Labour Party MP Diane Abbott has been suspended from her party after she doubled down on previous comments that Jews do not experience racism.
The remarks were made in a letter to The Guardian in 2023, during which she said, “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people undoubtedly experience prejudice... but they are not all their lives subject to racism.” She went on to compare Jews to redheads, writing, “Many types of white people experience this prejudice.”
Abbott’s 2023 comments led to her suspension at the time. However, she was reinstated after she apologized.
But then, in an interview with the BBC that was recorded in May but was broadcast last week, Abbott claimed she had no regrets about her comments, adding, “Clearly, there must be a difference between racism, which is about color and other types of racism, because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street [but] you don’t know [that they are different.”
“You don’t know unless you stop to speak to them or you’re in a meeting with them. But if you see a black person walking down the street, you see straight away that they’re black. There are different types of racism,” Abbott said.
She went on to say that she was “weary” about being labeled antisemitic, given that she has spent her life “fighting racism of all kinds.”
Following this, the Labour Party removed her whip as the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. She has been listed as an “independent” since July 17.
A Labour Party spokesperson said, “Diane Abbott has been administratively suspended from the Labour Party, pending an investigation. We cannot comment further while this investigation is ongoing.”
“There’s no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party,” Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told The Guardian.
“Diane had reflected on how she’d put that article together, and said that that ‘was not supposed to be the version,’ and now to double down and say, ‘Well, actually I didn’t mean that. I actually meant what I originally said,’ – I think it’s a real challenge.”
Abbott then released a statement saying, “It’s obvious this Labour leadership wants me out,” adding that her comments were “factually correct, as any fair-minded person would accept.”
Protesting her comments
Many groups and public figures came out to protest her 2023 comments, including the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, which said, “To say that white people are not subject to racism is factually wrong, a distortion of history and an insult both to the victims and to those who survived horrific persecution. Antisemitism – anti-Jewish hatred – and anti-Gypsyism are forms of racism, ones that are deeply ingrained even today.”
Later in 2023, Abbott claimed she was unfairly suspended, writing, “As a black woman, and someone on the Left of the Labour Party, I have unfortunately been forced to reach the conclusion that I will not get a fair hearing from this Labour leadership.”