Keir Starmer has condemned comments about racism by Diane Abbott as “antisemitic” but said any decision about whether she could stand again as a Labour MP would be made after a formal investigation.
In a letter to the Observer published on Sunday, Abbott suggested that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people were not subject to racism “all their lives”, prompting Labour to withdraw the whip.
Criticising an article published the previous week describing the racism experienced by many Irish, Jewish and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people in the UK, Abbott’s letter said people from these groups did experience prejudice, but that this was not the same as racism, likening it to the treatment faced by “white people with points of difference, such as redheads”.
Abbott apologised, saying an “initial draft” of her thoughts had been sent for publication by accident.
Starmer, during a visit to a community project in Camberwell, south London, said: “In my view what she said was to be condemned, it was antisemitic.
“Diane Abbott has suffered a lot of racial abuse over many, many years … that doesn’t take away from the fact that I condemn the words she used and we must never accept the argument that there’s some sort of hierarchy of racism.
“I will never accept that, the Labour party will never accept that, and that’s why we acted as swiftly as we did yesterday.”
Asked whether Abbott might be prevented from standing again as a Labour MP, Starmer said: “There’s an investigation in place, I’ve got to let that investigation be completed.”
Earlier, John Mann, the former Labour MP who is now a peer and advises the government on antisemitism, suggested it might be best if Abbott, an MP since 1987, did not stand again for her London constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
But Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the next steps would not be decided yet. “I’m sure that if she has made an apology, it is genuine. But it will be for the chief whip and the leader to decide what happens next,” he told Sky News.
“The way this works in the Labour party is you are picked by your local party, you have to be approved by the NEC [national executive committee]. The chief whip has a big say in that too. So there’ll be a process there. It’s not for me to decide who gets to be a candidate.”
Lord Mann told Sky: “I think we are seeing a rather sad end to what has been a very prominent political career. Has she not thought about her own constituents in this? What they must be thinking about what she said?
“It’s awful, it’s very, very sad. I think the best thing she could do is say she’s going to stand down at the next election.”
McFadden said the views in Abbott’s letter were “deeply wrong”. He said: “The chief whip of the party would have had no choice but to take the action that he took yesterday. When it comes to the awful history of racism, one thing we shouldn’t do is try to establish a hierarchy, or suggest that one group of people’s experience somehow counts more than others.
“When Keir Starmer became party leader three years ago, he was determined to turn the page on the culture that had come into the Labour party under the previous leadership. We’ve got to make sure that we underline our progress and that’s why yesterday’s suspension had to happen.”
