Diane Abbott is delivering uncomfortable truths that Starmer doesn’t like

The following is a statement from academic professor Gus John.

On Thursday 17 July, Diane Abbott MP, Mother of the House, was suspended from the Labour Party for a second time, having been suspended in 2023 for making statements which Keir Starmer decided were antisemitic.

It emerged that in an interview with James Naughtie of the BBC in May this year, Abbott said that she was not wrong in stating in 2023 that anti-black racism was different from the racism experienced by other target groups, including Jewish people.

Diane Abbott was right

On Saturday 19 July, I published an Open Letter I sent that day to Keir Starmer, in which I argued:

a) It was perfectly sensible for Diane Abbott to state that she was right in what she said in 2023, although she apologised for saying it then and that there was nothing antisemitic about it
b) That Starmer himself and whoever was advising him clearly did not understand racism and
c) That Abbott’s suspension, having judged what she said in 2023 to be antisemitic, had everything to do with the 10 pledges that Starmer and several members of his Cabinet, including David Lammy, had signed up to in 2020 when the Board of Deputies of British Jews demanded that they did so, if Labour wished to regain the trust of the Jewish community, having got rid of Jeremy Corbyn.

Attached to my Open Letter was a paper I wrote in 2020, days after the contenders for the position of Labour leader had signed up to those 10 pledges, including “the full adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism ‘with all its examples and clauses and without any caveats’”. Incredibly, all but three of the would-be leaders, including Keir Starmer and David Lammy, signed up to impose that discredited definition on their party membership and on the country.

Recipients of my post then started sending me phone and email messages to say that my post arrived carrying the following red alert warning:

“This message seems dangerous”

Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Avoid clicking links, downloading attachments, or replying with personal information.
[Looks Safe]

But if you decided you trusted the message and clicked on “Looks safe”, you still couldn’t access the Open Letter. You just were not given the choice to read it at your own risk.

Protestors are being taken off the streets for being ‘off message’. One would hope that, 10 pledges or not, the Labour Party is not applying political filters to the internet to shut down open, free and democratic debate about antisemitism and its post-Corbyn agenda, or about anything else for that matter.

I would remind Keir Starmer that Diane Abbott is a Black woman who has lived with racism her entire life. Lest he forget, I would remind him, too, that he commissioned and received the Forde Report and has done nothing about it. Knowing the racism that Diane Abbott and other Black politicians and rank-and-file members of Labour have suffered over many decades, Black Britain sees Starmer’s record on race as being beyond contempt.

Featured image via the Canary