‘Tell The Black Woman To Shut Up & Go Away' – Labour Shows ‘Zero Tolerance For Racism'...By Being Racist...
“You can have the whip back Diane - as long as you agree to step down at the election and not stand as Labour candidate for Hackney North”
Does that sound very much like a racist party telling the angry Black woman she’s in the wrong, not good enough for them, despite becoming the first Black woman MP in 1987 and holding the Hackney North constituency ever since - for 36 years? Because it does to me.
It also sounds very much like the ’40 acres and a mule’ promised to emancipated slaves after the American Civil War - that ‘pledge’ got broken too…
It’s reported that Keir Starmer’s Labour has offered to return the whip to Diane Abbott after almost a year - provided she accepts the dubious privilege of being a Labour MP until the General Election, and agrees to then go away quietly and not be the Labour candidate in a seat she wins easily every time.
I say ‘reported’ - tweeted by the revolting libel-ridden Lee Harpin, whose ‘career’ in what he presumably calls journalism includes such edifying incidents as ‘when he was arrested for phone hacking’ and ‘when his lies about Audrey White cost the Jewish Chronicle another fortune’.
Harpin is reputed to have a ‘senior Labour source’ who might or might not be a current ruddy-faced member of the party’s National Executive Committee - so it’s reasonable to assume that the gossip he hears has at least some basis in fact.
He's had a fair amount to say about Diane Abbott, has Harpin, who it's safe to say would hugely prefer it if she lost the whip permanently, and had done so a good four years ago...
According to the ‘dauphin of phone-hacking’ there are at least four people prepared to stand for Labour in Diane Abbott’s constituency. As the NEC has announced it will impose ‘candidates’ for most of the remaining constituencies, these are likely to include London Assembly member Sem Moena, Deputy Mayor Cllr Antoinette Bramble, who the odious Harpin follows on X (formerly Twitter), a choice of several other Hackney councillors like Mete Coban, Susan Fajana-Thomas (who seems a little too sympathetic to Diane to be considered), failed would-be TERFs like transphobe Laura Pascal - who could always chum up with Rosie Duffield - or someone simply parachuted in. Or there’s always Paul Mason…
Diane herself seems to have some information about the situation:
“More than one press report that I will not get the whip back because my tweets are critical of the leadership. This is from Starmer himself, who has already pronounced my guilt plus his staff. Making a mockery of the claim that 'process must be followed'.
The suggestion from Harpin was followed a few days later by a piece in the Independent which claimed ‘Labour sources’ had told them that Diane Abbott ‘refused to go on antisemitism training after it was offered by the Labour Party’. Despite failure to cite any evidence for the allegation, and Diane’s complete denial of the ‘story’, they made it the headline…
“A blatantly shoddy piece of journalism” said Diane,
“I told the reporter that all the key ‘facts’ in his piece were false – on the record. Instead, he has led with the unattributable briefings from Labour party sources. The facts can be verified by LP. On the record”
Despite its claimed ‘support’ for Diane over the Hester racism, Labour, even though she had clearly given her permission, refused to give said verification, just saying it declined to comment “on individual cases”.
(Like Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘case’ - on which every man and his dog from all ranks of Labour has commented?)
Imagine if Corbyn’s Labour had taken the whip from every MP who was ‘critical of the leadership’? There would have been more whipless right-wingers than you could shake a stick at walking the corridors of Parliament - and bemoaning their ‘unfair treatment’ across social media and any willing TV station or newspaper. “Stalinist”, they’d have said…
So, has what we must laughably call the Labour ‘leadership’ treated Diane Abbott differently than they would treat a more docile MP, less favourably than they would one who wasn’t leftwing? Or a woman? Or Black?
Well, clearly they have. It would be laughable to try and say Labour hasn’t treated Diane differently - the numerous examples available at even a cursory glance leave little choice but to assume this is because of the above.
This hasn’t stopped the party from trying to raise money on the back of Diane’s recent treatment, mind you – the begging emails citing Hester’s racism went out in days, quite possibly before Starmer or the Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, Anneliese Dodds, even bothered contacting Diane, who despite losing the whip has not been suspended from the party and remains a Labour member.
The journalist Owen Jones reported that the Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party John Cryer (married to the would-be Chancellor’s sister Ellie Reeves), had actively halted any mention of the racist attack on Diane Abbott at the PLP meeting on March 18th:
“At the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting tonight, the Chair, John Cryer reportedly stopped a discussion of @HackneyAbbott's racist treatment, saying: “I hope it’s not about this again because we spoke about it last week. We need to get onto the very important subject of Wales” tweeted Jones, known to have numerous sources within the PLP - this may well have changed over the last week as the Stockport-born self-publicist has, with of course significant fanfare, cancelled his membership and jumped from the sinking Labour ship.
The disgraceful racism against BAME Labour MPs by Labour Party staff, including Jon Ashworth’s then-wife Emilie Oldknow, is in the public domain. But did Labour discipline or fine these staff? No - in fact Starmer’s Labour actually paid them off in court, despite legal advice that the party would win the case.
A handful of Labour staffers even tried to stop the party’s Unite branch from sending letters of solidarity to the BAME MPs - including Diane Abbott - who were named in the leaked report as victims of racism and racial profiling from colleagues at Labour HQ.
The Forde Report states definitively that Labour has established a ‘hierarchy of racism’ - which appears to put offence to Israel far, far above racist attacks on a Black woman MP, or party staff calling a black colleague ‘pube head’…
Albeit perhaps clumsily phrased, all Diane meant in her letter was that Jewish people do not immediately attract racism by standing out visually in the same way that Black or Asian people do, a thing also mentioned by the likes of Rachel Riley, who said she ‘doesn’t look like a Jew’, recycling the antisemitic trope that there is a stereotypical ‘Jewish look’. Indeed, most Jewish people have traditionally identified as ‘White’ - it’s only in recent years that even a tick-box for Jewish’ was included in ethnicity monitoring.
Starmer himself has expelled more Jews from the Labour Party than all other leaders combined, including - almost as soon as the result was announced - the first Jewish woman ever elected to Labour’s NEC, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi.
His targets have included include Holocaust survivors, the children of Holocaust survivors, and those who lost family to the Nazis; he and other Labour seniors have even dared label some of these as ‘antisemitic’. They are not. What they do have in common is they are all anti-Zionist.
Steve Reed MP – incidentally a member of Labour Friends of Israel - used vile antisemitic tropes to describe Jewish Tory donor Ricard Desmond, describing him as a ‘puppet master’ of the entire Tory Cabinet, in July 2020.
Reed swiftly apologised - as did Diane Abbott. There was no ‘disciplinary investigation’. He didn’t even lose the whip. Not for a second. Not only did Starmer keep him in the party, but he also kept Reed in his Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Communities Secretary.
The antisemitism was also dismissed by Jewish Labour donor Trevor Chinn when Reed attended a secret meeting with representatives from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust, a few months later.
It’s almost as if it isn’t actually about ‘zero tolerance’ for antisemitism, or supporting Jewish people, at all. Just about supporting Israel…
Another white male MP, Neil Coyle, did lose the whip for racism in 2022, but was welcomed back into the party by Keir Starmer last year after attending an ‘unconscious bias’ awareness course - the cost of which he claimed on expenses.
Rosie Duffield MP - a white female rightwinger - has offended thousands in the trans community with her many overtly transphobic, TERF-style remarks. Although an investigation was rumoured, this didn’t noticeably happen.
And rather than being condemned for her prejudice, she was comforted by Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting after she said she felt ‘ostracised from the party’. “I’m really sorry about the way Rosie’s been treated” he said - he screamed in Diane Abbott’s face, reportedly launching a disgusting tirade that left her ‘shell-shocked’.
Streeting had no such words of comfort for Black female MP Claudia Webbe, who was swiftly suspended, and later expelled from Labour, after a woman falsely claimed that Webbe had threatened to throw acid over her but offered no evidence.
Kate Osamor, another Black female MP, was instantly suspended from Labour for even suggesting that the 30,000 Palestinian dead of Gaza should be remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day.
Following her suspension ‘while an investigation is carried out’ there was a no-confidence vote in one of her CLPs, which passed with just 25 votes, despite there being over 700 Labour members in the constituency.
The vote has been described as a ‘setup’ by at least one local member who attended the meeting, who said the motion was not advertised in advance, meaning members would not have been given warning of the vote.
“The fact it was an emergency motion meant it wasn’t on the agenda. Nobody was able to defend her properly. I think it was a setup”
The meeting also saw no checking of credentials when people arrived at the meeting: “From what I gather, there were no ways of checking who were members and who were not members”.
Again, words of comfort came there none from the Labour frontbench, with shadow minister Jon Ashworth saying “It’s right that she has been suspended” on live TV, where he also refused, when questioned, to acknowledge that Kare Osamor’s words were not ‘antisemitic’.
Labour actively tried to rid itself completely of female Bangladeshi MP Apsana Begum, contriving a trigger ballot in her constituency (which she won) at the same time as she was going through a trial, domestic violence, and mental health issues that hospitalised her.
Apsana was signed off sick in 2022 following “a sustained campaign of misogynistic abuse and harassment” from both her ex-husband and her Constituency Labour Party.
It was reported that just weeks before the announcement, a domestic violence advocate had warned Labour leader Keir Starmer and his general secretary David Evans that Begum was unsafe in the party due to her ex-husband’s influence within it - and they did nothing.
“This current trigger process is a further extension of the abuse that she has already endured” said the advocate, who pleaded with the leader to protect Begum. Instead, he allowed the abusive trigger process to continue.
Apsana believes Labour treated her as it did specifically because of her ethnicity and religion, as well as because she is left-wing: “I’m being targeted by the Labour party because I’m a socialist, because of my politics, because I’m a Muslim woman of Bangladeshi origin, and I’m working class. They don’t want us to represent people that are like us in Parliament”.
Zarah Sultana has received the most horrendous abuse and frequent death threats since being elected as MP for Coventry South in 2019. She is in constant fear for her safety, especially given the murders of two sitting MPs, and has been forced to organise her own security wherever she goes. In 2021 she broke down in tears during a debate in Parliament recounting the "Islamophobic hate" she had been subject to since being elected.
She was declared MP of the Year Award by the Patchwork Foundation in 2022, celebrating her work championing "underrepresented and disadvantaged communities across the UK, the following year nominated for a "Backbencher of the Year" award by PR firm Pagefield, and shortly afterwards she was given a "Coventry Legends Award" by Coventry United Women's FC in recognition of her work "as a committed champion of Coventry" and "for being an amazing female role model".
Starmer’s Labour has done nothing. Despite making headline news with ‘incorrect’ claims that then-MP Luciana Berger ‘had to have security at conference because she was Jewish’, rolling news coverage of a person shouting at Angela Rayner in a public meeting, and rightwinger Lisa Nandy’s recent claim that she ‘carries an alarm because people keep shouting at her about genocide’, the party has chosen not to highlight Zarah Sultana’s proven situation.
Indeed it has fallen to the government to provide extra security for some female MPs, both Tory and Labour (It is not known whether Zarah is one of these, as the MPs involved have not been named).
Quite apart from the mistreatment Starmer's party metes out to its Black female MPs (socialist ones) there are other warning signs:
Starmer and his frontbench cronies laud Margaret Thatcher, one of the most racist politicians in history.
The Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves applauds a statue of Nancy Astor, a virulent antisemite and racist.
Lindsay Hoyle (supposedly *not* Labour) apparently 'fails to notice' a Black woman, wearing bright red, standing to speak in Parliament 46 separate times in one debate.
A fair few of the ‘Labour’ MPs favoured by the leadership apparently believe Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli ones, that bombing civilians in refugee camps is 'justifiable', that a million Iraqi dead don’t matter. Is it because they’re darker-skinned?
So IS Starmer’s Labour racist? It would be hugely difficult to say it isn’t. It’s a cesspit.