In 1996, Diane Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. The NHS, she argued, should be employing local people, not importing them from abroad. It’s a familiar claim, though usually pushed by conservatives rather than by the Labour left. Most striking, though, was the way Abbott presented her argument.
“Are Finnish girls, who may never have met a black person before, let alone touched one, best suited to nurse in multicultural Hackney?’’ Abbott asked, expressing surprise that “blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland” had been chosen rather than Caribbean nurses “who know the language and understand British culture and institutions’’.
