, as a hypocrite. Her outspokenness on race and social matters did not diminish her standing within the Labour party, whether through careful judgment on her party, or a more liberal party leadership.

But things started to go wrong about ten years ago. Possibly an episode related to the diabetes she suffers from took the edge off her mental sharpness, culminating in a confusion over police numbers when she was Jeremy Corbyn's shadow home secretary. The younger Abbott would surely not have got in such a mess. She would also have realised that she was in the line of fire when Sir Keir Starmer took over as leader and started a purge of those associated with Corbyn. She would have known better than to send her confused musings on race to be published in The Observer.

Racism is black and white 

Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). 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.

Diane Abbott House of Commons, London SW1

One should point out that in the UK, there have been no laws against people of colour as such participating in public life, as there have been against Jews.

Quoted on Labour List,

[Pat McFadden MP] said the views in Abbott’s letter were “deeply wrong”. He said: “The chief whip of the party would have had no choice but to take the action that he took yesterday. When it comes to the awful history of racism, one thing we shouldn’t do is try to establish a hierarchy, or suggest that one group of people’s experience somehow counts more than others. 

That is like saying that one disease is as bad as any other. The unique awfulness of anti-Semitism is that it combines racism with religious intolerance. Race is a slippery concept anyway. It is a perception, not a scientific classification as leading geneticist Steve Jones constantly points out. Moreover, Judaism does accept converts, though as I understand it this is a more demanding process than with other religions. It is even more slippery when one considers Travellers. How many these days are true Roma, able to trace their ancestry back to India? 

Coincidentally, there was a fascinating programme on Radio 3 last night ("The Black Cantor") about a town (Newark, New Jersey) where, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews having fled to America from pogroms in eastern Europe made common cause with coloured people who had settled there in the hopes of making new lives away from the poverty and discrimination of the Deep South. There was mutual respect, if not assimilation, as shown by the nominal subject of the story, Thomas LaRue Jones, an African American tenor who sang Jewish music. One also learned that Willie "the lion" Smith, that pioneer of ragtime piano, had a Jewish father, took Hebrew instruction, and also had a side-line as a cantor. Sadly, the programme went on to detail how the  one-time partners in adversity drifted apart, culminating in the Newark Riots of 1967 in which Jewish-owned stores were a prime target for arson attack.