It is an image I will not forget in a hurry. That of 70-year-old Diane Abbott, Britain’s first and longest-serving black MP, rising to her feet in the House of Commons no fewer than 46 times to speak about the violent racism levelled against her, only to be routinely, and pointedly ignored.
If ever there was a metaphor about the contempt in which black women are so often held in public life, then surely it is the abject humiliation of Abbott being forced to listen to men from both parties speaking over and about her, using her pain to score cheap political points, all the while being rendered voiceless herself.
As difficult as they are to stomach, it is important to read Tory donor Frank Hester’s comments about Diane Abbott in full.
“It would be much better if she died. She’s eating food that other people could eat, you know?”
When Iread those words, I thought about my own experiences with racism. And I waited for what would surely be a swift and comprehensive condemnation from the Conservative Party of its top donor.
Instead, what resulted was a queue of supine Tory MPs once again lining up to defend the indefensible.
Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson repeatedly refused to be pinned down over whether Hester’s comments were racist.
Energy minister Graham Stuart took to the morning media round, saying that while remarks were “ridiculous”, and “rude”, he would “hesitate” to describe them as racist, going on to say Hester shouldn’t be “cancelled” for something he said five years ago.
Why did it take the Tories so long to admit these remarks were racist?
Meanwhile, Work and Pensions secretary Mel Stride was busying denying the literal meaning of words on Sky News, saying he didn’t think Hester’s comments were “gender-based or a race-based”.
So, to clarify in case you weren’t following – it sounded racist, but don’t worry, it wasn’t actually racist. The comments were “inappropriate” and “rude”, but definitely not racist, but, no, we won’t tell you why they were unacceptable. And, actually, this is all just cancel culture anyway so let’s all stop being such snowflakes about it.
To get past the obvious – Hester’s comments were, of course, racist, by even the most rudimentary definition of the term. The Government knows this as well as I do but only trotted out an inevitable U-turn 27 hours later. Swift it was not.
Which prompts the question: why did it take them so long to admit it? Why not score some cheap political points by doing the bare minimum?
The reality is, the Tory party has backed itself into a corner.
This is what happens when a party, empty of ideas, instead desperately cleaves to culture wars. When bleating about wokeism, diversity and inclusion schemes and trans women is your only election strategy, going on the airwaves to publicly denounce Hester’s comments becomes risky. The party has turned anti-racism into a culture war issue, on which they have taken the opposing side, all the while furtively stoking the fires of the very racism they claim doesn’t exist.
All of this, of course, flies in the face of the Government’s purported distress about the safety of MPs, and their upcoming crack down on extremism. But racism, it seems, only matters when it is politically expedient. Hester’s private healthcare company has been paid £400m by the NHS since 2016. Michael Gove plans to rule out extremists from receiving public money. Will Hester’s company stop receiving new NHS contracts, I wonder?
“It's frightening,” Diane Abbott said in a statement to Good Morning Britain today. “I live in Hackney and don't drive so I find myself, at weekends, popping on a bus or even walking more places than most MPs. I'm a single woman and that makes me vulnerable anyway. But to hear someone talking like this is worrying.”
As Abbott reminds us, the racism is bad enough. The collective gaslighting is even worse.
