Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott (born 1953) became the first black female elected to British Parliament in 1987, representing the Labour Party in the Hackney North and Stoke Newington districts. Abbott, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, remains strongly identified with the political left. In 2005, she was among 13 black members of the 659-member British House of Commons. Abbott, a former press aide, is still a frequent broadcaster and public speaker at universities, and on radio and television.

Attended Cambridge University

Abbott was born in London; her mother was a nurse, her father a welder. She attended Harrow County Grammar School and obtained her master's degree in history from Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. After college, Abbott worked for the government as a home office civil servant. She also worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties before entering journalism.

After doing considerable freelance work, she became a reporter for TV-AM, an early-morning station that aired in Great Britain through much of the 1980s, and the TV production company Thames Television. In addition, she was a public-relations consultant for public sector clients, including the Greater London Council and the left-oriented Lambeth Council. As a member of the Westminster City Council in the early 1980s, she was one of the few black female members.

Breakthrough Election in 1987

In 1987, Abbott was among a record number of non-whites running for British Parliament and political office elsewhere in Europe, reflecting the changing demographics of the continent. Though the presidential candidacy of the Reverend Jesse Jackson during that decade reflected the increasing role of minorities in U.S. politics, some observers said blacks had more of an uphill climb in Britain. "American blacks, their British counterparts repeatedly remind, have had nearly four centuries of coexistence with white society, compares [with] four decades here," Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post in 1988.

"We're just at the beginning of the process," Abbott told DeYoung, shortly after her election. "It took slavery, reconstruction, the Harlem renaissance, the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], all of that to build a Martin Luther King. And it took more than 20 years to bring a Jesse Jackson." Dolly Kiffen, director of Broadwater Farm's Youth Association, told DeYoung, "You have blacks there, they're black Americans. Here in Britain, black people haven't got any identity. They like to call us by different names. Like 'ethnic minorities.' I hate that term."

Jackson visited London in 1985, after rioting had broken out at Broadwater Farm, among other places, and, according to DeYoung, urged British blacks to "fight for your share of everything that's available, vertically and horizontally … in the labor movement, in the government, in property ownership." Sons and daughters of Caribbean ownership, DeYoung wrote, "have grown up in a homogeneous white society that never planned for their existence and has shown little willingness to make a place for them." They were raised in such districts as Brixton and Tottenham in London, Toxteth in Liverpool and Handsworth in Birmingham.

The first generation of immigrants were reluctant to confront the largely white British establishment. In Britain, the generic term "blacks" often applied to Asians, African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants, and their children. Whites, meanwhile, felt "swamped" by nonwhite immigrants, Conservative Party leader and future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in a 1978 interview, according to DeYoung. "My generation know[s] we're here, and know[s] we're not going anywhere," Abbott said in DeYoung's article. "We don't have that awe."

Labour Struggled with Race

Abbott joined Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, and Paul Boateng as minority Members of Parliament in 1987. Considered rebellious at times, she has called herself a Marxist, and the Guardian newspaper in 2005 described her as "an icon of the left." The four faced several uphill battles after joining Parliament, David S. Broder wrote in the Washington Post two years after their election.

Calling their struggle a "triple handicap," Broder wrote: "They lack experience and seniority. They are on the left of a party whose leadership is tugging it toward the center. And they are a handful of blacks in an institution which had been all-white since an Asian Communist was defeated after seven years' service in 1931. They express varying degrees of frustration and have chosen widely different tactics for advancing their goals and careers, causing some open divisions among them. But all of them know they cannot expect many reinforcements."

Abbott, who collaborated with Grant in forming the black caucus and over the years remained committed to black factions within the Labour Party, charged in Broder's article that "the Labour Party hasn't come to terms with race. They're like some of the leaders of the [U.S.] Democratic Party who think they can take black support for granted and win by appealing to the white middle class. Well, it didn't work in the United States and it won't work here."

Outspoken Critic of Educational Inequity

While in Parliament, Abbott served on several committees that addressed social and international concerns. In addition, she was elected to the Labour Party's national executive panel. She also served on the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, which addressed business and financial affairs, through much of the 1990s. Abbott traveled to Washington, New York, Frankfurt, and other financial hubs, frequently meeting with bankers, financial regulators, and senior politicians. In addition, Abbott has served on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and has traveled to several European countries, as well as China, Hong Kong, Uganda, and Kenya. In the early 2000s, Abbott established a special committee investigating gun-related crimes. "I urge the government to move away from excessively ideological approach to the so-called magic of the private sector and to adopt a more pragmatic approach," she said, as quoted in a profile in the Guardian.

Abbott has said that British public education has shortchanged black children. "Something is going seriously wrong between the age of five and the age of sixteen," Abbott was quoted as saying in the Economist, a British newspaper. "Black children do not perform nearly as well as other ethnic minority groups, nor as well as they should," the newspaper editorialized. "But the explanations—and, hence, the solutions—have less to do with bad attitudes among teachers and pupils and more to do with the old difficulties of poverty and place."

Abbott, though, drew harsh criticism when it was revealed that she would send her 12-year-old son to the exclusive, private City of London School rather than through London's public school system. Abbott had railed against such parents in the past. Author Adam Swift, in a 1996 commentary in the New Statesman, called Abbott a hypocrite. "It's hard not to think she's doing exactly what she criticized [Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [leading Labour politician] Harriet Harman for doing: opting out of local schools to get something better for her child. And neither Blair nor Harman—of whom Abbott said 'she made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another'—chose private schools for their children."

Swift, a professor at the University of Oxford's Balliol College, also wrote: "Yet if she had simply condemned private education, without criticizing others' choices, she might have been cleared of hypocrisy. It can be quite consistent to think that there should be no private schools, yet send your own child to one." He added: "Hypocrisy is about whether you practice what you preach. If you preach that parents should never use their money to buy their children out of the state system, and then you go ahead and do exactly that, you are a hypocrite."

Still, Swift praised Abbott for addressing the problems of educational inequity. "Unlike many who go private, she at least has taken seriously matters of the public good, has done what she can do to persuade her fellow citizens to endorse a more equitable educational system, and to improve state schools in a way that might make them adequate for all children. I'd like to see all parents of privately schooled children champion the cause of social justice with her vigor. I hope Abbott does not think she must now mute her demands for a fair educational system in which all the children get to go to decent schools."

Abbott communicated with her constituents, among other ways, through her weekly column in the Hackney Gazette. A 1996 column in which she complained that the arrival of Finnish nurses jeopardized employment opportunities for black women elicited a rebuke from the New Statesman's Darcus Howe, who otherwise has generally supported her work. "It is worse than careless for Diane Abbott to have made such remarks," Howe said. "It smacks of right-wing reaction and is anti-labor. But for me these charges are mitigated by my belief that she is facing demons of doubt about her future in the new Labour Party." Howe went on to praise Abbott for her column and her often-unappreciated work in Parliament.

"Class of '87" Left Legacy

Abbott, who married in 1991 and divorced two years later, was nearing the end of her second decade in the House of Commons as the mid-2000s beckoned. Abbott and other British minority politicians realized their appeal must be broad-based. "You don't get elected in Britain on black votes alone," Abbott said in 2005, according to the Washington Post's Keith B. Richburg. Unlike the United States, where all African-Americans from the House of Representatives are Democrats and nearly all come from heavily black districts, members of Parliament are elected from a party slate, meaning seats are divided commensurate with a nationwide vote total. "Though still influential, she has become sidelined," the Guardian wrote.

Abbott has spoken at Ivy League universities in the United States, including Harvard. She also makes frequent radio and TV appearances. She has hosted a call-in show for LBC Radio, presented a program on the treasury for BBC Radio 4 and appeared regularly on the BBC1 late-night political talk show with fellow Members of Parliament Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo.

Remained Highly Visible Member of Parliament

"She has remained one of the most well-known MPs [members of Parliament] among the general public, with her outspoken views ensuring she is never far from sight," the British Broadcasting Corporation wrote on its Web site, BBC News. Abbott strongly opposes converting to a singular currency—the United Kingdom still uses the pound, not the euro—and she is the only MP among the "Class of 1987," the four black persons elected to Parliament that year. "Now only Abbott is left to hold the fort," Howe wrote in the New Statesman. Abbott and others, Richburg wrote, "are chipping away at one of the most durable color barriers in a fast-changing Europe, the doors to legislative chambers."

Periodicals

Economist, March 12, 2005.

New Statesman, December 6, 1996; November 3, 2003; March 21, 2005.

Washington Post, June 10, 1987; June 24, 1988; July 4, 1989; April 24, 2005.

Online

BBC News, Diane Abbott profile, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2085582.stm (December 12, 2005).

Diane Abbott Official Web Site, Abbott biography, http://www.dianeabbott.org.uk/index.php?page=Biography (December 12, 2005).

Guardian Unlimited, Diane Abbott profile, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/person/0,9290,-4,00.html (January 3, 2006).