Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
Look, if no one else is prepared to say it, I will. Diane Abbott shouldn’t be destroyed over one moronic mistake.
I am well aware of my disqualifications as her defender. I disagree with her strongly, both in general and on the specific issue that has caused her to lose the Labour whip. I detest the culture of competitive victimhood which she promotes. I suspect that, if our positions were reversed, she would be calling for me to not only be expelled from my party, but to be charged with some sort of hate crime.
Still, one has to be consistent. Either one is for cancel culture or one is against it. And an MP being prevented from fighting the next election over an idiotic letter, however offensive its contents, strikes me as an open and shut case of cancel culture.
For anyone who has been on a news detox for the past 72 hours, Abbott took issue with an article by Tomima Owolade, which argued that white people – specifically, Jewish, travelling and Irish people – could also be victims of racism. In a letter to The Observer, Abbott denied that premise:
“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.”
Where to begin with such imbecility? Abbott’s letter was published on the eightieth anniversary of the operation to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, which resulted in more than 55,000 Jews being murdered. Those men, women and children were “white-seeming”. Some of them had converted to Christianity. But this did not matter to the Nazis, who condemned them for their race. If that isn’t racism, I don’t know what is.
Adding insult to ignorance, Abbott made what must surely be the most obnoxious parallel of 2023 to date, likening Jewish suffering to the teasing experienced by redheads. Perhaps she had read A.E. Housman’s masterful satire as literal truth:
“Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
‘Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.“
It is striking that the examples Abbott gives of suffering experienced by black people are foreign: segregation in the American South and apartheid in South Africa. There is something almost demented about pretending that the Selma and Soweto are part of the British story.
Why should quarrels thousands of miles away involve us – unless we assume that we are wholly defined by our skin-colour, linked in some metaphysical way to people who share melanin levels? Why encourage black British kids to believe that these distant conflicts personally oppress them? If you were actively trying to foster depression and anxiety, that’s how you’d go about it.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, plenty of “white-seeming people” have been enslaved down the centuries. Given that the disgusting institution was practised on every continent for almost the whole of human history, there cannot be a single person alive today who does not have both slaves and slavers in the family tree.
Left-wing anti-Semitism has, as I have noted on this site before, been a powerful force down the centuries. I can’t help feeling that it is bound up with a resentment at the refusal of Jews to play the underdog role as Leftists demand. No people have suffered so much over the past century.
Only very recently – if at all – has the global Jewish population returned to its 1940 level. Jews remember the Holocaust with dignity and grief. But it does not occur to most Jewish people to claim that that abomination prevents future success. Does Abbott’s possessiveness about racism reflect her annoyance at the way Jews refuse to turn past persecution into present victimhood? Who knows?
But I am getting drawn into the contents of Abbott’s asinine epistle, which everyone else has already torn apart. Labour condemned her immediately and, I think, sincerely. The party seems genuinely to have understood that its stance under Jeremy Corbyn was shameful.
My point is not to excuse Abbott. It is to argue for the possibility of forgiveness and rehabilitation. One of the worst things about cancel culture is its totalitarianism. There is no proportionality, no room for remorse or redemption. No one ever says, “Yes, he phrased that badly, but look at his record overall” or “OK, she shouldn’t have said that, but is it really a resigning matter?” Condemnation is always at volume ten, and nothing short of a sacking will do.
Yes, Abbott insulted our intelligence by claiming that she had sent the wrong draft of her letter. Still, her apology was immediate and unqualified:
“I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them,” she said. “Racism takes many forms, and it is completely undeniable that Jewish people have suffered its monstrous effects, as have Irish people, Travellers, and many others.”
Doesn’t that count for something? Can’t words be taken back, deeds disowned, atonement sought? Or are we, as G.K. Chesterton used to aver, vengeful savages under the thinnest of Christian veneers?
The fiercest opponents of cancel culture often respond to Leftist infractions (such as Rupa Huq on Kwasi Kwarteng not sounding black, or Gary Lineker on Suella Braverman echoing the Nazis) in one of two ways.
Either they convince themselves that they are dealing with something qualitatively different, that the circumstances are peculiarly outrageous, or that the comments were uniquely abominable. Or else they say, in effect, “Well, you guys started this culture war, and what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”.
Well, I’d rather not cook your goose at all. I’d prefer to leave room in politics for misunderstandings, climbdowns, corrections, second chances. Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?
I am uncomfortable with the way people excuse on their own side what they damn on the other, all the while convinced that they are being perfectly rational. A functioning democracy depends on allowing that the other lot have decent motives, that they are our opponents not our enemies.
“Well, she started it!” you say. OK, maybe she did. I am more interested in ending it.