I’ll be doing a message to Labour Party members and MPs explaining why I am so opposed to them, why I hold them responsible for Starmer’s actions (re: support, active participation and complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide, attacks on the poor and vulnerable), how I intend to continue to oppose the UK Labour party, etc.
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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MP Diane Abbott addressing the People’s Assembly Britain is Broken national demonstration in central London, November 5, 2022SUSPENDING Diane Abbott on the same day a far-right mob attacked police and anti-racists reveals Labour’s “rank hypocrisy,” Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) said yesterday.
The campaign group slammed the party for censuring Britain’s first black woman MP and leading anti-racist while its leader, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, stoked anti-immigrant sentiment with a speech implying Britain was becoming “an island of strangers.”
Anti-racists were surrounded by masked far-right thugs on Thursday night after staging a counter demonstration to an anti-immigration protest outside a hotel in Epping, Essex.
Riot police swarmed the streets after police vans were vandalised and officers assaulted by groups of men trying to reach the hotel.
SUTR co-convener Sabby Dhalu said: “On the same evening as a violent racist riot targeting asylum-seekers erupted outside the Bell Hotel in Epping Forest, Labour decided to suspend Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black woman MP and a leading anti-racist.
“The government has lost its bearings on racism.”
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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, in Downing Street, London, on his first official visit to Britain, July 17, 2025…
Just 12 per cent of the public approve of the government’s record, a historic low. Current polling shows the great majority of Labour MPs losing their seats at the next election, either to Reform, or to the new left party struggling to be born, or in Scotland and Wales to nationalist parties.
Certainly, at present it is as easy to see the suspended four — and the already-whipless John McDonnell and Apsana Begum who rebelled a year ago against the two-child benefit cap — securing re-election as independents than as candidates of the Starmer regime.
It is certainly hard to see this move breaking resistance to the new austerity agenda going forward. Only successful leaders can hope to get away with this sort of crackdown.
So this latest exercise in authoritarianism speaks only to Starmer’s loss of capacity to advance his right-wing agenda, as well as to his consigliere Morgan McSweeney’s blinkered view that whatever the problem is the answer lies in attacking the left.
But it is also a challenge to the Labour left. Over the last five years it has consistently failed to find the means to arrest the Starmer-McSweeney purge of the left, often for want of the simple virtue of sticking together when under attack.
The response to the latest suspensions has been robust, in words at least. The left has shown it can inflict defeats on the government, reversing specific policy proposals.
But it is now beyond obvious that only a fighting plan to actually oust Starmer himself has any prospect of reversing Labour’s dismal prospects in time to save the next election. They should take every opportunity — and even create them — to express no-confidence in this government of austerity, war and authoritarianism.
Failure to do so will certainly turbocharge the case for the new socialist party being promoted by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The appeal of that venture rests in part on the perception that Labour is a lost cause.
Starmer’s latest sanctions against dissent tend to make that case. He has flung down the gauntlet — the left in the PLP, the affiliated unions and the membership must pick it up.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/purge-dissenting-mps-sign-starmers-weakness
