Diane Abbott row spotlights Labour’s grubby pre-election tradition

Good morning from Hackney North and Stoke Newington! My home constituency is the epicentre of Labour’s first difficult moment in this general election campaign. A row has broken out over the treatment and future of Diane Abbott, one of the party’s longest-standing MPs.

As it stands, Abbott has had the party’s whip returned after she apologised for a letter to the Observer in which she said that Irish, Jewish and people from a Traveller background are “not all their lives subject to racism”. She had been suspended from the party since April last year.

According to BBC Newsnight, Abbot was investigated, given a warning and required to complete an antisemitism awareness course, which she has done.

Following that, she has had the whip restored and under the spirit of the Labour party’s rule book, the right to restand as a Labour MP would usually be expected to follow automatically. The party’s ruling national executive committee has the right to prevent a Labour MP in good standing with the party whip and their local party from running again, but this right has to the best of my knowledge never been used.

As the NEC has not yet voted to reconfirm on the matter, that means Keir Starmer is, for the moment, telling the truth when he says that Abbott has not been barred from standing as a Labour MP. But given that as it stands Starmer enjoys a healthy majority on the NEC — well-demonstrated by his success in getting his allies selected by the same body — if he wants to guarantee that right, he can.

Instead, the Times has reported she is to be barred, triggering a row in the Labour party. I try to explain the stakes and why Labour MPs are so angry about it.

The first wobble

There is a particularly unattractive Labour tradition at the start of a general election that plays out in favour of MPs whose politics are close to that of the incumbent leader, or who have been promised some kind of preferment (usually but not always a place in the House of Lords). The person standing in their seat will be chosen by the party’s ruling national executive committee, instead of being subject to a full selection process.

If you are politically close to the leader of the day, making sure your successor shares your politics is an important achievement in and of itself. I remember one aide saying of their boss that they would consider their career a failure if their seat went to the “wrong” replacement. During the Corbyn era, one of his older opponents told me that they would never voluntarily relinquish the seat while he remained as leader.

Given the very high barrier you have to clear to be deselected as a Labour MP candidate under the current terms of the party rule book, the candidates being selected in these “retirement seats” — largely very safe — are likely to be around and shaping the future of the Labour party long into the future.

As I wrote earlier this week, the party leadership has extensive powers over a local party’s selection process if the vacancy is unfilled at the start of the “short campaign”.

That’s the prize on offer here, if you will: a seat that is expected to remain very safe for a long time, and at a time when the present leadership has a strong majority on the ruling national executive committee.

But what spooks Labour MPs is that it causes Labour a headache outside of Abbott’s own constituency. While Abbott does not have the same depth of support in her own constituency as Jeremy Corbyn does in his nearby Islington North seat, and would be highly, highly unlikely to be able to make a successful run as an independent, she commands a standing across the country that Corbyn does not, particularly in places where Labour MPs face serious electoral threats from their left.

It is also causing further irritation to those Labour MPs who think that the leader’s office is a “boys’ club” that falters whenever it has to tackle diversity issues. This is only going to grow when it is in office, particularly as Labour women will once again be a minority in the Parliamentary Labour party after the election.

But currently the central problem that the Labour leadership is going to struggle to explain is that Abbott has met the terms of the party’s disciplinary process and therefore has every right to expect she should be able to continue on as a Labour MP. “Hackney North and Stoke Newington is a great constituency for someone” is not in fact a good enough reason why, as it stands, Labour politicians who have gone through the same process are not being barred from standing.

That lack of a decent rationale for making a change and going beyond Labour’s rule book is bringing one of Labour’s grubbiest practices — its use of power politics and fixes in its safest seats — to the forefront of the general election campaign. That is a headache that the party simply does not need.

Now try this

I am very much enjoying Max Richter’s new single, “Movement, Before All Flowers”.

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