Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Diane Abbott, MP, Shadow Home Secretary, 19.02.17

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: Now I’m joined in the studio by the Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, hello to you, thanks for coming in on a Sunday morning.  Now you have obviously been in the headlines a lot over the last few weeks and I am keen to talk about some of those issues but first I think we should speak about the abuse that you’ve experienced.  You have been in parliament now for 30 years, the first black woman to take your seat in parliament.  You have never spoken about this before so why have you decided to speak out now?  

DIANE ABBOTT: It’s the level of abuse, particularly in recent weeks.  What we have been getting and have been for some time is almost daily abuse, being called a bitch, a nigger, rape threats, people saying I should be hanged and it reached a particular pitch in the last few weeks and I thought to myself had I known it would be like this, thirty years on from being elected, I would have thought twice about running for parliament at all.

SR: Really?  That is actually quite shocking and I’d like to apologise to viewers for some of the language that we are going to listen to and have heard, I think it is important of course to look at some of the examples of what we’ve actually seen.  These are things that have been provided by your office, Diane Abbot, the violence in some of this language is obviously pretty shocking and appalling, a lot of clearly is frankly racist as well and I think it’s important to say as well that these are the examples that we felt we could actually show on TV, there is stuff that is even more shocking than that in some ways.  Not as a politician but as a person, how does it make you feel when you read some of that directed at yourself?

DIANE ABBOTT: Well first of all it is horrible for my staff who have to read it every day and they are of diversity and mostly women.  For me, first of all it kind of does get in your head, it kind of does demoralise you and even though you know it shouldn’t do, it does make you doubt yourself.  When Jo Cox unfortunately was attacked and died, of course your first thought was for her children and her husband and for her friends and family and for the people of Batley and Spen who lost a great MP, but you also thought, you know, maybe this is all just abuse, maybe stuff can happen so since then I’ve been trying to sort out the security on my home and my staff try not to let me walk around Hackney on my own.  It’s a horrible, horrible world out there.

SR: It really is quite frightening and you mentioned Jo Cox, I remember speaking to some other Labour female MPs who said that after that happened, their children basically asked them to quit politics because it’s not worth it.  I mean the emotional impact of it must be really very heavy.

DIANE ABBOTT: The emotional impact both on me, the people that work for me and also my family is appalling and people don’t realise because they kind of dehumanise you so they can call you all these names, they can say you should be hanged or die in some horrible way and I just think that everybody, not just the people that tweet and Facebook that stuff but even mainstream media have to recognise they talk about women politicians and black politicians in a different way.

SR: What would you say then to a young black girl or a young black boy thinking about going into politics because seeing some of this must be pretty off-putting?

DIANE ABBOTT: Well I’d tell them to do it because in thirty years I have been able to see change.  I mean I was the first member of parliament to make a speech about Stephen Laurence and with Bernie Grant, who was an MP at the time and Paul Boeteng, we took Doreen Laurence to meet Jack Straw when Labour were still in opposition and she completely swept him away and as a consequence of that we had the McPherson Inquiry, so you can make change, you can make a difference but I think it’s very, very sad seeing all this horrible abuse and I actually think internet providers could do more.  Facebook and Twitter are very much American companies, they believe in the first amendment right to the freedom of speech but no one really has a right to peddle this racist and sexist abuse.

SR: So what needs to happen then?  Do you think a parliamentary inquiry for example into racist and sexist abuse would help?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I think there is probably a case for parliamentary inquiry, partly to make internet providers do more to close down these people.  I mean my colleague Luciana Berger, in the end they found the guy that was directing anti-Semitic abuse at her and he was charged and convicted but there are so many more of these people out there and what they are doing is they’re poisoning the political debate and they are putting off young women from even getting involved in the political debate online and they must be putting off some women from getting involved in politics.  

SR: I spoke to one other MP about this who suggested there was a radicalisation if you like going on of white men on the internet, do you think that’s happening?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I think it’s become turbo charged.  When I was a new MP if you wanted to send racist abuse you wrote a letter in green ink usually and you got one or two of those letters a week.  Now you can press a button and threaten to rape somebody and the more they see, the more these guys see this get online, the more the feel encouraged and emboldened and it has become turbo charged and it’s become worse.  It’s almost as if they want to drive some of us out of politics.  

SR: Is there a camaraderie amongst other Labour MPs, do you feel other women in parliament have supported you?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I think I’ve had a lot of support from Labour women MPs in recent weeks, I’m very glad of that.  I think we all have to stand together because it is a concerted attempt to delegitimise women in politics, first of all you marginalise women who are most outspoken and then you frighten other women out of saying the same things.  

SR: Certainly when I said you were a guest on the programme, I think the level of the response I received was more strong than any other politician I’ve had on this programme which I thought was perhaps quite an interesting illustration.  

DIANE ABBOTT: Well it’s indicative.  I am quite happy to engage in political debate, I’m quite happy to engage in quite fiery political debate but we’re not talking about political debate here, we’re talking about racism and sexism and abuse and there’s no case for that.  

SR: Have you ever been tempted to quit?  Had one of those wobbles when you thought actually it’s not worth it?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I did have a wobble a few years ago, I can’t remember, it was a horrible press story and I rang Keith Vaz who entered parliament with me in 1987 and Keith was quite brusque, he said Diane you have forgotten what it took for us to get here and he kind of gave me an emotional shake but I suppose because it took so much, people forget what it was like when I came in in ’87, I was the only black woman MP, you hardly ever saw even a black admin person or secretary.  I remember a few months in in ’87 I had a friend for tea and she said to me, Diane do you realise everybody is staring at you as you walk around?  And I hadn’t because my thing is just to get on with the job and I am saddened in a way that I have to raise these issues all these years later.  

SR: Do you think that Labour has a bit of an issue with women?  I’m asking you this because you ran for the Labour leadership of course on quite a similar platform in some ways to Jeremy Corbyn.  You came last, when he ran as a white man in 2015 he won in the first round.

DIANE ABBOTT: I wouldn’t want to say anything about Jeremy but I think that some people do have an issue with women in politics and they are not even examining the issue.  They say things in response to some of the abuse I’ve had recently, oh well she’s asked for it, don’t worry about her feelings.  People need to examine – even including some of our colleagues – how they talk about and how the regard women colleagues.  

SR: You talk about some of your colleagues and the example that comes to mind is the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, his text messages about you appeared on the front pages of the Mail on Sunday saying that he wouldn’t hug you because he’s not blind.  I mean are those the kind of comments you’re talking about?  

DIANE ABBOTT: That but also the fact that the Mail on Sunday made it a front page story and there were two pages inside about it and it was all about denigrating and belittling me.  This is my point, it’s not just the things that you hear on the internet, it’s also the way the media acts as an echo chamber for some of it.

SR: That’s interesting.  Were you upset by David Davis’s comments in particular or was it just the coverage?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I wouldn’t want to comment on David Davis at all.  

SR: Fair enough.  Well thank you for being so candid about your experiences as an MP, I’m hoping you’ll be equally candid about some of the challenges ahead for the Labour party.  Now a few weeks ago we had the second reading of Article 50 so one of the most important parliamentary moments for MPs got to vote whether Brexit should go ahead, whether the process should be started.  Now Nick Bell the Conservative MP went to that vote in a wheelchair after receiving chemotherapy for a tumour in his head, you missed the vote because you had a migraine even though you’d spoken in the debate earlier and there were pictures of you in the pub the night before.  What honestly happened there?  

DIANE ABBOTT: What honestly happened was I had to go home because I had a migraine and there were other people who missed the vote, George Osborne missed the vote because he was doing a highly paid speech abroad but for the third reading, which was the final vote, I was there and I did vote to trigger Article 50 because the Labour party believes that even though we campaigned for Remain that it’s very important to take the result of the referendum seriously.

SR: Do you think that the abuse that you got for that, compared to say George Osborne, was disproportionate?  

DIANE ABBOTT: Well all I can say is that when it came to it on the third reading I did vote to trigger Article 50.  

SR: You did vote to trigger Article 50 and just after you made the decision we can have a look at what you said about the vote to trigger Article 50 which is ‘A Tory Brexit is going to be quite disastrous’.   If you think Brexit is going to be disastrous how can you look your constituents in the eye after voting in favour of it?

DIANE ABBOTT: Because I’m a member of the Shadow Cabinet and I have to abide by the collective responsibility, it’s different from being a back bench MP, there’s collective responsibility and we discussed this exhaustively and the view was if you looked at the national picture and the fact that the majority of Labour constituencies voted for Brexit, then the feeling was that we had to listen as a Shadow Cabinet, we had to listen to the nation as a whole.  It wasn’t just a question as us as individuals voting in line with our constituencies.  

SR: So did you effectively lose the argument then in shadow cabinet?  

DIANE ABBOTT: My view is that Theresa May’s Brexit which puts controlling immigration above wages, above jobs, above living standards, is absolutely the wrong type of Brexit but obviously Labour will continue to campaign on access to the single market.  

SR: But you voted in favour of Theresa May’s Brexit so …

DIANE ABBOTT: Because I abided by a collective decision which is what you have to do when you are in the shadow cabinet.  

SR: Someone else who has been pretty scathing about Theresa May’s version of Brexit is Tony Blair, he said in the last few days that a debilitated Labour is facilitating a disastrous Brexit.  We already know that you agree with Mr Blair that Brexit is going to be disastrous and he is right, isn’t he, at the moment the Labour party is effectively the best friend of the Conservatives?

DIANE ABBOTT: Not at all.  We actually got proportionately more of our voters out to vote for Remain than the Conservative party did.  

SR: But you’re not shaping Brexit at the moment are you, you’re voting in favour of Theresa May’s …

DIANE ABBOTT: Because the process has just begun in a way.  We have got a really effective Brexit Secretary in the shape of Kier Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn goes up and down the country explaining what the difficulties are going to be with the Tory Brexit …

SR: But you haven’t achieved anything and if you think about it, there are very few opportunities for parliament to actually vote and have an influence on the deal.  

DIANE ABBOTT: There will be more opportunities coming forward.  Tony Blair is obviously entitled to his opinion but I think former Prime Ministers do better when they keep out of the Westminster debate and I don't think his intervention has been helpful.

SR: Now there are two hugely important by-elections coming up in Copeland and in Stoke and in some ways this should be a formality for Labour, they should win both of those by-elections but of course there are fears that the Labour party could lose at least one of them.  Considering that you have been so frank in this interview, if Labour does lose one of those by-elections do you think that Jeremy Corbyn should consider his position?  Would you have any doubts over his leadership?

DIANE ABBOTT: These are difficult by-elections, they are going to be quite tight.  We are hopeful of winning both of them but it is really important that every Labour supporter comes out to vote and if we lose one or we lose both I think the party will go forward, it has to go forward.  

SR: There are no questions over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership then if he loses one?  

DIANE ABBOTT: No, no.  There are people who’ve been opposed to Jeremy from the very beginning, I’m not one of them.  I think we have to move forward.  

SR: The polls are pretty abysmal for Labour right now.  We saw this week that Jeremy Corbyn is more unpopular than any opposition leader in modern history at this moment, at this time, after his election.  Are you confident that if the polls don’t improve he’ll still be leading Labour into the next election?

DIANE ABBOTT: I’m confident that Jeremy will lead us into 2020 and the problem about the polls is that you’ve had nearly a year of a sustained a campaign against Jeremy and the Labour party both in the media and sadly a few of our MPs …

SR: Although that does seem to have died down now, he is having a free run at Brexit at the moment and for many people he’s not doing that well.  

DIANE ABBOTT:  I think as we move beyond what has been almost a year of misrepresentation of Jeremy’s position, I think we’ll move beyond that and the more people that get to see him and hear him, whether it’s in the media or at campaigning events, I’m confident the polls will improve.  

SR: If that doesn’t happen do you think the succession needs to be looked at, because there are reports of course that polling is being done of other members of the Shadow Cabinet.

DIANE ABBOTT: Those reports aren’t really true, it was polling about what’s our best voice in the north I think.  No, I don't think we need to be looking at the succession because I am confident Jeremy will take us into 2020.

SR: Now you’ve dedicated your life to championing left wing politics, finally for the first time you’ve got a leader who shares those left wing ideals as the leader of the Labour party but at the same time, if the polls are anything to go by, the public don’t really like what you’re selling.  What does that say about the future of the left wing ideals that you have been so committed to?  

DIANE ABBOTT: I haven’t devoted my life to left wing ideas as much as I’ve devoted my life to social justice at home and peace abroad and I still think that those are vital issues, particularly in the era of Trump.  Just because something is unpopular at a given moment in time doesn’t mean you should drop it.  When I first became an MP the idea of gay rights, the idea of women’s equality, the idea of justice for black people wasn’t popular at all and even some Labour MPs thought that by pushing those ideas the London Labour party was responsible for us losing in ’87 but actually those ideas are now mainstream and my view about politics is that if you believe in certain things you have to be prepared to campaign for them.  Now I’ve lived to see an issue like gay rights become a mainstream middle of the road issue with a Tory Prime Minister put into legislation on equal marriage so I haven’t given up on my ideals, not at all.

SR: You haven’t given up on your ideas, keep fighting the fight even if the polls don’t necessarily reflect that people are agreeing with what you’re doing.  Diane Abbott, thank you very much.