Diane Abbott has lost any right to call herself ‘anti-racist’

One of the most troubling political tragedies of our era is the moral collapse of the ‘anti-racism’ movement. A movement once grounded in universal human dignity and a principled rejection of pseudo-scientific racial hierarchies has, over the past few decades, curdled into something almost unrecognisable. What passes for ‘anti-racism’ today now openly promotes discrimination, routinely downplays abuses committed by non-white groups, and rehabilitates racial thinking by casting individuals into simplistic categories of oppressor and oppressed based on skin colour. Nowhere has the moral rot within the anti-racist establishment been more obvious than in its indifference towards anti-Semitism.

Take Diane Abbott, a revered icon of progressive politics. In 2023, she was suspended from the Labour Party for writing a letter to the Observer in which she equated the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism – a bigotry that has fuelled pogroms, expulsions and the Holocaust – with prejudice against redheads. She apologised, and was later re-admitted to the Labour Party. This week, however, she doubled down on her remarks.

In a BBC Radio 4 Reflections interview on Thursday, Abbott insisted she had no regrets over her 2023 letter. She argued that racism ‘about colour’ is different because a person’s skin colour is visible. Jews and Travellers, she claimed, may not be identifiable ‘unless you stop to speak to them’. ‘I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism that’s about skin colour is the same as other types of racism’, she said. Unsurprisingly, Abbott has now been suspended again by Labour.

Abbott isn’t just downplaying anti-Semitism here, she is trying to rewrite history, too. Her original letter did not merely suggest that Jewish and Traveller experiences differ in form. It denied outright that they experience racism at all, reducing centuries of persecution to a form of mere ‘prejudice’ on a par with playground bullying. She cited the slave trade, Apartheid and Jim Crow as atrocities meted out against black people, but said nothing about the Nazi Holocaust.

This historical revisionism, and this denial that anti-Semitism is really a form of racism, is becoming more common. In 2022, American actor Whoopi Goldberg described the Holocaust as ‘two groups of white people’ killing each other. She essentially dismissed the calculated murder of six million Jews as merely a generic example of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.

These kinds of sentiments aren’t only an insult to Jews. They betray the tradition of solidarity that once existed between black and Jewish communities. This bond was powerful enough for Martin Luther King Jr to address the American Jewish Congress in 1958, where he described the ‘unity’ born from a ‘common struggle’ against racism and oppression. He later praised Israel as ‘one of the great outposts of democracy in the world’. His vision, rooted in moral clarity and a belief in shared human dignity, is difficult to find in modern anti-racist discourse.

The sickness of anti-Semitism is now impossible to ignore. Since 7 October 2023, synagogues have been vandalised, Jewish children have been harassed, and open, vicious anti-Semitic speech has become more frequent. You hear it from celebrities like Kanye West, who has openly declared himself to be a ‘Nazi’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ in his songs. I recently shared footage on social media of a young man in a central London McDonald’s casually shouting ‘Fuck the Jews!’. Earlier this week, a report, written by Lord John Mann and Dame Penny Mordaunt, found that anti-Semitism has become ‘normalised in middle-class Britain’. Yet for many in the anti-racist establishment, this rising hatred barely registers.

If the anti-racism movement cannot recognise anti-Semitism, then it has lost its way. The fight against racism must be universal, or else it is merely an instrument of division and tribalism.

Inaya Folarin Iman is a spiked columnist and founder of the Equiano Project.