[Malcolm Armsteen]

Where to start?
Once the great hope, the successor to Bernie Grant, but now enmeshed in an aura of loopiness.

Not to go over her greatest hits but she has done one today.

Tomiwa Owolade (a freelance leftist writer who does some work for the New Statesman) wrote a piece in The Observer, entitled 'Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated' in which he examined the findings of the Evidence for Equality National Survey - which he finds to be challenging, noting for example that more people of Irish descent reported being subjected to racist assaults than people of Black descent:

Black Caribbean people, for instance, are more likely than black African people to say they have experienced racism – nearly 50% for black Caribbean people and more than 30% for black African people. Which also means that more than half of black Caribbean people and two thirds of black African people say they experienced no racist assault. All of this from a survey many have used to conclude that Britain is far from being a racially just society.

Remarkably, the survey found that 40% of white Irish people reported experiencing some form of racist assault in their lives. This means that white Irish people are more likely to say they have experienced prejudice in Britain than black African people and all Asian ethnic groups: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese and other Asian groups.

This, he argues, means having a rather more nuanced view of racism than 'white = top, Black = bottom'.

There are racial inequalities in our society. This much is true. But this should be approached with subtlety rather than simplicity. This is because ethnic minority people in this country have diverse experiences and any commitment to fighting racial disadvantage needs to incorporate this complex truth if it wants to be truly effective.

Morally speaking, racism is a black and white issue. But when it comes to how it manifests itself, it is multidimensional. The most comprehensive survey on racial inequality for nearly 30 years needs to be examined comprehensively.

It's a short piece, and I would have thought pretty uncontroversial.

However, Abbot took exception, and wrote

Many people have interpreted this as her attempting to get the whip withdrawn, but I don't think so. She has since retracted.

I think that this is another example of the Corbynite blind spot - the Corbyn left is so convinced of its own moral righteousness that they cannot conceive that they are in any way out of step. Blinkered in a deadly fashion.

She has now been suspended from the party. About time.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... gn=uk_main

I'm with Russ:

[Crabcakes]

It was as unforced an own goal as I’ve ever seen - and that ‘sending an old draft’ excuse is clearly bullshit. Who sends a potentially inflammatory email to a national newspaper without checking thoroughly before pressing send?

And if it was an error, that level of incompetence is worrying.

[Youngian]

Travellers aren’t even allowed to sit in the front of the bus if they park in the wrong place. But Priti stuck in a caveat for Gorgers* in the Caravan Club who can just about wing an overnight road stop off without having their home crushed.
* Non Romani

[Yug]

And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships."

Maybe she could talk to her Arab friends about that. Or at least read a fucking history book. But I suppose Arabs enslaving Europeans doesn't count because it wasn't white people doing it.

Abbott seems to be saying only blacks suffer, which is a pretty racist saying in itself.

Whale sandwich springs to mind.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Whale sandwich springs to mind.

She has that left mindset that somehow anti-semitism is a lesser form of racism/prejudice because Jews run the world or something.

[Spoonman]

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Ms. Abbot has been for some time waiting for an excuse for the Parliamentary Labour Party to withdraw the whip from her so she can join her comrade-in-arms?

[Crabcakes]

I’d put money on her and Jez starting a party now. Heck, I could believe she asked him and he egged her on because he likes the idea of safety in numbers.

[Youngian]

Barbary slave trade isn’t compatible to the horrors and scale of the transatlantic slave trade.

Racism is about power relationships and is not the same as xenophobia and prejudice, is what Diane would have pointed out when she wasn’t a pissed pundit. Centuries of gypsy and Jew persecution does not fall into the category of prejudice and social snobbery.
Not the first time lately where I think I know what Diane is saying but lacks clarity when Tweeting after her third bottle.

[Youngian]

And hasn’t every Labour MP got the message apart from Diane that if you gob off, you take a bullet for the team if it sucks oxygen from Labour’s messaging? And the party doesn’t have time to fanny around playing ‘it’s not fair’ like the Tories and Raab.

Dave Spart hits back

[Oboogie]

Whale sandwich springs to mind.

She has that left mindset that somehow anti-semitism is a lesser form of racism/prejudice because Jews run the world or something.

But it's not 'just'* anti-Semitism which Abbott denied is racism. In her, very narrow, definition the only people subject to racism are the descendants of slaves and black South Africans. Irish, Travellers, Asians and non-South African Black Africans are also excluded.

According to Abbott, prejudice against Arabs - including Palestinians- is not racist. Where does this leave the Corbynite tropes that their anti-Semitism is actually anti-Zionism? How can Israel be a racist Apartheid state - unless evidence can be found that Israel persecutes South Africans, Afro-Caribbean or Afro-American people?

*I apologise for the use of the word "just", I'm certainly not diminishing anti-Semitism, but my fury has robbed me of my articulacy.

[davidjay]

The bloody annoying thing about her is that she could have been such a force for good in both the Labour party and the country in general, showing how someone from a classically deprived background can rise to the top. She could now be winding down a career that included holding one of the Great Offices. Instead she's been an embarrassment to the party from the time she was first promoted from the back benches.

Ironically, this is the best thing she's ever done as she's given Starmer the opportunity to act decisively. It wouldn't surprise me if it was, indeed, Grandpa's idea all along - having someone else do his dirty work is quintessential Corbyn.

[The Weeping Angel]

Tomiwa Owolade responds to Dianne's letter

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/20 ... out-racism

It is easy to swiftly dismiss a newspaper column – through a tweet, a private message, a Facebook comment. Something visceral is triggered in us, and we want to scratch that itch. But writing a letter in response to one takes time and effort; it is not a thoughtless exercise.

In response to my recent column for the Observer – in which I argued that accounts of racism in the UK need to reflect racism against Jewish people, Traveller communities, and Irish people – the Labour MP Diane Abbott wrote a public letter, published in today’s paper, that criticised my argument.

Abbott writes that the groups above “undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.” According to the MP, prejudice and racism are not the same thing. In her view, racism is about prejudice and power. Any group can be victims of prejudice; racism only applies to groups of people who lack social, economic and political power.

But this kind of reasoning is odd. How do Traveller communities have any sort of power when they have the worst educational outcomes of all ethnic minority groups in the country? And doesn’t the power and privilege framework risk playing into one of the key tropes of anti-Semitism: that Jews have too much power?

Abbott has a very narrow conception of what constitutes racism. In her letter, she added that, “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.” It is striking that in response to a piece that is specifically about Britain, she cites the examples of America and apartheid South Africa. In any case, she is plainly wrong even on her own terms. Jewish people and Irish people have most certainly been discriminated against in America: in the early 20th century, for example, many US Ivy League universities placed quotas that restricted the number of Jewish students they could admit.

Many of those who despise black people on racial grounds feel the same way about Jews. The Martiniquan theorist Frantz Fanon was once told by one of his teachers at his lycée school: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.” This is why Fanon, a black man, was sensitive about anti-Semitism: “Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick. They are denying me the right to be a man. I cannot dissociate myself from the fate reserved for my brother.”

In the infamous Mississippi Burning murders in 1964, three civil rights activists visiting Philadelphia, Mississippi, were shot then buried by the Ku Klux Klan and the local police force. One of them, James Chaney, was a black American. Two of them were Jewish: Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. And one of the greatest acts of racial hatred in the past century – the Holocaust – is also sidelined by Abbott as she claims Jewish people and Traveller communities can’t be victims of racism.

After all the controversies of the Jeremy Corbyn years, when Labour became the second political party after the BNP to be investigated for racism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, it is astonishing that a Labour MP and key Corbyn ally would write in a public letter that Jews cannot be victims of racism.

In a tweet, Abbott tried to desperately retract her letter: “I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and dissociate myself from them.” She claimed the errors of the letter arose because of “an initial draft being sent.” But it is too late. She has had the Labour whip suspended. And rightly so.

Abbott understandably feels strongly about racism. She has been the victim of appalling racism herself, and I have no personal animus or ill-will towards her. Yet her response to my column showed a remarkable lack of judgement. And she doesn’t have the excuse of a throwaway tweet or Facebook comment: this was a public letter.

The only positive to be gleaned from this sad story is how quickly the Labour Party has acted and how universal the condemnation of Abbott’s comments has been.

[Abernathy]

Abbott’s “retraction” strikes me as two things :

- a frankly grovelling attempt (having realised that the letter is the smoking gun that will condemn her) to try to avoid the fate of her friend and former intimate, Jeremy Corbyn.
- and a ham-fisted attempt to game Starmer on his approach to anti-semitic racism.

I can’t see her succeeding with the latter at all.

[Andy McDandy]

Seems that she conflated her job and story with "being Dianne Abbott". And now it's reached the Norma Desmond point.

[Abernathy]

I think that she now will follow in darling Jez’s footsteps by having been allowed to stand for election as an official Labour candidate for the very last time in 2019.

I can’t say I’m sad to be waving her off. She is almost as big a liability for Labour as Corbyn.

[Crabcakes]

Abbott’s “retraction” strikes me as two things :

- a frankly grovelling attempt (having realised that the letter is the smoking gun that will condemn her) to try to avoid the fate of her friend and former intimate, Jeremy Corbyn.
- and a ham-fisted attempt to game Starmer on his approach to anti-semitic racism.

I can’t see her succeeding with the latter at all.

As retractions/apologies go, “I put some racism in the first draft but didn’t mean to send that one” is a pretty interesting gambit.

[Abernathy]

Indeed. “My second draft was less racist.”. WTF ?

[Youngian]

I can’t say I’m sad to be waving her off. She is almost as big a liability for Labour as Corbyn.

I will be sad to see her go as I was Ken Livingstone but neither were political novices when they started gobbing off as lefty pub bore historians. A lot if what she’s said over the years has been on the money. That’s why she became a totemic hate figure for racist shitheads who aren’t ever going to vote Labour.

[Dalem Lake]

I always thought she was good on This Week and on Question Time.

[Bones McCoy]

A great political skill is the ability to quit while you're still in credit.