IN 2022, barrister Martin Forde KC, who had been commissioned more than two years earlier by Keir Starmer to investigate racism in the Labour Party, concluded that Labour operates a “hierarchy of racism” that privileged anti-semitism above other forms of racism in Labour’s disciplinary processes and conduct.

Forde wrote: “the party [is] in effect operating a hierarchy of racism or of discrimination with other forms of racism and discrimination being ignored. For a party which seeks to be a standard bearer of progressive politics, equality, and workers’ rights, this is an untenable situation.”

When Forde, a year later and after trying and failing to get a meeting with Labour, expressed concerns at Labour’s failure to act on his report’s recommendations and that they were failing to take the issue seriously, the party threatened him with a legal “cease and desist” letter.

Forde was commissioned, if reluctantly, by Starmer to write the report after the notorious leaked report outlining serious issues of racism among right-wing Labour staff, in large part directed toward Diane Abbott, Britain’s first black woman MP and as the longest-serving female MP, now the Mother of the House of Commons.

Abbott was the target of a string of racist hate and insults by staff at the party’s Southside headquarters. She is also Britain’s most abused woman MP, receiving more than half of all the the hate messages directed towards the more than 200 female MPs serving in Parliament. Despite this, she has not just received no protection from the Labour Party leadership, but has repeatedly been targeted for suspension, as well as facing attempts to force her deselection before last year’s general election, before the party ultimately backed down in the face of justified outrage and accusations of anti-black racism. Diane also faced the insult of being repeatedly ignored by the Commons Speaker and prevented from participating in a debate about racist remarks made about her, forced to sit stony-faced while other MPs discussed her.

Labour’s institutional racism is not, of course, limited to its treatment of Abbott. A survey by the Labour Muslim Network (LMN) of Muslim MPs, mayors and councillors in June concluded that the party’s relationship with Muslims is “at breaking point” and that Islamophobia is rife within the party: “anti-Muslim racism is embedded, tolerated, and too often ignored.”

Like Forde, two thirds of respondents said that Labour operates a “hierarchy of racism.” This was not the LMN’s first damning assessment of Labour’s anti-Muslim racism. In November 2020, with Starmer’s leadership of the party barely half a year old, the group noted that only a quarter of Muslim Labour members trusted the party to tackle Islamophobia. Labour promised to implement LMN’s recommendations in full but, as with the Forde report recommendations, never kept its promise.

Labour’s Islamophobia is not merely subtle — it has repeatedly manifested in Labour’s campaigning. During the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election a “senior Labour official” briefed the press that Labour expected to lose because — given as the primary reason — Muslims objected to “what Keir has been doing on anti-semitism.” Similarly, in last year’s West Midlands mayoral election a Labour spokesperson told journalists that if the party’s candidate didn’t win, “It’s the Middle East, not West Midlands, that will have won.”

And the party’s own sparse responses to issues of racism have demonstrated how deep those issues run. The “diversity panel” Starmer set up shortly after becoming party leader was all-white; his 2024 “race equality” launch excluded black journalists and most black MPs.

Despite all this, it could hardly be clearer that Starmer has not learned, and appears determined to ignore, any lessons from the criticism of him and his party by both experts and the public. More than that, he appears determined to outflank the far-right Reform UK on the right, making a speech in which he said that Britain was becoming an “island of strangers” because of immigrants and describing immigration as a “squalid chapter” in Britain’s history.

It was clear that he was not referring to Britain’s effective “open door’ refugee policy for mostly white Ukrainian refugees, who are officially “welcomed” into Britain in numbers of over a quarter of a million since 2022. In February, when a family of Palestinian refugees succeeded in their court case to be allowed asylum in Britain under a scheme “designed for Ukrainians,” Starmer angrily condemned the court’s decision as “completely wrong” and vowed to “close the loophole” to prevent any repeat.

Which brings us back to Abbott, who has been suspended for the second time by Labour for writing a letter pointing out that the experience of racism is different for people with a different skin colour than it is for groups who are not immediately identifiable as non-white. Starmer exemplified Labour’s hierarchy of racism perfectly when he jumped to condemn Diane’s comments as “anti-semitic.”

It would be my argument that conflating the broader black liberation struggle, protesting against anti-black racism with anti-semitism functions to preserve Britain’s racial-capitalist state. Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism argues that capitalism’s emergence was fused with racial hierarchies; it did not later “add on” race as an epiphenomenon.

British capitalism’s genesis in the Atlantic slave trade, colonial enclosure of Ireland, and empire is therefore foundational. British institutions, including the Labour Party, are riddled with and retain those logics. Racial subordination is reproduced because capital accumulation still requires differentiated subjectivities: whiteness receives relative privileges, while blackness is systematically devalued. Labour’s “hierarchy of racism” named by the 2022 Forde Report sits squarely inside this framework. Anti-semitism became Labour’s supreme disciplinary focus, while anti-black and, for that matter, anti-Muslim racism were minimised or ignored. Robinson would call this a hegemonic manoeuvre: the Labour Party uses a limited anti-racism (protecting on oppressed group) to legitimise its institutional power while leaving racial capitalist structures intact.

Diane had told Radio 4’s James Naughtie, in a discussion about her 2023 letter to the Observer, that, “Clearly there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know … but if you see a black person walking down the street, you see straight away that they’re black. There are different types of racism.”

She did not dismiss racism experienced by those groups — and she was clearly not wrong to say that racism is a far more constant experience for those who are “all their lives subject to racism.” As well as being logically obvious, this conclusion is borne out by evidence.

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on the effects of racial discrimination, unemployment rates for black people and those otherwise differentiated by skin colour are double those of their white counterparts. Black graduates earn almost a quarter less than white graduates and are only half as likely to be promoted into management roles; black school pupils are more than three times more likely to be excluded from school than the “general population” — which means an even higher inequality compared to only white pupils; black people are more than three times as likely to be prosecuted than white people, per thousand of population; black and south Asian people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty and almost three times as likely to live in substandard homes. The list goes on.

These outcomes support the point that the experience of racism is more persistent and visible for black Britons and some other racialised groups, distinct from (but not diminishing) other forms of racism experienced by other groups.

Abbott’s insistence that phenotypically visible blackness produces unique, constant exposure to racialised oppression echoes Fanon’s analysis of epidermalisation — “the lived experience of blackness” under colonial modernity. Her argument is not a denial of anti-semitism but an indictment of Britain’s continuing colonial colour line. 

When Starmer and the Labour leadership brands this argument anti-semitic, it recentres white guilt anxiety around anti-semitism, relegating anti-black realities to secondary status — thereby upholding the racial division of labour predicated by Robinson; deploys what Nkrumah called neocolonial “divide and rule” tactics, redirecting working-class anger away from class-race exploitation toward intraminority competition; and protects Labour’s electoral calculus among sections of the white electorate uneasy with explicit anti-immigration politics but receptive to paternalistic anti-racism that costs them nothing materially.

Anti-semitism must indeed be fought. But elevating it above anti-black racism, Islamophobia, or anti-Roma bigotry fractures working-class solidarity. The ruling bloc then manoeuvres between “multicultural liberalism” and “border security toughness” — both securing capital.

Anti-semitism, Islamophobia and anti-black racism are all products of racial capitalism and imperial geopolitics. Fighting one while deliberately instrumentalising it against another entrenches oppression. The Labour Party cynically knows this.

Diane Abbott is not wrong. Protesting against anti-black racism is not wrong and facts about the experience of racism for those who are black or otherwise differentiated by skin colour, like any facts, are certainly not anti-semitic.

Instead, the anti-semitism smears by Starmer and his factional allies against Diane and his decision to suspend her yet again demonstrate their determination to maintain and propagate their hierarchy of racism and their refusal to respect the experiences of the millions of people living in Britain who are “all their lives subject to racism” simply for being visibly different all of the time. In this respect as in many others, he is no less different from the Tories and far right in their defence of a racial-capitalist order, not a principled stand against bigotry.

The Labour Party’s treatment of Diane Abbott is neither accidental nor merely “ill-advised.” It is structurally embedded in the party’s role within Britain’s racial-capitalist state. Protesting against anti-black racism challenges the hierarchy that secures the bourgeois class order. Dismantling that hierarchy is essential to any genuine anti-racist, anti-capitalist transformation.

Claudia Webbe was previously the UK Member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019 –2024). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.