Racism - Diane Abbott Was Right

[Update at end of post]

As panic sets in among the Tory-backing press at the prospect that if their side does not score an overall majority next week they might not get that free pass that is repealing Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, along with cancellation of the second part of the Leveson Inquiry, the time has come for some pretty desperate measures.

Diane Abbott

For the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker, that means entrusting pretend journalists like the odious flannelled fool Master Harry Cole with the task of penning hit jobs on Labour shadow cabinet members, today’s target for the deeply unpleasant Fawkes refugee being Diane Abbott. “‘Brits invented racism’ Diane Abbott sparks fury as it’s revealed she once branded UK ‘one of the most fundamentally racist nations’” screams the headline.

And there is more. “DIANE ABBOTT once branded Britain ‘one of the most fundamentally racist nations on earth’, The Sun can reveal … The wannabe Home Secretary claimed Brits ‘invented racism’ and called Parliament ‘the heart of darkness, in the belly of the beast’ … According to contemporary reports the incendiary remarks were made to a US conference for radical left wingers in 1988”. Very good, Master Cole.

Now let’s take this nice and slowly, for the benefit of the flanelled fool and his fellow Murdoch goons. Britain, especially when Diane Abbott is alleged to have made those remarks, most definitely was fundamentally racist. When Stephen Lawrence was fatally stabbed in Eltham in 1993, it was only nine months after another fatal racist attack.

The press was comprehensively racist, too. Nick Davies recounts in Flat Earth News a former Daily Mail writer recalling a senior colleague “on the phone to the West Indies … he was having trouble booking a hotel room and resorted to addressing the receptionist as a slave, shouting down the phone ‘Who’s your owner?’” And it got worse.

Behold the rictus grin of the flannelled fool

Davies was also told by another reporter who had worked briefly at the Mail that “he had been amazed at the openness of the racism in the office: ‘You’d often hear people using the word “n****r” or “nig-nog” - really shocking … There is definitely a racist environment’”. Both the Mail and the Sun were upfront in their demonising of Winston Silcott after he had been accused of murdering PC Keith Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. Black Britons were often on the receiving end of significant, blatant racism.

There is still an undercurrent of racism at work today: after Gina Miller brought her successful legal challenge against the Government’s proposal to use the Royal Prerogative to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, she was the target of vicious racist abuse, including calls for her to be deported (Ms Miller is a British citizen).

And as to who invented racism, well, Britain did rather well out of one of its most basic manifestations - the slave trade. The problem for Master Cole is that he is young enough, and white enough, not to have noticed what life was like for Brits who were not white, and he is the kind of individual who most likely would not have cared if he had.

Diane Abbott was right - Britain in the 1980s was, still, fundamentally racist. But good to see the desperation to which the Murdoch goons are now having to sink.

[UPDATE 1 June 1730 hours: Master Cole should have looked first at the archives of his own newspaper before sounding off about racism in Britain in the late 1980s.

A Sun Says editorial, probably written by the deeply unpleasant Kelvin McFilth, from 27 April 1987, ranted "WOULD YOU LET THIS MAN NEAR YOUR DAUGHTER?" and went on to smear poet Benjamin Zephaniah by asserting "On Friday, he is expected to become a Cambridge don …  Just what are his qualities [sic] which have appealed to Trinity College? He is black. He is a Rastafarian".

Britain in the late 1980s was indeed fundamentally racist. The Sun said so]