Diane Abbott's suspension highlights the complexity of different types of racism

Gidley, Ben and Feldman, David and Mcgeever, Brendan (2025) Diane Abbott's suspension highlights the complexity of different types of racism. Political Quarterly blog , ISSN 1467-923X.

Abstract

Diane Abbott–Britain’s first black woman MP and the longest serving woman in parliament, a veteran anti–racist with a large number of Jewish people in her Hackney constituency–has been suspended from the Labour Party for a second time after a BBC interview in which she appeared to place anti-black racism above antisemitism in a hierarchy of racisms: “It's silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism". It’s hard to see how her new comments can be understood as antisemitic or that they merit discipline, but this is precisely the path Labour has chosen to pursue. On the eve of Abbott’s suspension, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner bluntly told The Guardian newspaper: “there’s no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party”, yet failed to explain how Abbott’s comments bear any relation to it. What did Abbott actually say–and, more importantly, is she right?

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