Diane Abbott, Labour and the Travellers

Diane Abbott, Britain’s longest-serving woman MP, was yesterday suspended from the Labour party after a BBC Radio 4 interview in which she reiterated remarks she made in a letter to the Observer in 2023, for which she was suspended at the time (though later allowed to defend her east London seat as a Labour candidate, and won) about the racism experienced by white minorities, specifically mentioning Irish, Jews, Gypsies and Travellers, compared to that experienced by Black and Asian people who can easily be identified by their skin colour which the aforementioned minorities could not. This week an interview with the Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie, recorded in May, was broadcast in which she reiterated the point she had made in her original letter to the Observer: that racism against people identifiable by skin colour was just not the same as against those who aren’t, and it is just silly to pretend otherwise. (The interview can be listened to on BBC Sounds here.) Ava Vidal wrote a response to the controversy for the Independent. What Diane Abbott said in both this interview and in her original letter has been the standard view of anti-racist activists for decades, and many Black and Asian listeners will think her observations were self-evident, but the sticking point with her list of groups which aren’t oppressed quite like Black people is that includes Travellers, who are one of the country’s most openly despised minorities.
Admittedly, a Traveller can be walking down a street which is far from any Travellers’ site, or a location where there is a dispute over a Travellers’ site, and not be recognised as such. However, Travellers face intense resistance when seeking to establish new sites as well as legal and political efforts to remove them, and as research by Katherine Quarmby notes, Travellers’ sites are often in “risky and unhealthy” locations, nearly always within 500 metres of a major road, railway line, canal, sewage or refuse plant or industrial estate (more than half were within 100 metres), and often these sites are miles away from amenities such as schools and clinics. Intersecting the Traveller and Irish experiences, only last year the holiday camp chain Pontin’s were found to have discriminated racially by blacklisting a number of Irish surnames, such as Boyle and Gallagher, on the basis that they were common surnames of “undesirable guests”, and telling call centre staff to refuse or cancel bookings on the basis that a guest had an Irish accent (see these tweets from Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC from last year — KC, for my overseas readers, means King’s Counsel or a senior lawyer). People use anti-Traveller slurs, or thin euphemisms such as “do-as-you-likeys”, quite openly in a way they would not use more ‘traditional’ racial slurs against Black and Asian people.
Speaking as someone of Irish descent on my mother’s side (not with one of the surnames on the “undesirable guest” list), I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything close to racial abuse. I’m white, and I speak with an English accent, as does everyone related to me on my mother’s side of her generation. By the 80s when I was growing up, people of Irish background had anglicised, and although still Catholic (and often more practising than they are now), were not particularly Irish by culture. Actual Irish people did experience discrimination, and suspicion of association with the IRA, during the early years of the Troubles in the late 60s and early 70s. There is still prejudice against Jews and violent, organised antisemitism on the Far Right and James Naughtie mentioned to Abbott that synagogues usually have guards to protect worshippers from violence. However, the majority of claims of antisemitism that blighted the Labour party in the five years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership had nothing to do with violence, discrimination, slurs or anything else that would be recognised as racism if it concerned any other group; it was about intemperate speech on Israel (at a time when their oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank was ratcheting up) and criticism of individual Jews which fitted a list of so-called “antisemitic tropes”, frequently strained through the needle’s eye to justify an accusation. While there are Jewish dissenters who openly criticise or condemn Israel’s actions, the mainstream Jewish representative bodies are openly aligned with Israel and openly cheer on its genocide while denying that one is taking place. Such accusations were commonly levelled at Black and Asian Labour activists during the Corbyn years.
Labour’s policy on racism appears to be a convenient mishmash of different doctrines around racism. On antisemitism, they demand we accept Jewish definitions, despite the ample history of false claims levelled in response to justified criticism of Israeli actions; they fail to uphold this standard when it comes to anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. Anti-racism activism has traditionally held that racism is not prejudice alone but prejudice combined with power. This is significant, because plenty of Black people can tell stories of Black children being punished for shouting back “honky” or “white pig” at groups of racist white bullies who themselves went unpunished, or who turned on the tears and got sympathy from a teacher. Labour only seem to be quick to deal with perceived racism on the recipients’ terms when the recipients are the one minority which is more likely to be white and middle-class, and many of the loudest voices in accusing all and sundry of ‘antisemitism’ are anglicised white Jews. Whether Starmer’s reaction to Diane Abbott’s interview is yet another cave-in to that racist mob or yet another example of his authoritarian behaviour as leader, exiling Abbott because she is a relapsed heretic, is debatable. As was the case at the last election, if her health permits, she could easily win her seat with or without Labour’s blessing at the next election, much as Corbyn could. However, while it is not antisemitic to say that Jews are not principal victims of racism or oppression in modern Britain and have not been for decades — it’s fact — her principal injury is to the Traveller community whose oppression she belittles just because it is not exactly like what Black people experience. It says much about official attitudes to that community that this injury goes unnoticed in this whole debate.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Grooming gangs, rape and racism
- Just don’t call it genocide
- Does Croydon deserve the nickname “the Cronx”?
- Axel Rudakubana is guilty, and nobody else
- Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape