Defend Diane Abbott!

Rising prices and soaring inflation. Doctors, teachers and railway workers on strike for higher pay. Tens of thousands of young people marching through London to demand action on climate change. Yet for Sir Keir Starmer top of the agenda is the suspension of Diane Abbot from the Parliamentary Labour Party for some ill-chosen words on racism that she subsequently retracted. 

     The veteran black Labour MP perhaps unwisely sent a letter to the Observer that some claimed downplayed the Holocaust or was even anti-semitic. Starmer certainly thinks so.
In fact all that her letter in the Observer said was “Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
    "It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships”.
    There’s confusion between “prejudice” and “racism” and silly talk about “redheads” while any reference to the “prejudice” against Jewish people is incomplete without reference to the Holocaust.
    Prejudice and racism are, of course, not quite the same. But one often leads to the other. Adolf Hitler hated Jews but he didn’t talk about extermination during the Nazi rise to power in Germany after the first world war. But there’s a certain inevitability once you establish the creed of the “master race” and state that Jews were “sub-human” enemies of the entire human race.
    Yes Diane Abbott’s letter is insensitive, crass and historically wrong. But it’s certainly not anti-semitic.
    The left social-democratic Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) network points out “ No individual has suffered more from racism over her 40 years as an MP than Abbott and to even think of characterising her as racist is grotesque political chicanery”.
    Or as Caribbean Labour Solidarity rightly says: “Whether you agree with the formulation of Diane’s letter...or not, we must be clear that this is not the real issue at stake here. She has been suspended from the Labour Party for being a socialist who opposes the class-collaborationist position of the Starmer leadership. We may wish to discuss with Diane the terms in which we discuss the nature of racism, we do not doubt her commitment to the struggle against racism in all its manifestations. We cannot say the same about Keir Starmer. She has apologised and withdrawn the statement. Let that be the end of the matter. We demand that she be reinstated forthwith”.
    Starmer & Co now seems determined to purge Labour of all the remaining Corbynistas including the tiny band of Labour MPs who still support the former Labour leader in the House of Commons. But Starmer should beware. Diane Abbott is a highly respected London MP. Kicking her out of the Labour Party will cost Starmer votes – not just in her north London constituency and not just amongst the Black ethnic minority communities either.

Ending BBC bias

Labour has quite rightly lodged a formal complaint with the BBC about the treatment of Diane Abbott on last week’s Question Time. The Shadow Home Secretary says that the show’s presenter, Fiona Bruce, “was clearly repeating Tory propaganda that Labour were behind in the polls”; that she was interrupted more than double the number of times Tory MP Rory Stewart was; and that she was not allowed to respond to a "blatantly abusive remark" from the audience.

Labour has told the BBC: “The way she was treated on Question Time was unacceptable and fed the hostility towards her. We expect the programme to correct inaccuracies, provide a full explanation of what happened during the show's production and to apologise to Diane.”

In its heyday Question Time attracted huge audiences. Although viewers have now crashed down to an average of 2.7 million, the bourgeois media still regards the show as one the jewels in the BBC’s crown. But the programme’s only real merit in the eyes of the ruling class is it attempt to pass off bourgeois propaganda as informed debate.

None of us should be surprised at this. The British Broadcasting Corporation is one of our supposed “national treasures” whose aims are to educate, inform and entertain the public that funds it through the licence fee. Under the motto “Nation shall speak peace unto Nation” the Corporation claims to be a pillar of impartiality and a reliable source of independent news at home and abroad. That was never the case back in the 1920s when the BBC was founded and it is certainly not the case now.

During the Second World War the BBC’s policy of credible reporting easily outshone that of the Nazis. When the war ended the BBC continued to serve the ruling class and defend British imperialism. It totally failed to report a famine in Bengal that resulted in around 10 million deaths and was the result of a deliberate British imperialist policy of deprivation, and defended colonial efforts to maintain the Empire in the post-war era.

During the Cold War the BBC cashed in on its war-time prestige to broadcast sophisticated anti-communist propaganda at home and all around the world in the service of Anglo-American imperialism. At the same time the BBC pioneered the sponsorship of arts and drama to compete with commercial television and justify its licence fee.

Those days are now long gone. Although the state-owned broadcasting service still promotes some serious dramas, its news and current affairs output is just cheap, dumbed-down and third-rate bourgeois propaganda.

It consistently supported NATO aggression against Serbia, Iraq and Libya and US-led efforts for regime-change in Syria whilst turning a blind eye to routine Zionist atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. Whilst obscure Russian, Chinese and Korean dissidents are treated like latter-day Gandhis, the regular weekend ‘Yellow Vests’ riots in France are ignored. No wonder millions are turning to Russian, Middle Eastern and American news networks as well as the social media for their news.

The only cure is to end government control over the BBC and allow the public to elect the corporation’s board members. That’s what Jeremy Corbyn says he’s going to do when Labour win the next election. Let’s make sure he does!