14 March 2024
Open Letter to Rt Hon Keir Starmer MP
Dear Sir Keir
Make the Labour Party Worthy of Diane Abbott MP
I have been a Labour Party supporter since 1964 and have voted Labour in every general and local election over the last 60 years. Throughout those six decades, we the African diaspora (including African and Indian Caribbean) have voted Labour predominantly, while simultaneously struggling to root our racism within Labour and from the organised workers’ movement, especially as we remained subject to systemic racism as much under Labour as under the Conservatives. For example, there is indisputable evidence dating back to 1948, at least, that Labour was no less responsible for racialising immigration and ushering in more racist and draconian immigration control measures targeted at citizens from the Black Commonwealth with each new iteration, than the self-styled ‘nasty’ Conservatives.
It is worth reminding you, the Labour shadow cabinet and today’s national executive of that history and that it is those struggles that gave rise to Labour Party Black Sections and the perennial battles they had with Labour before their stalwart efforts resulted in the election of Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz to parliament in 1987. Their election induced hope and belief that better was yet to come, as the immigrant population the nation state sought to control, contain and remained obsessed with keeping out, settled inexorably and made Britain the only home their descendants would know. Today, however, we are experiencing a level of racism within Labour which is arguably more toxic than when Black Sections were focused on building an antiracist movement within Labour and the trade unions.
It is expected that Britain will go to the polls before this year ends, a year of unprecedented global uncertainty, not least on account of the proxy wars Britain and the USA are waging in the Middle East. There is much speculation about whether the Labour Party could depend upon the black vote that it has traditionally taken for granted. The only group of people who seem not to care about that is the Labour Party itself, given how you, sir, and the national executive have been conducting yourselves since the 2019 election.
Black activists in and out of the Labour Party justifiably cite a number of actions taken by Labour that suggest that the party does not give a toss about what Black and Global Majority voters think about how it treats its black MPs, councillors and party activists, especially those on the left of the party.
In April 2023, Diane Abbott, who is the longest serving black member of parliament, was suspended from the Labour Party after suggesting that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people were not subject to racism "all their lives". You and the Labour Party wasted no time in condemning her remarks as ‘antisemitic’. Following her suspension, the party claimed that it was going to investigate the matter. However, almost a year later, Abbott remains suspended and operates in her constituency as an independent MP. There are no signs that the Labour Party intends to lift her suspension before the next election and the expectation is that she would be deselected and the party would field another candidate in the seat she has held for the last 37years.
Abbott apologised for her remarks, claiming that she had erroneously sent an earlier draft to the paper that printed her statement. Her remarks were clumsy and poorly communicated, but I and any number of black people knew exactly what she meant. No one has explained what made her remarks ‘antisemitic’. It would appear that in your hands, sir, antisemitism has become a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon anyone who dares to talk about Jewish people. What in those remarks suggests Holocaust denial, or that Jews do not suffer antisemitism or anti-Jewish racism? Why should your obsession with seeing anti-Semites crawling out of the Labour woodwork like termites and with being seen to be zapping them, prevent you from acting as a leader of the entire Labour Party and as such having an obligation to Diane Abbott and her rights as a black woman and a highly experienced member of parliament that has been committed all of her life to combating all forms of racism?
In the last year, Ukrainians, Jewish and non-Jewish, have been welcomed into British homes with a hospitality that I cannot ever see being extended to people fleeing war in Darfur, for example. Were James Cleverly to follow Theresa May’s example and use foghorns to tell ‘illegal’ immigrants to ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’, the spotlight would be upon the likes of me, my children and grandchildren, not Ukrainians, or Jews, or Irish and Traveller people. Organised neofascists who take their cue from government and its racist tropes are known to step up their attacks on black individuals and communities after such pronouncements. Those acts of racial harassment and racial violence are seldom targeted at Jews, or Irish and Traveller people. Any or all of the latter could mesh with the white population in Britain without experiencing xenophobia, let alone racism or antisemitism. How many of us as African people have had the experience of working for years with Jewish colleagues without knowing that they were Jewish, even when they themselves were discriminating against us in the workplace? How many Irish and Jewish people have exercised their right to relocate from areas they saw as becoming ‘too black’ into mainly white areas, without their new neighbours so much as batting an eyelid?
Diane Abbott was perfectly entitled to argue that anti-black racism, or Afriphobia, is something which black people experience specifically and from which we cannot hide, irrespective of how many of us might want to laboriously bleach our skin and ruin our health in the process.
Abbott should have stood her ground, said unequivocally what she wished to say and not be bullied by you as party leader, or by anyone else indulging in weaponizing antisemitism.
All the signs are that your decision to suspend her had no regard for her track record as a constituency MP, or for what the wider constituency of Black Britain and the electorate generally who know and applaud that track record might think about your injudicious decision to withdraw the Whip from her.
I was the director of education and leisure services in the borough of Hackney for almost 8 years. Diane was the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, an area with a large Jewish population. I joined the council 2 years after she became an MP. Not only did she develop the most positive and supportive relationship with that Jewish population, she worked tirelessly to represent their interests and to defend their right to live full lives and be respected as a faith community and a cultural community. She similarly nurtured a most positive relationship with the Jewish councillors on Hackney council, irrespective of their party affiliations. As the years rolled on, Diane Abbott became more and more a servant of that community and a defender of their rights. She remains so to this day, as many of her Jewish constituents would attest.
The issue of black children’s experience of schooling has preoccupied Britain’s black population for generations. No other elected politician has championed black children’s rights and educational entitlement more than Diane Abbott, especially through the annual London Schools and the Black Child conference she hosted annually and which attracted upwards of 3,000 black parents and teachers from around the country.
Who are you, then, Keir Starmer, to ignore Diane Abbott’s 37 years of loyal and selfless service to the Jewish and other communities in Hackney and condemn her for being antisemitic?
You once were a director of public prosecutions and you of all people would be familiar with the adage: Justice delayed is justice denied! Why in God’s name has it taken a year for even the sclerotic machinery of the Labour Party to investigate Diane Abbott’s ‘crime’ against the UK’s Jewish community and either find against her, or lift her suspension? Why humiliate the people’s MP and effectively encourage others to accuse her falsely and vilify her? Where is the justice in that? What does the Labour Party under your leadership stand for and what can Black Britain expect of it?
In the light of your evangelistic campaign to rid the Labour Party of antisemitism and rein in the left, you have faced criticism for not being as concerned about racism and Islamophobia in the party. You yourself commissioned Martin Forde KC to investigate allegations of racism, bullying and sexism in Labour. In the summer of 2022, Forde published a 139 page report and called on the party to implement 165 recommendations. Despite a Labour party spokesperson at the time asserting that the report detailed ‘a party that was out of control’, you took no action and the report did not provoke any debate within the party, unlike the urgent and comprehensive response that you gave to an earlier report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on antisemitism in Labour. Some nine months later, Forde was telling Al Jazeera:
“Anti-black racism and Islamophobia is not taken as seriously as antisemitism within the Labour party, that’s the perception that has come through….My slight anxiety is that in terms of hierarchy, and genuine underlying concerns about wider racial issues, it’s not in my view a sufficient response to say that was then, this is now.”
Forde expressed the view that the Labour Party was enabling a hierarchy of racism.
But then, we should not be surprised at your weaponizing of antisemitism, given the undertakings you gave during your bid for the leadership of the party.
On Sunday 12 January 2020, the Board of Deputies of British Jews launched its 10 pledges which it demanded that each of Labour’s candidates for leader and deputy leader should sign up to. Marie van der Zyl, the Board’s president, said she hoped the new leader of the opposition would address antisemitism in Labour “promptly and energetically”.
The 10 pledges the Board demanded that candidates adopt were:
Mrs Marie van der Zyl stated: “Our Ten Pledges identify the key points we believe Labour needs to sign up to in order to begin healing its relationship with our community… We expect that those seeking to move the party forward will openly and unequivocally endorse these Ten Pledges in full, making it clear that if elected as leader, or deputy leader, they will commit themselves to ensuring the adoption of all these points.”
Of the six declared leadership candidates, five endorsed the Board’s demands straight away: You, Sir Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry. You declared on Twitter: ‘The Labour Party’s handling of antisemitism has been completely unacceptable. It has caused deep distress for the Jewish community, which we must all accept responsibility for and apologise. I support the recommendations put forward by the Board of Deputies’.
Racism is clearly too far down the hierarchy of oppression to warrant your endorsement of Martin Forde’s findings and recommendations, let alone address them “promptly and energetically”.
And as if your failure to accept and implement ‘Forde’ were not enough, you have been less than forthright in your condemnation of the racist and misogynistic incitement to racial violence against Diane Abbott that Frank Hester has ben reported as encouraging. Although those comments were reported as having been made before you suspended Diane Abbott, there is no question that Diane Abbott had been subjected to not too dissimilar treatment by her own colleagues in Labour since before the 2019 elections and the routing of Jeremy Corbyn MP. The Labour Party did not defend her then and has not defended her since. It is utter hypocrisy, therefore, for you and your Shadow Cabinet to be demanding that Hester be treated as ‘persona non grata’ by the Conservative leadership, when you failed to take action to uphold Diane Abbott’s rights as a black woman and an MP in response to conduct by Labour that sits on the same spectrum as that of Hester.
What is clearly beyond dispute, though, is that if any Labour member, let alone a Labour MP, had suggested that a prominent Jewish female MP was loathsome and should be shot on account of her weaponizing of antisemitism against Jeremy Corbyn and Labour, not only would that person have been arrested and charged with an antisemitic hate crime and with terrorism, the MP would have been granted full police protection and we would have witnessed unprecedented counter-terrorism surveillance within the Jewish community, especially against the background of the murder of David Amess MP in October 2021. Yet, Diane Abbott who has received more vile hate mail and more threats of physical violence than any other MP receives no protection from the Labour Party, but is suspended for antisemitism.
So, what does all of that say about the value Labour places on the life of Diane Abbott MP and on how race hate is treated both by the party and the British state?
Abbott’s continued suspension is not only an indictment of the Labour Party. It is evidence of a hierarchy of oppression constructed by yourself and the Board of Deputies of British Jews that renders anti-blackness tolerable and of considerably less urgency than antisemitism.
This, sir, is intrinsically dangerous, if only because it has the potential to fuel yet more antipathy towards the Jewish community in general, especially given the acts of genocide being committed by the state of Israel in Gaza. Your mindless endorsement of the debunked and discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism means that to call out the IDF’s and Netanyahu’s massacre of Palestinian women and children and their creating and sustaining conditions of famine is to be antisemitic, as another suspended black female MP has discovered.
I join thousands of others in imploring you to:
Kind regards,
Professor Augustine John
Equality and Human Rights Campaigner
07544 770385