With the reporting of the disgusting racist words of Frank Hester about DIane Abbott, a campaign developed anew to demand that the Labour Whip be restored so that she could stand as a Labour candidate for Hackney North at the General Election. She has a very large majority and would likely win if she stood as an independent. However there is a point of principle at stake.
The suspension of the Whip came after she wrote a letter to the Observer which at best provided a very muddled perspective on what is known as the ‘hierarchy of the oppressed’. The letter was in a response to an earlier tendentious article the paper had published but that was and is not the point. She rightly immediately apologised and withdrew her comments.
Other Labour MPs who have transgressed in various ways, some more worrying, have in due course had the Whip restored. Diane Abbott said that she didnt think this would happen in her case because she is, rightly, critical of the leadership.
Now reportedly five months after an investigation into the Observer letter was concluded and the matter dealt with via a warning, Diane Abbott has finally had the whip restored. Its unclear whether she will stand as a Labour candidate at the Election or even if she now wants to.
Contrasts with the Starmer open arms welcome that hard right former Tory MP Natalie Elphicke had are entirely appropriate.
Does all this mean that Starmer has finally disbanded Labour as a broad church? Here is what Ralph Miliband the author of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) the definitive history of the early decades of the Labour Party had to say:
Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.
In short Starmer is not the exception to the behaviour of the Labour right but very much in line with it. If there is a difference his inadequacies as a politician mean he appears more unpleasant when he attacks the left then say Hugh Gaitskell or even Harold Wilson did.
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