Labour MP Diane Abbott was stripped of the Labour whip on Sunday morning amid a backlash at her “shameful” suggestion that Jewish people don’t suffer racism in a letter to the Observer. MailOnline has more.
The former Shadow Home Secretary has been suspended as a Labour MP by the party’s chief whip, Alan Campbell, while an investigation is carried out.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had faced called calls to take action against Ms. Abbott following her comments in a Sunday newspaper.
The 69-year-old, who has been an MP for more than 35 years, suggested that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experience “prejudice” but “are not all their lives subject to racism”.
Amid the fury at her comments, Cabinet minister Grant Shapps accused Ms Abbott, a close ally of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, of “spouting hateful anti-Semitism”.
She later issued a statement to “wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them” as she blamed drafting “errors”.
But Labour pushed ahead with action against the ex-shadow minister.
A spokesperson said: “The Labour Party completely condemns these comments which are deeply offensive and wrong. The chief whip has suspended the Labour whip from Diane Abbott pending an investigation.” …
The Jewish Labour Movement issued a statement in support of the party’s action to withdraw the whip from Ms. Abbott.
“Diane Abbott is one of the most respected people in the Labour Party as an activist who overcame racism and prejudice to become Britain’s first black woman MP,” they said.
“We should be unified in our struggle against racism, not divided against one another. A hierarchy of racism only divides communities and assists the racists. We must not allow this. We take seriously our responsibility to unite with friends and partners across the Labour movement to fight racism together.”
A senior Labour activist told MailOnline: “Shame that Diane decides that testing boundaries with Keir is more important than building solidarity between black people and other minorities. She should know better. People are furious – this tendentious hierarchy of racism narrative only helps the racists in the end.”
Worth reading in full.
Ms. Abbott has also been criticised for claiming that white people were not enslaved. In her letter she wrote: “At the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”
This is untrue, of course: historians estimate that over a million Europeans were abducted and enslaved by North Africans between the 16th and 18th centuries, as explained in this old Guardian book review (which I suspect would not get published in the newspaper now):
North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than one million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids that depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research.
Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, labourers and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, it is claimed.
Scholars have long known of the slave raids on Europe. But U.S. historian Robert Davis has calculated that the total number captured – although small compared with the 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in later years – was far higher than previously recognised.
His new book, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery In The Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, And Italy, 1500-1800, concluded that one million to 1.3 million ended up in bondage.
Historians were split over whether Prof. Davis’s unorthodox methodology has produced plausible estimates, but they welcomed any attempt to fill a gap in the little-known story of Africans subjugating Europeans.
Ms. Abbott’s comments about Jews not suffering racism are reminiscent of comments by Whoopi Goldberg last year that the “Holocaust isn’t about race” because “these are two white groups of people”. There appears to be a strain of woke thought that sees racism as only applying to black people and not other racial or ethnic groups, or at least not to Jews and other “white-seeming people”.
While denying that non-Jewish caucasians can suffer race-based prejudice is par for the course among critical race theorists, saying the same about Jews is obviously more contentious. However, there is a strain of Leftist thinking that sees Jewish people as beneficiaries of ‘white privilege’ – perhaps even especially so – and hence ‘oppressors’ rather than ‘oppressed’. This may be what Abbott and Goldberg are drawing on, though not necessarily consciously.
Whatever the source of these ideas, though, they are clearly factually dubious and likely to exacerbate racial divisions rather than heal them.
Stop Press: Brendan O’Neill in Spiked says that “Abbott’s mad letter sums up everything that’s wrong with identity politics”.
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It’s actually best to click the link and read the full article for context because it’s easy to jump to conclusions and minimize this young lady’s experience. I think the thing this guy did wrong, well, after basically singling her out to act in such an inappropriate and unprofessional manner, was to ‘ghost’ her and stop giving her any shifts. When he overheard her on the CCTV confiding in colleagues about how creepy he was being only with her that should’ve been a wake-up call that he was out of order and over stepping the mark as her boss. He should’ve stopped being a sleaze, apologized for his behaviour, which obviously wasn’t welcome and made her feel uncomfortable, then he should’ve went ahead and treat her exactly like her colleagues.
So at first I was like, ”Only in Clown World does somebody think getting an extra 20 quid is harassment”, but there’s much more to it than that. I think the reason, as stated in the article, she went ahead for the sexual harassment claim as opposed to unfair dismissal is that she hadn’t worked there long enough to make a claim for the latter. He’d done it with a previous female staff member but if the staff just up and leave then he’s never going to be held to account and change his behaviour going forward. Well it looks like he might think twice before being a perv with any future staff and abusing his authority, which he obviously enjoyed doing.
She tried both sexual harrasment and unfair dismissal. The latter complaint was dismissed because she hadn’t been working there for long enough.
I concluded just from this article that the guy’s a slimeball.
Me too
I’m not keen on the micro regulation of workplace behaviour but other than leaving to find a job with a better employer I think her options were limited unless she is in a trade union but they probably wouldn’t hold much sway in a small business
I think what she did took guts, more guts than merely leaving and basically allowing him to behave this way continuously with future victims he singles out. By winning her case she’s presumably broken the cycle and the creep will think twice in future. He was blatantly grooming her, telling her to keep the fact he gave her extra cash a secret etc, so I’m very glad she listened to her intuition and didn’t accept any lifts from him. People, females especially, need to listen to their gut instinct ( their lizard brain, in reality ) and if something doesn’t feel right then it usually isn’t. Being all agreeable and thinking something won’t happen to you can be your downfall.
I generally agree and you make some good points. She could have left and left some online reviews calling him out- I like the idea of the market taking care of things like this- but I accept it’s not easy. I don’t think I’ve paid anyone (male or female) at work a compliment about their eyes or anything similar in the 38 years I have been there. I may remark on them looking smart or well but nothing beyond that. I don’t think winking necessarily constitutes inappropriate behaviour but it depends on the context and in this case it’s part of a much wider pattern.
Well-said. The ever-insightful Gavin de Becker would certainly agree with you.
Well look at the title; ”Winking at a female employee can be sexual harassment”, and we are presumably supposed to form a certain opinion based on the insinuation of that sentence. So that’s why I thought I’d beat the resident misogynists and advise people to read the DM article in order to get the bigger picture before making a judgment, seeing as it was a lot more than some over-sensitive snowflake girl taking offense and playing her ”victim card” because her boss winked at her.
The article was almost certainly written by someone who wanted to support the women’s side of the story. Stripped of all the decorations, it’s (almost certainly) “middle-aged married guy making clumsy attempts to flirt with a much younger woman and floundering spectacularly at that”. Which immediately leads to the question: “What did the women do to motivate this guy to make a total ass of himself in such a hopeless and expensive way?”
Viewed objectively, he didn’t do anything justifying actual outrage and she never really told him off, she just made fun of him when she thought he wouldn’t notice because she hadn’t noticed the CCTV camera. She then voluntarily stopped working there “for her exams” and called the guy again afterwards as she wanted to have more shifts. Having finally wised up to the situation and with a bit of distance, he chose to let the matter rest at that. And then, she sued him, ie, not because of what he allegedly did before but because he wasn’t willing to throw more money in her direction.
NB: That’s an attempt to the tell the side of the story the Mail left out based on the facts and some not entirely unlikely conjectures. As I don’t know any of the people, I do not claim that it must be true, just that it could.
Indeed, the clickbait title of this article is extremely misleading.
Sexual harassment like racial discrimination cases have no upper limit on compensation.
I agree the guy is clearly a slime ball and he should have apologised to her once he saw and heard the CCTV, and that would have been that. But no: he was exploiting the very good law which avoids having the judicial system tied up with petty disagreements between employee and employer in the probationary period, during which either side can walk away without having to give any reason or notice. He could have his way with her (or so he thought) then just say she wasn’t very good at her job and that’s that, he would be off scott-free. I am sure he’s tried it (and maybe had it) many times. It’s a kind of justice that this lady frustrated his efforts in the future… I hope.
And I hope Ms Almussawi invests her damages wisely.
I also hope that her win will not make potential employers see her as too big a risk as “a litigious little so and so” and exclude her on that basis alone.
BUT, and it’s a big BUT:
People really need to learn that sticks and stones…. etc. For a woman, this should be to learn how to dismiss cackhanded/sleazy advances. Most guys get it and walk off, tail between their legs.
She was not raped. Not even close. She seemed to deal with him well enough, and although I am not dismissing how stressful it is for many young women who have never had to deal with a lecherous bloke, she should have just left and avoided all the stress of the tribunal. Those waitressing jobs are two a penny.
But like I say, I hope she invests the money wisely. And that he realises what a sleazy twat he probably is.
And it’s probably too late to hope that this won’t open the floodgates to a load of vexatious and horrible accusations by manipulative “victims”, of either sex…
This.
Yes, thank you for pointing out such an important nuance here. Context matters, and they guy was clearly being a creep.
History Debunked: Why are so many older white men angry!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=585JGCCMZBo
Jenna Almussawi? Wejdi Moussa? I bet their ancestors were not at Bannockburn or Culloden.
Maybe if their ancestors had been at Culloden, Jenna and Wejdi wouldn’t have come into existence at all…
Were your ancestors at Stamford Bridge? Or Crecy?
Come on this dude’s obviously Welsh.
What a winker.
Just change one vowel in “winker”, lol.
its a joke. And explaining why a joke is a joke is never funny.
I suspect most DS readers understood without having it telegraphed to them.
It’s a relief to find the comments align with my views on this story. The tribunal found its way to the right answer in my opinion. Mr Moussa sounds like the kind of dangerous bully that the anti-harrassment laws should be keeping in check.
Very true
My wife’s former employer once said to her on the way back from the Bank “Do you fancy a white sheet job?”. She didn’t know what one was, when he told her she laughed and brushed it off. He always wanted a bit of the extra with her. No big deal, he never got it. I wonder how much she could have claimed?
We were talking about wolf whistles and so on the other night as it happens. She used to get the builders at the company whistle her and suggestive comments. It ended when she got older. She was quite flattered when younger and never took it seriously.
Women can be far worse than men. When I was an apprentice the women used to grab and twist everything they could when you were going up a ladder. I found it funny, some guys found it distressing and actually frightening; 50 women in a small section is intimidating.
Where is the line between acceptable and abuse? Today it seems nothing is acceptable from a bloke but a woman, ever seen a gaggle of them on a night out or at a strip show? They are worse than any bunch of guys I ever knew.
Perhaps the difference is in intent? The White Sheet Job was semi-serious (its a quicky in a Hotel), the women grabbing my balls was jokey in intent. This guy, well, he seemed to use it as a weapon and that is very different.
It’s not only women. As far as I can tell, everything is acceptable provided the person who did it wasn’t a heterosexual man, because that’s the only ‘serious’ case, all others are “just fun”. But as someone who has been a target of this from both men and women (men much more frequently, obviously) I can’t help asking “Whose fun?”
The entire concept of sexual harassment has well and truly jumped the shark now.
That said, if you read the FULL story, the guy really was overstepping his bounds, being a creep and in the wrong in this particular case. There is, after all, a little detail called CONTEXT.