Diane Abbott was careless but she didn't deserve the sharkfest
White people are not a minority. They are not stopped and searched on the basis of their skin colour
THE microblogging site Twitter only allows messages of 140 characters, but politicians who use it would do well to ponder them carefully. If not, they are likely to find even their pithiest observations subjected to a level of attention that they hadn't bargained for.
Such is the fate of the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott, this week after a Twitter conversation with the black journalist Bim Adewunmi about the Stephen Lawrence trial prompted outraged accusations of racism and calls for her resignation from Tory politicians and the right-wing commentariat.
The furore derived from Abbott's response to Adewunmi's criticisms of the 'lazy' media use of the terms 'black community' and 'black community leaders' in its coverage of race issues. In response Abbott advised her to avoid 'playing into a "divide and rule" agenda'. When Adewunmi replied that "half the time, such leaders are out of touch with black people they purport to represent," Abbott replied that "white people love playing 'divide & rule' We should not play their game#tacticasoldascolonialism".
Abbott's prickliness on this subject may well have had an element of defensiveness, coming from a black MP in one of the most deprived constituencies in London who has herself been accused of double standards for sending her son to an expensive private school. But her essential point was that the Lawrence verdict called for a united front, and had she preceded the words "white people" with the qualifier "some" her remarks might have gone unremarked.
One might certainly criticise her careless and injudicious choice of language in a public forum, but none of this explains the frantic sharkfest generated by her remarks. Within hours, the Conservative MPs Nadhim Zahawi and Rehman Chishti accused her of racism, in addition to similar accusations from the increasingly ubiquitous Louise Mensch.
By the end of yesterday afternoon, the story was national news. On the Telegraph blog, Toby Young declared that her comments fitted the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of racism. On the Guido Fawkes website, Paul Staines suggested that Abbott was guilty of incitement to racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act. At Conservative Home, the journalist and former Conservative MP Paul Goodman called for her resignation.
The controversy reached a new peak of absurdity when Abbott took a phonecall from Ed Miliband, in the middle of a Sky television interview, to receive what was billed by Labour insiders as a "severe dressing down". This orchestrated public demonstration of toughness was clearly designed to please the right-wing press, even though Abbott had already withdrawn the 'race tweet' and tried to qualify it, saying that she was referring to nineteenth century colonialism. In her Sky interview, Abbott suggested that her remarks had been interpreted "maliciously" and she subsequently issued a reserved apology.
It is something of an understatement to describe this episode as a twitterstorm in a teacup. On one level, the pseudo-scandal was a cynical political manoeuvre designed to undermine a prominent female black politician with a history on the Labour left who has often spoken out on racial issues.
Coming only two days after the belated and truncated justice for the murder of Stephen Lawrence however, the outraged victimhood emanating from the Tory press and blogosphere also reflect wider attitudes toward race and racism.
The British media have unanimously celebrated the conviction of two of Stephen Lawrence's killers, but these celebrations have tended to concentrate more on the racist sociopaths who carried out the murder than the institutional failings that have delayed their conviction for so many years.
The convictions of Dobson and Norris have coincided with a period in which British race relations have become a focus of national attention in various ways, from the shooting of Mark Duggan that ignited last August's riots, to the recent accusations of racism directed against Luis Suarez and John Terry, or the brutal random shooting of Indian student Anuj Bidve in Salford on 29 December.
In this context, the suggestion that white people are being discriminated against by the UK's most prominent anti-racist politician rings somewhat hollow. Various commentators have made the point that had a white politician made similarly derogatory comments about black people they would have been sacked. Interviewed on Sky News, 'conservative blogger' Harry Cole declared that Abbott's remarks were particularly inappropriate after a "fantastic day for race relations" and insisted that "racism does work both ways".
Clearly racism is not an exclusively white phenomenon, but these protestations of white victimhood are misleading and disingenuous. White people are not a minority. They are not generally subjected to racial profiling, stopped and searched and even shot dead by police, or murdered by random strangers on the basis of their skin colour.
A single careless tweet does not amount to racial discrimination; nor does it mean than Abbott is a racist. The gleeful alacrity with which the likes of Staines and Coles have seized on her remarks tell us more about them than it does about her. And for all their wounded outrage and indignation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their efforts are more concerned with trivialising racism than with improving race relations. ·
