Tag Archives: traveller

Diane Abbott loses Labour whip for making a fair point the wrong way

Diane Abbott: she has suffered more racist abuse than anybody you can name, due to the colour of her skin – and has now lost the Labour Parliamentary whip for attacking a newspaper article that apparently tried to minimise racism against people of colour.

First they came for Jeremy Corbyn…

Then they came for his grassroots supporters…

Then they came for left-wing Jews…

Now they are coming for members of the Socialist Campaign Group – and Diane Abbott is the first to be targeted.

She is an easy target because she has an unfortunate turn of phrase and often fails to think carefully before going public with her words.

This time, it has cost her the Labour whip, after the Observer published the following letter:

For those who can’t read images, here‘s the letter in full:

Racism is black and white

Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). 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.
Diane Abbott
House of Commons, London SW1

Anybody can see what she was trying to do: she was pointing out that people of colour suffer racism far more often in their daily lives than those who might be defined as “white/European”, because the difference is visually obvious.

(It is also misleading. I have a friend who is white and Welsh, but whose face might seem to have a Middle-Eastern look about it to those who live by stereotypes. He tans very easily, and tells me that, when he has been on holiday abroad (lucky fellow!) he is habitually picked out for a “random” bomb check on the way back into the UK, by security officials who think he looks like an Islamic terrorist.)

Nobody who knows her history could deny that she has a very strong point; if I recall correctly, Ms Abbott receives more racist hate mail than all other MPs put together.

She tried to make a distinction by saying people of colour suffer racism while Irish people, Jews and Travellers (the GRT community), suffer prejudice instead – and that’s where she went wrong.

It’s all racism. Jewish people (for example) were originally Semitic (hence the word for hate against them: anti-Semitism), and the fact that their culture, like Christianity, has been successful in absorbing people from other races does not stop hatred being directed at them because they are different.

I was going to suggest that she could have used the word “xenophobia” to describe the hatred of people of colour in this context – the so-called “dislike of the unlike”. But that does not only refer to race/skin colour but also to culture, so it might be a better umbrella title for the prejudice faced by all the groups she mentions.

The problem here is simply finding the right word for the distinction she intended, which is that the other groups can avoid abuse on occasions because their skin colour means they can blend in with what, for want of a better word, I’ll describe as the majority.

But it was enough for the usual suspects to spring to the attack – presumably secure in the knowledge that nobody is about to ask them to compare the amount of abuse those of them who present as white/European receive against Ms Abbott’s.

(Indeed, judging from the abuse that Ms Abbott has received over this letter, it seems some of them may even have perpetrated some of it.)

At the end of the day, it was a valid point made in a very clumsy way.

Ms Abbott has apologised for it, claiming that the letter published in The Observer was a draft that should not have gone out. That’s still her mistake, though – and one she should not have made. Here’s what she said:

Again, for people who can’t read images:

I am writing regarding my letter that was recently published in the Observer.

I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them.

The errors arose in an initial draft being sent. But there is no excuse, and I wish to apologise for any anguish caused.

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.

So she accepts that she was at fault and has apologised.

If she was a member of Keir Starmer’s gang, that would be the end of it. But she isn’t, so she has lost the whip and there will undoubtedly be attempts to push her out of the party (or at least out of ever again being able to stand for election to the Hackney Parliamentary seat).

But some good has come of the row, because alongside the screaming, some people are discussing her points in a reasonable way. And they have good points to make:

It’s possible to foresee difficulties for Keir Starmer, though, as the suspension can be seen to carry a meaning that is harmful to him:

How about this from a Jewish Twitter user?

And this is an important point about the online wolves who are currently baying for her blood:

At the end of the day:

Diane Abbott overreacted to a newspaper article and published hasty words and, while that reflects badly on her, she has apologised, and that goes in her favour. The Labour Party that has suspended her – and the critics and abusers who have lined up to pour hate on her – will need to justify any action taken against her in that context – and I don’t think they’ll be able to.

It is they who will come out of this smelling like bull manure – not Ms Abbott.

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#JimmyCarr postscript: don’t try to tell us his #HolocaustJoke was awareness-raising!

I had to take a break from writing about Jimmy Carr and his Holocaust “joke” because his supporters were infuriating me with their attempts at justification.

Their point was that, after uttering his shocking attempt at humour on the His Dark Material video, Carr told his audience (who had laughed heartily) that his joke was “****ing funny” and went on to say it was educational because some people don’t know Nazis killed gypsies too, along with homosexuals, disabled people and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Mention of Jehovah’s Witnesses led him to a secondary punchline about “Yeah, we don’t like JWs either.”

But how many people really don’t know that, while being the largest individual group, Jews constituted only slightly more than one-third of those killed in the Nazi Holocaust?

When right-wingers in the Labour Party were trying to expel me, one of their arguments was that I had accused other people of saying Jews were the only group of people to be murdered in the Holocaust, so I provided ample evidence of people who have made it quite clear that such is their belief – or at least, what they want you to believe.

So there is that aspect of it – misinformation by people (mostly Zionists, although certainly not always Jews – never mix up the two groups) who have political reasons for wanting you to believe a lie.

But a friend on Facebook makes an excellent point about this:

How many times have there been rows about the Holocaust where the focus on 6 million Jews, and the Nazis attempt to eradicate Jewish people as a ‘race,’ has been corrected by someone pointing out that the true number of victims of the Holocaust is between 12 and 20 million, and includes Roma, Poles, Serbs, Slovenes, Soviet P.O.W.s, Soviet civilians, communists, trade unionists, disabled people and homosexuals? This is not some new discovery made by Jimmy Carr, and making a joke of it is not the way to bring it to wider attention.

The other aspect of it is as a reflection of the way the travelling community are viewed in general. A commenter on This Site’s Facebook page stated:

I found this particular joke a pointed comment on how Gypsy’s and the Traveling Community are perceived in general by the wider population… That’s what the joke is tapping into, its a reflection of the bias and prejudice we all feel towards those not our own when coming into contact with them.

But another commenter pointed out:

I’ve listened to his ‘excuses’ after getting the racist laugh from a racist audience… I think you’d have to be racist to find it funny… The educational element is a little flawed if you first harvest a laugh based on racism, then merely tag on a line after that just says ‘based on a true story’… The problem here was that he crafted a racist joke that depended on a racist audience.

Personally, I like the response of a third commenter:

Just call him “the Nazi comedian” and if anybody complains just say you are being edgy and your comment is hilarious.

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#PoliceBill attack on travellers is another step on Johnson’s journey to Hitlerian Nazism

Travellers: this is a council-run traveller site, so it looks orderly enough. But a proposed law means that even here the police could confiscate travellers’ homes, if officers don’t like the look of them.

Roma (or Romani); travellers; gypsies; diddycai; tinkers if you like. There are plenty of words for these almost universally maligned people.

They have a bad reputation because some of them are trespassers who will camp on any land, whether it is privately-owned or common, some of them are dirty and will leave their campsites filthy with litter, and some of them are prone to criminal behaviour.

In 1930s Germany, Hitler ramped up already-existing anti-gypsy laws to establish the pre-supposition that they were a “nuisance”, that they were criminal by their nature (so it follows that the authorities were allowed to assume they were criminals without them actually having to commit a crime), and that they should be moved on from encampments that were considered to cause a disturbance to the rest of the German population (in Hitler’s Germany, they were moved on into concentration camps where they were murdered in a holocaust that was every bit as brutal as the attempted genocide of the Jews).

Boris Johnson has been stealing policies from Hitler, it seems. Just take a look at his plans for travellers, as written into the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that has just won its first major vote in the House of Commons. Here’s Ian Dunt to explain it to you:

There. Police only need to assume that, because a traveller is there, they are likely to engage in criminal activity, and they can then treat that traveller as if they had been seen to commit such an act (even though they haven’t).

It’s like “pre-crime”, as described in the movie Minority Report, which turns the law on its head, allowing people to be arrested on the basis of predictions that they will commit crime. In the film, these predictions were not necessarily accurate. In this law, there isn’t even a requirement to be.

To recap: on sight of a traveller, the police may confiscate everything they own. And what will happen to them then? An arrest for vagrancy?

It sets innocent people up to be criminalised because of who they are, which is a well-recognised form of prejudice. Suppose Johnson targeted Jews. It would be an attack on these people because of who they are, not what they do. That is what we have here.

It isn’t quite racism, and it can’t be anti-Semitism, but the lesson of Hitler tells us it is just as bad.

Oh, and by the way, illegal traveller encampments could have been made a thing of the past if only local authorities had obeyed a 1968 law (the commenter below was adrift by a few years) that ordered them to provide standing sites for travellers to camp:

The Caravan Sites Act of 1968 led to the creation of 400 sites, but was ignored by many local authorities. I recall Powys County Council dragging its heels over demands for such sites within the last 10 years.

By breaking the law, council leaders (many of whom, I have no doubt, are Conservatives) made it possible for the current Conservative government to create the current legislation that demands that they be treated as criminals for no reason at all.

The Bill is sponsored by Priti Patel, who is already running concentration camps for refugees from foreign countries.

Where do you think she’ll open her first concentration camp for travellers? And what will they do next?

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Boris please note: We don’t need violence to demonstrate against Thatcherism

It seems police confiscated an effigy of the Blue Baroness after protesters set fire to it in Glasgow. It is doubtful that the scene looked anything like the above image. Without an effigy to burn the protesters did NOT become violent. They DID do a conga, while chanting, "Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead".

It seems police confiscated an effigy of the Blue Baroness after protesters set fire to it in Glasgow. It is doubtful that the scene looked anything like the above image. Without an effigy to burn, the protesters did NOT become violent. No – they did a conga, while chanting, “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead”.

Why on earth does Boris Johnson think it’s necessary to put the fear of violence into our heads, just because people are coming to London to demonstrate in favour of common sense?

The London Mayor said hundreds of Metropolitan police officers would be “kitted up” and ready to be deployed rapidly, in case of outbreaks of disorder.

The trouble with that, of course, is that he has made everybody involved – protesters and police – paranoid that unpleasantness of some kind will happen, and that it will be the other side that starts it!

How utterly ridiculous. By all means, keep your political tools (the police) ready, Boris, but keep them in the background. Otherwise, you’re the one inciting trouble.

If only he was able to step back and look at the situation dispassionately. Consider what the protests are about:

The main event is a demonstration against the current lionisation of Margaret Thatcher that has already cost the taxpayer nearly £2 million in expenses payments for MPs who were recalled to Parliament during their Easter recess for no good reason, when tributes could have been paid to the Blue Baroness upon MPs’ scheduled return, on Monday. Add to that a further £10 million for a state-funded funeral with military honours that a huge proportion of the population believes is undeserved – especially when the late champion of privatisation had more than enough cash in her estate to pay for as much pomp and ceremony as she could ever have wanted – and anyone can see there is a valid justification for the event.

Attendees will include former miners, and members of mining communities that were devastated by the Thatcher government’s decision to force a confrontation with the unions – the real reason the pits were closed in the mid-1980s. They will be joined by travellers – whose kind were attacked by police, in their role as a political tool of the Thatcher government rather than as guardians of lawful behaviour, most notably in the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’. Students whose grants were transformed into loans during her period of office will also be represented, along with those who are politically opposed to her policies and their legacy.

History tells us that violence involving those groups has always been instigated by those arrayed against them – the forces of the government; remember, the BBC was forced into a (grudging) apology after it was proved that footage of a police charge had been doctored to make it seem the miners had attacked first, when in fact the police provoked the unpleasantness.

So let’s hope that nothing of the kind happens today – either at the main event, the UKUncut demo against the Bedroom Tax and benefit cap, or the Taxpayers Against Poverty march.

But if it does, let’s all take a good hard look at whoever kicks it off – particularly their voting history. I have a sneaking suspicion that anyone causing trouble today will have a prediliction for supporting the Conservative Party.