Diane Abbott had this letter in The Observer yesterday:

Abbott has apologised for the letter.

Labour has eliminated the whip from her. They’ve reacted, wholly appropriately in my view, to the letter.

In fact racism is, for some, a black and white concern. Pores and skin color drives far an excessive amount of prejudice on the earth. However to recommend that’s the restrict of racism and nobody else can expertise it’s, in my view, improper.

I’ll go away the anti-Semitic ingredient of this letter to others to handle. There are hundreds of thousands higher in a position to tackle this than me.

I do, nevertheless, have a big prolonged Irish household. And to disclaim that the Irish suffered racism is simply improper.

There was no famine in Eire within the final 1840s. There was a hunger. Meals was exported from Eire as hundreds of thousands died. This was not a pure and unavoidable phenomena. It was genocide. The inhabitants, 8 million earlier than the hunger started, has not but recovered. Distinction that with England, the place the inhabitants has tripled.

And that was simply part of a lot abuse, which was all too acquainted in my childhood and past.

All through his life my father did every little thing he might to keep away from affiliation along with his Irish roots. Assimilation was the important thing to his notion of survival and acceptability. He adopted his personal cultural suppression to realize that. The battle was a part of the insecurity and doubt that persevered all through his life. His identify stated one thing of which he was in perpetual denial for concern of oppression.

His was a typical expertise. It’s simpler to be Irish now in England, maybe the simplest it has ever been. However let’s not faux that the problems don’t persist, as a result of there are locations the place they very clearly do. It is robust being an Irish-origin catholic in Scotland, for instance. The unfairness stays.

Yesterday LBC posted this tweet:

I feel the tweet profoundly insensitive. The query is extraordinary. I somewhat hope OfCom considers it. The reply is obviously clearly, sure, they’ll. That’s the reason Diane Abbott was improper.

To her credit score, Abbott has admitted her mistake. I think Labour will likely be unforgiving. That’s one other concern.

What issues to me, past the offence, is how naively silly this was. The entire far-right fascist rule ebook relies on creating division in society in order that the advance of fascism will not be observed. Diane Abbott sowed that division, wrongly and wholly unnecessarily. It wasn’t simply the views she expressed that had been a present to the Tories – though I feel they had been that – it was the infighting within the left that they are going to enjoyment of.

Let there be no infighting. Let’s face, as Diane Abbott has, that she acquired this improper. And let’s face that racism isn’t just a black and white concern, nevertheless necessary that concern is. As an alternative let’s face that society have to be illiberal of prejudice in all its varieties. The appropriate wish to gasoline that prejudice. It’s the job of the left to finish it, not simply pragmatically, however as a result of that’s what is ethically demanded, and that’s what Diane Abbott acquired so improper.

Please be aware I will likely be heavy handed with moderation on this publish. I will likely be illiberal of intolerance.