IS SHE, isn’t she, will she, won’t she … the scandalous treatment meted out to Diane Abbott by Keir Starmer and his bogus “new brooms” is a warning to the labour movement of what is to come.
Her initial suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party for drawing an unwise comparison between different targets of racism was disproportionate enough.
That the sham “independent” investigatory process into her offence apparently concluded last December, with the leader acting as though unaware of this position, defies belief.
For Abbott to have continued in a state of suspended animation ever since is a disgrace, especially given her record as a courageous, pioneering member of Parliament who has always put serving her constituents before grabbing a seat on the Westminster gravy train.
But will anybody be hauled up before the beaks of the party’s national executive committee for commiting this gross miscarriage of justice, if not the NEC members themselves?
We shouldn’t hold our breath. Loyal servants of Sir Keir Starmer, and especially his lieutenants in charge of discipline, need fear no retribution worthy of the name.
Opponents of his purge of the left and ideological turn to the right, on the other hand, already know that no effort will be spared in the drive to put them outside the new “New Labour” party.
They daren’t contradict the new orthodoxy for fear of investigation and expulsion. Even signifying a “like” for a five-year-old Facebook post can be enough for a veteran member of the party to be dumped outside with the trash; not because of the post itself, you understand, but because the original FB author had put up questionable posts elsewhere.
It’s “guilt by association” on a scale for which the late Senator Joe McCarthy sacrificed his witch-hunting career.
Communist Party general secretary Robert Griffiths reminded us today of some of the other items on Starmer’s rubbish heap, notably all those pledges that helped him win the Labour leadership contest and retain — if only for a brief period — the allegiance of those whose votes he garnered by deception.
Pledges to extend public ownership, introduce more progressive taxation, end charity status for public schools, reform social benefit rules to challenge child poverty, cancel tuition fees, launch the green new deal, abolish the House of Lords … all dumped, as Starmer and his shadow cabinet continue to sacrifice Labour’s name on the altar of big business profit.
And who remembers Labour’s promise, in what we must now presumably refer to as Labour’s “bad old days,” to impose stricter controls on arms exports to dictatorships around the world?
Greater London Mayor Sadiq Khan, for one, to his credit. He has joined the growing call for a halt to British arms exports to the extreme right-wing and racist regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Starmer and his shadow cabinet creatures, on the other hand, are intensely relaxed about the fact that Britain’s corrupt, heavily subsidised and therefore hugely profitable arms corporations help facilitate Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
How much lower can the Labour leadership fall in terms of decency, principle and integrity? Perhaps not far enough to lose an election that the Tories appear determined to lose.
But there will be a reckoning at the bar of public opinion, later if not sooner.
