Labour Party keeps on gaslighting Diane Abbott
JVL Introduction
The revelations in the interview with Diane Abbott on BBC’s Newsnight (Sept. 17th 2024) were all too familiar to many activists but perhaps Labour’s ability to continue to deny what happened was staggering and, as this article asserts, “gaslighting”. You can listen to a longer version of the Interview here, at the end of which are various statements from the Labour Party claiming, for example, huge respect for her – that they did not show her during this period. Their comments do not refer to the many months between the conclusion of the investigation into her alleged antisemitism in December 2023 and the reinstatement of the whip to her in June so that she was finally, and perhaps only in the wake of extensive protests, able to stand for parliament in the seat she had represented for 37 years.
As the interviewer noted, a current cabinet member, Steve Reed, who referred to a Jewish donor to the Tory Party as a “puppet master”, a clear antisemitic trope, was able to apologise (and Diane did) and was not investigated, nor suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party for one minute, let alone for several months as happened to Diane Abbott.
This web editor thinks her claims that Starmer wanted to be rid of one of the leading left wing MPs stands up. As always, we stand in solidarity with Diane.
LL
This article was originally published by The Canary on Tue 17 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
Keir Starmer gaslights Diane Abbott after she says he treated her as a “non person”
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The so-called Labour left, who stay blindly loyal to the wretched party no matter what.
In other news, Sir Trouser Press met with Jim Crow/Genocide Joe to seek permission to use Storm Shadow missiles against Russia.
One thing was new. The treatment of the interviewee, by the interviewer.
It was a pleasure to see the respect accorded to Diane Abbott, by Victoria Derbyshire, during the interview, while not holding back on some tough questioning – not a lot, but I suspect something Diane hasn’t experienced too often in her political life.
Not wanting to sound too sycophantic, I didn’t agree with everything Diane said. About 95% of it, but I’ll never understand why any Labour MP would abstain, rather than vote against a motion.
Diane Abbott has been treated apallingly. Her treatment by the Labour leadership and their supporters on the Party’s right reached new heights/depths of moral squalor – lying, bullying, humilating.
That said, I want to make two points. Firstly, the “gaslighting” was in fact a “gaslighting” of the entire electorate.
Secondly, I’m disappointed with the JVL intro (by LL). As I read it, it claims that the Canary interview points out that right-winger Steve Reed was treated with indulgence when he used an “anti-semitic trope”. I can see no reference to Steve Reed in the Canary piece.
What bothers me more – since the foregoing is probably simply the result of an editorial mashup – is the idea that referring to a Jew as a “puppet master” (if that is what Reed did) is an “anti-semitic trope”. Let’s not follow the apologists for Israel in instant trope-tracking. A Jew is as likely to be a “puppet master” as a non-Jew. The Zionists are happy to assert that every phrase or image connecting Israel with blood is a “blood libel”.
Of course, the basic point LL is making is correct: the right-wing is treated with indulgence while the left is villified. What we should be doing – and JVL often does this – is exposing the falsity of the trope-trick not giving it a new twist.
Thank you for your comment and you are correct that the reference to Steve Reed was not in the Canary article but I felt it was an important example to add to the one within the piece.
I think we will all agree that the treatment of Diane Abbott by the Party and Starmer in particular – as head of the Party, has been appalling. I concur with the inference by “Sol” that the “Labour Left” has discredited itself and weakened its credibility by remaining in the Party. If the likes of McDonnell, Burgeon, Tricket and the rest, had anything about them, they would resign the Whip and cut up their Party card’s for good.
Perhaps Leah will further clarify?
I don’t see any problem with describing a rich capitalist who is using his wealth to manipulate our political system as a ‘puppet master’ even if he happens to be Jewish.
No more do I have a problem with citing the fact that Israel has a lobby and is using it to manipulate the political climate in its favour, regardless of Zionist ‘Jewish conspiracy’ accusations. The same had been pointed out about its sister colonial projects Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa.
Surely what would be anti-Semitic would be saying that capitalist or colonial domination were uniquely Jewish ethnic characteristics?
Anyone who claimed that Don King was a particularly manipulative and untrustworthy capitalist, would not have been maligning his Black ethnicity.
Similarly, many of us had been part of the anti-racist, anti-Imperialist movement. We didn’t mind pointing out that Robert Mugabe had turned out to be a monster or that occasionally an indigenous nationalist leader had gone rogue. We would not have been invoking so-called ‘Black primitiveness’.
Surely, we should not allow the Israel lobby to box us in with language constraints. If someone is part of an exploitive class and doing harm, then this is an exploitative class issue not an ethnic one, and we should feel able to oppose oppression and corruption where it exists regardless.
Further debate would be welcome?
really interesting points Gavin – and interested to see what others think.
I cannot understand why Diane Abbott does not resign from the hijacked Labour Party and why she does not stand shoulder to shoulder with Jeremy Corbyn as independent. Her presence in the Parliament bolsters the huge LP majority which enables Starmer to do whatever he wants.
And let us not forget the duplicitous Starmer lied earlier this year when asked when the whip might be restored to Diane. He said the ‘investigation’ was still ongoing when in fact it had ended some months before in December 2023.
It had already taken eight months to ‘investigate’ a perhaps badly worded letter, but the content of which was accurate.
I take no pleasure in being proved right in my original summation of Starmer from even before election to Leader of the Labour Party, but since then he has sunk fathoms below my already very low expectations. He is truly despicable.
Dianne Abbot was treated disgracefully, as was Jeremy Corbyn, and so many others who opposed Starmer’s Zionism or just had different poltical ideals to himself. But the disgrace goes deeper: there is an awful parallel between Keir Starmer wants and what Donald Trump is planning. The idea of elected national leaders using their position to put in place only those who are personally loyal to them must be repellent to any-one who has seen what the aim of such leaders usually is, to rule the nation as if it was their own household. Trump’s ambition to emulate Hitler has become fairly plain. We must all beware that Starmer does not fall into the moral and ethical trap that Trump has.
Three points: Der Starmer only supports the right kind of Jew which is, to most of the rest of humanity, the wrong kind of Jew; second, his government feeds ignorance and incompetence rather as an unfillable bucket consumes water; and third, he has a passion for suspending/expelling Labour Party members whether they are black, white, Jewish or given to even the mildest momentary thought crime, ie, those to fail agree with even the finer points of his crass narrow minded, multi-drectional bigotry, because he has not yet passed the laws enabling him to imprison or execute them, or send them on a one month holiday to Gaza.
Diana has been viciously abused by Der Starmer’s Labour Party and I am pretty sure she will be levered to the other side of the House during Starmer’s inevitably short period as leader and prime minister. A government with Reeves, Lammy and Cooper in the principal Offices of State is not built for survival, and Der Starmer’s passion to unleash
a “British” missile deep into the heart of Russia – in the full knowledge that Russia will see this as an act of war by NATO and take retaliatory action – does the UK few favours. And Lammy’s performance in the House of Commons following the decline of Der Starmer’s generous offer by the mentally enfeebled Biden after the US military made it clear that no member of NATO was prepared for the kind of war that would have to be fought against Russia was pathetic and offensive to even those without a built-in bullshit detector.
Maybe, in a kinder, wiser Labour Party, the best outcome would be to oust Starmer and to give a wise, compassionate loyalist like Diane a key Cabinet post; or maybe she would be serve the people of the UK by voluntarily crossing the floor of the House to build a new party capable of operating in a multiparty Commons as the Tories and Labour disintegrate under pressure of events.