The sight of Sir Keir Starmer’s enforcers attempting to bully an elderly black woman into retirement has created a wretched impression. Whether or not one shares Diane Abbott’s politics, her treatment has been a disgrace.
The enforcers reckon that enraging the Labour Left will reassure Middle England that Starmer is sound: a Blairite calculation which may, in the short term, turn out to be correct.
But it is not only the Labour Left that is outraged by the bullying of Abbott: many others both within and beyond the party are horrified too.
And in the slightly longer term, such behaviour is likely to create serious difficulties. “Good governments need internal challenge,” as Michael Crick observed when interviewed by ConHome just over a year ago about the purge of the Labour Left which was already under way in candidate selections.
Starmer’s enforcers wish to eliminate anyone with the courage and independence of mind to question the leadership.
We are instead to be offered presidential government by the supposedly infallible Starmer. This is not a fault found only in the Labour Party: my colleague Henry Hill has identified “government by bunker”, with policies cooked up in secret in Downing Street and turning out to be botch jobs, as one of the failings of the present administration.
But Starmer’s enforcers seem, unfortunately, to have concluded that this way of running things is the correct one. The error presumably springs from his and their inexperience: the less one knows, the more anxious one is to pretend one really does know.
And once Starmer starts pretending, in his best lawyerly manner, he knows what he is talking about, he cannot resist adding a moral dimension to the whole thing.
He implies, in a pious tone, that his policy, far from being an unsatisfactory compromise arrived at under pressure of time and circumstance, is the only answer a virtuous person could have reached.
It follows that any criticism of his policy must be malign. The possibility of loyal opposition ceases to exist.
And this is another reason why it was considered fine to go for Abbott, and indeed to tell Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Faiza Shaheen that they cannot be Labour candidates.
Abbott was first elected to the Commons in 1987, and from the first she had the courage and independence of mind to raise unfashionable issues, and to reach her own conclusions about things. Parliament needs such members, or it becomes a mere rubber stamp, the role envisaged for it by Starmer’s enforcers.
In 2008, Abbott spoke out against the attempt by Gordon Brown’s administration to introduce detention for 42 days without trial. The Spectator made this its Speech of the Year.
Abbott is not always right, but she is a friend of freedom who challenges rather than kowtows to the executive. In her ebullient way, she demonstrated, as the first black woman ever to be elected to the Commons, the responsiveness of Parliament to the great and rapid changes taking place in wider society.
She became a voice for her constituents and for others like them, vigilant in defending what she believed to be their interests, a sign they could not be ignored as our laws were being made. We may take this for granted, but it is one reason why, on the whole, we settle our arguments peacefully.
Abbott has received a horrendous volume of hate mail, against which one might have expected those now running the Labour Party to defend her.
They have instead tried to lever her out by using against her an ill-advised letter she sent to The Observer, for which she quickly apologised: a matter which could have been dealt with in a week but was allowed to drag on for more than a year.
Is Starmer an authoritarian who demands unquestioning obedience at all times? Whether he now calls off his bullies, and indicates that he is content for Abbott to stand again, will help show us the answer to this question.
