Diane Abbott’s problem with Jews

In an interview on Times Radio, Daniel Finkelstein made a good point about Diane Abbott. As the first black woman MP (she was elected in 1987) she “has experienced terrible racism”, he said. Born in 1953, she went to Cambridge in the early 1970s, a time when black students there were as rare as hen’s teeth and black teaching staff were almost unknown. In an interview about her time at Cambridge (she graduated in 1973), she said she was one of three “girls of colour” at Newnham and she couldn’t “remember any other black people as undergraduates at the history faculty”. The late 1960s and early 1970s, when Abbott was growing up, was a time of serious racism in the UK.

Even now, some fifty years later, according to a report by Amnesty International on abuse against black and Asian women MPs, Diane Abbott “receives an incredibly disproportionate amount of abuse and was the target of almost a third (31.61%) of all abusive tweets we analysed. She received even more abuse in the six weeks leading up to 2017’s snap general election, when 45.14% of abusive tweets were aimed at her. This amounts to an average 51 abusive tweets per day over the 158 day study. The type of abuse she receives often focuses on her gender and race, and includes threats of sexual violence.” Some of the tweets quoted in the report are utterly vile.

In a magazine interview around the time of the 2017 election Abbott said, “And just to outline: I’ve had death threats, I’ve had people tweeting that I should be hung if ‘they could find a tree big enough to take the fat bitch’s weight’. I’ve had rape threats, [been] described as a ‘pathetic, useless, fat, black piece of shit, ugly fat black bitch and n*****’.”

Finkelstein is surely right to mention Diane Abbott’s experience of racism. However, in the same interview he goes on to quote his own mother talking about her experience of Belsen and her husband’s experience of being in a camp in Siberia and saying, “it’s not a competition”. We should never speak of a hierarchy of racism or of suffering.

This brings us to Abbott’s letter to Sunday’s Observer. She was replying to the black columnist Tomiwa Owolade’s article, in which he claimed that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism”. Abbott begins by contrasting racism with “prejudice”. From then on it’s downhill all the way. “They undoubtedly experience prejudice,” she goes on, but this is not the same as racism. “It is true that many types of white people, … such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”

There’s worse to come. “In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus.” She seems to be unaware that in 1930s Germany Jews were not allowed to travel on buses at all, that there were many other kinds of discrimination against Jews in modern America and that there used to be infamous signs in boarding houses saying, “No Irish, no Blacks, no Dogs.”

She concludes, “And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”

No decent person would want to defend racism in pre-civil rights America, apartheid South Africa or slavery. But nor would they want to defend the long history of antisemitism, the killing of Sinti and Roma people by the Nazis or discrimination against the Irish. So why make the comparison? Why create a hierarchy which belittles the suffering of others?

A spokesperson for Friends, Families and Travellers said: “Diane Abbott’s letter accurately demonstrates the constant erasure of Irish Traveller, Romany Gypsy and Roma people’s daily experiences of racism and discrimination. The letter is utterly inexcusable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, who is Jewish, tweeted, “Diane Abbott’s letter was deeply offensive and deeply depressing.” She supported Abbott’s suspension. “No excuses. No delays.”

Of course, they are right to condemn Diane Abbott’s letter. It is offensive and historically illiterate. Worse still, this was someone who was Shadow Home Secretary from 2016-20. As Shadow Home Secretary she spoke in what Sajid Javid, speaking for the government, called “the first general debate on anti-Semitism” to take place in the House of Commons, on 17 April 2018.

In that debate Luciana Berger spoke of her own experience of antisemitism within the Labour Party: “In 2018, anti-Semitism is now more commonplace, more conspicuous and more corrosive within the Labour party. That is why I have no words for the people purporting to be both members and supporters of our party and using the hashtag JCforPM who have attacked me in recent weeks … for speaking at the rally against anti-Semitism, and for questioning the remarks of those endorsing the anti-Semitic mural. They say I should be de-selected, and they have called it all a smear.” The following year, Luciana Berger left the Labour Party. She only rejoined it four years later, in 2023.

In the same 2018 debate, Margaret Hodge said, “I have never felt as nervous and frightened at being a Jew as I feel today. It feels as if my party has given permission for anti-Semitism to go unchallenged. Anti-Semitism is making me an outsider in my Labour Party.”

Someone else spoke in that debate. Diane Abbott said, “For me, it has always been the case that racism includes anti-Semitism. Jew hatred is race hatred, and one anti-Semite in the Labour party is one too many.” She went on, “We in the Labour Party take anti-Semitism very seriously.”

This was 2018, when Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour Party and when she had just heard Labour MPs like Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge speak openly in Parliament of their experiences of antisemitism. Abbott had the impertinence to say that Labour under Corbyn took antisemitism “very seriously” and said categorically that “racism includes anti-Semitism”. The truth is that Labour under Corbyn left countless Jews in Britain feeling desperately unsafe with its attacks on Israel and Jewish MPs. It now seems that Diane Abbott didn’t believe what she was saying about antisemitism being a form of racism. These damning words are why she should have been suspended then, never mind five years later.