‘Where did you copy this from?’ she asked bluntly.

I was shocked. She did not even bother to ask whether I had copied the essay. That teacher thought she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this chubby, bespectacled Black girl looking up at her could not possibly have written anything of that standard.’

Diane abbott ‘A woman like me’ (p. 41)

his happened to Diane Abbott when she was in the first year of her secondary school at Harrow County Grammar School for Girls. She was the only Black girl in the school. Being the first to enter spaces normally not open to a Black woman and getting this racist reaction became a recurring, ever-present experience in Diane’s life. You might have thought graduating from Cambridge, working in the Civil Service, being part of the National Council for Civil Liberties, working as a journalist on TV, becoming a councillor and an MP, leading various crucial campaigns such as for Black sections or for Black children in education, appearing on the This Week TV programme for a decade, and being appointed as Shadow Home Secretary… might have stopped all of it. But Diane has had to stand up and defy this othering, this racist contempt, right up to today.

I’m so excited to have in my hands early copies of my upcoming book, A Woman Like Me. I can’t wait for you all to read it when it comes out from @PenguinUKBooks on September 19th. pic.twitter.com/i1lmsNcw4I

— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) September 8, 2024

The right wing and the capitalist mass media have been doing it for nearly 40 years but, as she notes on a number of occasions, she suffered at the hands of the left and the Labour Party too. Even Corbyn’s head of staff, Karie Murphy, tried to dump on her following a slip-up in a TV interview during the 2017 election campaign, saying she should take a step back. She refused. Starmer first suspended her then tried to remove her as a candidate in 2024. She stood up, mobilised support and stopped him. Diane continues, as the longest-standing woman MP, to defy the right-wing, anti-working-class policies of this Labour government, speaking up clearly for migrants and asylum seekers.

As the early chapters show, her family was rooted in the migrant and working-class community. Her uncles migrated to the USA and other places. She saw and heard the racists’ insults during her childhood and remembers when an Irish friend stopped the Teddy Boy attacks threatening her home. Family does influence our personal and political development. Her mother was a pioneer insofar as she came to England on her own as a single woman. Generally, male migrants came first. Her father wanted the best for his kids. Often Jamaican families would send their children back to the homeland to be looked after by their grandparents—such was the demands of work and accumulating some security in England. Abbott’s father refused to do that as he thought his children would progress more by staying put. Subsequently, he moved the family from Paddington out to Harrow, scraping money together to buy another property and to let out his first one. He thought—probably correctly at that time—that his kids’ life chances were best served by moving out to the suburbs. Later, her mother, fed up with suffering from her husband’s anger, walked out and moved north.

Surely the fierce independence of her mother and the aspirational guidance of her father rubbed off on Diane.

‘He bequeathed me stubbornness and determination that helped make me the woman I was’

Diane abbott ‘A woman like me’ (p. 81)

Assertiveness and resilience marked out her development. More importantly, the experience of where she came from meant that her success was used in the service of the struggle of women, Black people and the working class here and globally.

Every step of the way, Diane had to defy people who suggested it was maybe not a good idea to aim so high. This was the case with her desire to get into Cambridge against the advice of her teachers. It reflects an understanding of where power resides in English society and carries through with wanting to get into the Civil Service and then be elected as a councillor and an MP. Although always campaigning for various causes, she knew political power was decisive. Staying in the media, becoming an academic or working for a campaigning NGO were credible options but I think she always had a political project to make a difference. Even in the very latest crisis she had to deal with when Starmer and the apparatus wanted to eliminate her from the party, she knew it would be a significant defeat for that shared political project if she did not stand up to him despite the strain on her health.

The book is more than just a personal account of her life so far. It is a good summary of the main events and issues facing the left over the last fifty years or so:

• Grunwick, an exemplary two-year struggle led by Asian women.
• Solidarity campaigns on Ireland and South Africa.
• The radical Greater London Council experience with Ken Livingstone, which did a lot to promote Black, women’s and LGBT rights (later shut down by Thatcher for that reason)
• Organising against the racist SUS laws (stop and search)
• Support for the epic miners’ strike in 1984.
• Working for Black representation in the Labour Party through the Black Sections movement.
• The anti-war movement that surged around Iraq and Blair’s troop deployment.
• Campaigning for justice for Stephen Lawrence, murdered by white racists in South London.
• Defending democratic rights against Blair’s repressive anti-terrorist legislation.
• Leading campaigns to support Black school students against discrimination.
• The failure of the Miliband leadership.
• Rise and defeat of Corbynism.

As someone of a similar age, it is fascinating to read her commentary with a different vantage point to my own. Although I have been in and out of Labour over the years, she nearly always has been an elected party representative. I remember her speaking at meetings of the Stephen Lawrence campaign. She was instrumental in pressurising Jack Straw, future Home Secretary, into promising an inquiry. Eventually, the Macpherson inquiry delivered a damning report on the Met’s institutional racism.

Joining Labour happened through her personal (and temporary romantic) connection with Jeremy Corbyn. As she says, at the time many of her friends and comrades in the Black and women’s movement were to the left of Labour and operated in other left currents or as independents. Another factor perhaps leading her towards Labour was her rather minimal involvement in student politics. At that time in many universities (perhaps less at Cambridge compared to Oxford) the radical left outside Labour were the dominant active political groups.

Nevertheless, unlike a lot of Labour ‘left’ MPs, she has (like Jeremy) always collaborated with left groups outside Labour, notably in campaigns led by them such as Stand Up to Racism or Stop the War. Clearly, her deep involvement in Black politics and understanding of the Labour Party’s failure to relate to that movement or to its key demands around migrants and discriminatory/repressive laws, has meant she has always had one leg in Labour and another in campaigns outside it. Unlike people she knew earlier like David Lammy or Trevor Phillips, she never took the easy path and became captured by the LP hierarchy or the establishment.

One area of the book where I would have liked to see more reflections and inside analysis was on why the Corbyn project ultimately failed. She is right to say Brexit and antisemitism were two huge factors but there were certainly other issues she could have addressed such as how the Corbyn team dealt with the right wing and its hold of the party apparatus and the PLP. She says the defeat was partly ‘self-inflicted’ and a consequence of disunity but does not go too much into this. From the incident with Karie Murphy around her TV interview she might have elaborated further on the quality of the team around the leader and his ability to manage and make strategic decisions. The comments she makes earlier about how Jeremy lived in a bit of a political bubble with a rather austere lifestyle might point to how he could fail to anticipate mass reaction to some of his positions. Just to take one example, he failed to quickly take a position condemning Putin’s role in the Salisbury poisoning, leaving it up to his notoriously campist press officer to write a very weak statement.

Another strong position she expresses is her left remain position on Brexit. She correctly saw, as a Black activist, the way in which Brexit would strengthen the racist right. Unlike those on the Left (lexiteers) who saw Brexit as an opportunity for the left because the majority of the bourgeoisie were in favour and that it would provide more ‘sovereignty’ for working people.

In the final chapter of her book she does make some pertinent points about the strategy of socialists joining Labour to push Labour to the left in order to bring about some sort of ‘socialist’ government that could deliver real change. On the Corbyn project she notes:

‘That interlude tested to destruction the idea that the left will be allowed significant influence in the Labour Party any time soon’

Diane abbott ‘A woman like me’ (p. 274)

In a further discussion about PR that is a bit ambiguous she accepts that:

‘In the UK it has the potential to shift national politics to the left’

Diane abbott ‘A woman like me’ (p. 275)

In speculating about an alliance with the Greens she appears to break with the Labour leadership and much orthodoxy on the Labour left. Such a coalition

‘would effectively shift the Labour Party to the left’

Diane abbott ‘A woman like me’ (p. 276)

Indeed, from a Hackney viewpoint she can see first-hand how the Greens are becoming the main opposition to the Labour Party, picking up votes from people appalled by the Palestine line and by its retreat on radical economic or social policies. The Greens won another council seat just weeks ago.

In a recent interview with Gary Younge in The Guardian this critical position is reinforced by the following comment:

‘So if she had her time again, would she join the Labour Party now? A long sigh is followed by an even longer pause. “I wouldn’t want to say.” When I ask if she thinks Labour have learned the lessons of this last election, her response is quick and brief. “No.”’

Hardly a ringing endorsement for diehard Labour leftists who feel the only strategy is beavering away until some new Corbyn-type surge emerges and who tend to often dismiss what is happening outside LP meetings.

The book was finished before her victory over Starmer concerning her candidature and the significant results for candidates standing to the left of Labour. The interview mentioned above fills in some of her thoughts about the fight about the candidature. Again, it shows her resilience and understanding that accepting the ‘Lords’ deal would have been a political defeat for the broad movement of Black people and for the left. It was more than her personal battle. Clearly, the victory for Corbyn and the four other ‘Gaza’ independents only reinforces her points about the state of Starmer’s Labour today and the need for a new perspective about how to build a socialist alternative.

Like John McDonnell, who has already lost the whip and is very probably in his last mandate, she has a certain freedom to lead an opposition to Starmer from both within and outside the party. Activists on the left outside Labour need to reach out and work with them to discuss and organise a broad left alternative.

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