After one week of campaigning, and successfully so, Keir Starmer is discovering there are some events that defy storyboarding and scrupulous choreography. He clearly had no inkling that on Wednesday, as he took his battlebus and trusted lieutenants to Wales, he would be talking not just about his six steps for the beginnings of a Labour government but would also be forced to address the wide and growing, and increasingly vociferous, concerns about his treatment of the Black Labour veteran, and my friend, Diane Abbott.
And yet the problem here is that the perfect storm that now surrounds the pioneering MP and the party leader desperate for a decisive, steady-as-she-goes election is one that could and should have been planned for. It was foreseeable, maybe even predictable.
Instead Labour has walked into the middle of a minefield with no clear idea of how to get out, first with its treatment of Abbott and then with the ousting of Faiza Shaheen as the candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green. Shaheen was out knocking on doors where I live just hours before she was blocked on Wednesday night, drumming up support for the party with her young baby in tow.
How the party navigates accusations that it has embarked on a ruthless, reckless purge of those seen as unsympathetic to the Starmer project – or, still worse, a Muslim woman and a Black woman whose views aren’t welcomed in the “big Labour tent” – may well affect how well it fares in seats where its minority support was hitherto solid and ultimately whether it gains power sufficient to enact its much-needed programme.
And in the case of Diane Abbott, you sense that the party is staring over a cliff edge. How it deals with Abbott in the next 48 hours will be a defining moment. She is but one MP, but, more than Starmer’s high command seems to understand, she matters: to many of Britain’s minorities, to women, to working-class voters. For Britain’s African and Caribbean communities, she is a symbol of achievement, and progress and struggle – and, right now, of the unfairness and injustices they feel they face in their daily lives. It says something about the antenna atop Starmer HQ that neither the leader nor many of his lieutenants seem to understand that.
Outside of the party machinery, and particularly in her east London constituency, they understand it all too well. They know that Abbott isn’t perfect. She’s made gaffes; she’s upset people. When she wrote that regrettable letter suggesting anti-Black racism was worse than discriminatory actions against Jewish people or Traveller people, they were able to delineate their support and affection for her with the knowledge that she had made a mistake. She too acknowledged that, offering an apology and undertaking an online antisemitism awareness training course, as required by the party.
But as constituents and supporters also know, she’s decent, and 99 times out of 100 she falls on the side of the angels when it comes to fairness, and fighting injustice.
They know too that when you consider the intersection between our frontline politics, race and gender, no British politician has received the kind of racial and misogynistic abuse directed at her. Frank Hester, the Tories’ biggest ever donor, brought that into a gleaming, shaming light when he was revealed to have told his staff that looking at Abbott “makes you want to hate all Black women”.
Of course, people were outraged by the vileness and callousness of that comment, but the anger was amplified because it was her. In the 1987 general election, when first elected as MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, she had a majority of 7,678: that was 48.7% of the vote. In 2019, her majority was 33,188. Her share then was 70% of the vote. That speaks to a connection with voters, developed over time, that is precisely that bond Starmer and his team must be seeking to create, if the intention is – as the leader says – to change Britain, with a victory and at least two terms. But there is something about her, her history, her independence of thought, her place on the progressive left, that fails to connect with the Starmer radar.
Today there are others who would help the party and the Starmer project, whose forced estrangement multiplies those concerns. Faiza Shaheen, the Labour Muslim candidate who has given six years of her life in a bid to oust former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, and ran the grandee close in 2019, was not endorsed by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) after she allegedly liked a series of improper social media posts.
Starmer is right to be sensitive to antisemitism concerns. An apologetic Shaheen conceded one retweeted sentence “plays into a trope and I absolutely don’t agree with that”.
But Labour now has work to do, to address criticisms that in Shaheen’s case it has been heavy-handed with a Muslim candidate – exacerbating claims from Labour supporters that Muslims seem less than peripheral to the Starmer project.
But most of all, it has work to quell the growing storm over Diane Abbott. Step one: there must be some proper dialogue. Clearly, that has been lacking. There was, it is said, a deal in which she would have had the party whip restored and then would have gracefully retired, but that was exploded by the Labour source who told the Times she was to be banned, thereby miring those talks in bad faith.
An interlocutor must be found, and fast. There must be an acknowledgment of the fact that she did apologise, that she did take the course as asked. There must be a clear statement that the future is hers to decide. She may stand; she may bow out, but the first Black woman to enter parliament must be accorded the dignity that her place in history deserves. On Wednesday, Angela Rayner, Starmer’s deputy, said Abbott had not been treated “fairly or appropriately” by some Labour colleagues and should be allowed to stand again, if that was her wish. Where Rayner leads, others should follow.
And there should be a simple thank you. There have been controversies, perhaps too many, but Abbott has long fought, for longer than many who now disdain her, for the party and for social and racial justice. The NEC makes a final decision on her fate within the party next Tuesday. There is still time to fix this.
As a friend of Abbott’s, I hope Starmer’s Labour will rise to its own values, but this is bigger than her. This is also about reasserting in our politics a kindness and a decency that has been so lacking in the Tory government he seeks to replace. I believe Keir to be a good man when he promises change: here the actions must match the rhetoric.
Simon Woolley is co-founder of Operation Black Vote and head of Homerton College, Cambridge
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