Diane Abbott speaking at the People’s Assembly Against Austerity protest in central London, June 7, 2025DIANE ABBOTT is not so much guilty of thought crime as the crime of thinking. In her response to question put to her by Radio 4’s James Naughtie (and recorded in May before the present ructions in the Parliamentary Labour Party) she simply said: “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.”
She then went on to remark: “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. I don’t know why people would say that.”
Keir Starmer’s reimposition of the verbot on Abbott’s membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party arrived without anything resembling a rational examination of the manifestly sensible things she said and without any reasoned argument against.
It is, and was intended as such, as an arbitrary act of punishment, designed to isolate her and render toxic a rational discussion of racism.
You might think that Starmer and his praetorian guard would think about the way this might be understood in black communities, particularly as this all occurs alongside a violent racist riot in a neighbouring constituency to hers.
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Starmer sees it as another opportunity to buttress his complicity in the Gaza genocide to strengthen his police regime which has driven hundreds of thousands out of the Labour Party, shed millions of Labour voters and is creating something of a panic in a Parliamentary Labour Party whose members, if they lack the courage to confront him, still retain the capacity to count and thus know they face certain defeat.
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