DIANE ABBOTT is not so much guilty of thought crime as the crime of thinking. In her response to question put to her by Radio 4’s James Naughtie (and recorded in May before the present ructions in the Parliamentary Labour Party) she simply said: “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.”

She then went on to remark: “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism. I don’t know why people would say that.”

Keir Starmer’s reimposition of the verbot on Abbott’s membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party arrived without anything resembling a rational examination of the manifestly sensible things she said and without any reasoned argument against.

It is, and was intended as such, as an arbitrary act of punishment, designed to isolate her and render toxic a rational discussion of racism.

You might think that Starmer and his praetorian guard would think about the way this might be understood in black communities, particularly as this all occurs alongside a violent racist riot in a neighbouring constituency to hers.

The Epping riot resulting from a fascist-encouraged attack on anti-racist campaigners and was directed at refugees and asylum-seekers. In this we can see how Britain’s crisis finds diverse ways to express itself. In this case a media and state-sponsored racist narrative about asylum-seekers has culminated in a riot that was as much directed at the police as anything else.

It makes the argument for a reasoned national conversation about these questions all the more necessary.

Abbott’s comments took place in a calm and reflective interview in which Naughtie asked if she would condemn anti-semitic behaviour in the same way she would racist behaviour against someone because of the colour of their skin.

Her reply was telling. “Well of course, and I do get a bit weary of people trying to pin the anti-semitic label on me because I’ve spent a lifetime fighting racism of all kinds and in particular fighting anti-semitism, partly because of the nature of my constituency.”

A more sophisticated politician than Starmer, or one better advised, might take the opportunity to allow a measured discussion in which the blindingly obvious fact that racism is a multi-faceted problem that cannot be disentangled from the reality that contemporary British society and reflects our complex colonial history is given.

This entails understanding the particular ways in which racism affects different groups of people.

Incidentally, such an approach is routine in local government, education, the NHS and the Civil Service and is obviously necessary in both policy formulation, planning and resource allocation.

But Starmer sees it as another opportunity to buttress his complicity in the Gaza genocide to strengthen his police regime which has driven hundreds of thousands out of the Labour Party, shed millions of Labour voters and is creating something of a panic in a Parliamentary Labour Party whose members, if they lack the courage to confront him, still retain the capacity to count and thus know they face certain defeat.

But neither purging Abbott nor the punishment meted out to the four MPs arbitrarily selected as an example to other welfare Bill rebels can keep the lid on the resistance which will inevitably arise again if the government keep on its neoliberal, warmongering austerity course.

Today it will be on the streets in a Palestine solidarity march that will inevitable include many challenges to the government’s repressive move to make solidarity and protest an act of “terrorism.”