MP says she received no apologies after racist and sexist remarks made about her were revealed in Forde report
Diane Abbott has called on the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, to take action over racism in the party in the wake of the Forde inquiry.
The Forde report, published last week, condemned remarks made about Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, in leaked WhatsApp messages among Labour officials.
The report by Martin Forde QC found that some of the attitudes expressed towards Abbott and other Bame MPs in private WhatsApp messages among staffers hostile to Jeremy Corbyn represented “overt and underlying racism and sexism”.
Abbott said she had received no apology for the comments, which Forde said used “expressions of visceral disgust, drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes, and they bear little resemblance to the criticisms of white male MPs elsewhere in the messages”.
Abbott said: “In a private sector organisation people who were as blatantly racist as this would be disciplined, if not sacked. Instead, Starmer commissioned the Forde report and deliberately sat on it for two years hoping people would forget.”
She added: “He needs to combat racism in the Labour party as energetically as he has opposed antisemitism. Anything else suggests that he does not really care. It would also be good if, even five years later, I got any type of apology for the sustained racist abuse by paid Labour full-time officials.”
The private WhatsApp messages...
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