My children love Top Trumps. Do you remember it? The card game in which footballers, superheroes, aeroplanes — the things kids are obsessed with — are rated out of 100 in various different categories — think strength, intelligence, firepower. It is now so popular in our house that my boys now only converse in Top Trump terms. Is Messi better than Naymar? Has The F-16 or the Eurofighter got bigger guns? Is Hulk taller than Spiderman?
I like Top Trumps. I like its cataloguing of assets. It’s a straightforward, uncomplicated way of assessing something. But there will come a point when I will have to explain to my boys that this way of trying to understand the world is silly, misleading, and sometimes downright dangerous. You cannot plot all differences on a common scale. Some variables just don’t map. Apples and Oranges. Black and Jew.
I like Diane Abbott. She is a proper fighter for the causes she believes in; she is fun and adds hugely to the gaiety of the House of Commons. I suspect she gets more nasty, racist shit from the public than anyone else in public life. I like her because she often seems so vulnerable, and it is this vulnerability that enables her to be so sensitive to the lived experience of many of her constituents. That’s why she was so great on assisted dying.
But sometimes she gets things spectacularly wrong. And I don’t mean drinking mojitos on the tube, or stumbling in a TV interview. I mean by conjuring up what amounts to a Top Trumps of racism. Black people, she claims, have it harder than Jews.
‘Two yellow cards make a red’ — Starmer shouldn’t let her back.’
In an interview earlier this week, she doubled down on earlier comments she had made about race and prejudice. “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism,” she said. “I don’t know why people would say that.” Certainly, both Jews and black people will have their own distinct experience of prejudice. But rating either according to who is more wronged is nothing more than a children’s game — and a dangerous one at that. On this, if little else, I’m with Keir Starmer. He might not have half the moral seriousness of Diane Abbott, as he attempts to triangulate his politics through a continual assessment of party management and public opinion. But he was right to say that Abbott deserved to be suspended — again.
On the substantive issue, Abbott wants to claim a kind of priority for racism against people with darker-coloured skin. This all dates back to a letter she sent The Observer, in 2023, in which she appeared to equate antisemitism with the kind of prejudice that people with ginger hair experience. There’s a difference between the lived experience of black people and Jews, she argued, because Jews “are not all their lives subject to racism”.
But it’s important to have a little context here. Abbott had written to the newspaper in response to an article by Tomiwa Owolade, in which he was considering the idea that white people cannot experience racism. He wrote about a girl at his sixth form who told him that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege, she told him. “White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of colour.”
Owolade then niftily dismantles this argument, insisting that racism is a more complex and varied phenomenon. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, being white or wealthy wasn’t much help to those Jews who were carted off to Auschwitz. Indeed, if you were to take the argument of Owolade’s sixth-form friend to its logical conclusion, the Holocaust cannot have been a programme of racist extermination because European Jews are overwhelmingly white and “white people can’t be victims of racism”. In her letter, Abbott appeared to be siding with Owolade’s sixth-form friend — and this is where her comments get very dark and troubling. She didn’t literally say the Holocaust wasn’t racist; but she pretty much did, by implication.
On the 100th anniversary of the publication of Mein Kampf, Jews are again the targets of hatred, blamed for a “genocide” in the Middle East that many of us would consider a very nasty war of existential self-defence. But whatever one thinks of the current situation in Palestine, it is certainly the case that many of those who have long harboured antisemitic instincts are now able to dress them up as morally virtuous condemnations of the State of Israel. To Starmer’s credit, he understands that the Left is on weak ground here. His party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is making something of a comeback, liked a tweet of a mural which depicted Jews as greedy financiers and agents of global capitalism. The Left has a certain fondness for these tropes — and Abbott’s comments were of a piece with that historic antisemitism.
Jews, she remarks in her letter to The Observer “were never required to sit at the back of the bus on pre-civil right America”. To which Daniel Finkelstein has replied that, in Germany in the Forties, they weren’t allowed on the bus or the train at all. As he pointed out, it was an irony not lost on many as they were crowded into tram cars and cattle trucks to be taken to their deaths.
But the problem here is that Abbott is using the African-American experience as paradigmatic. Across the Atlantic, Jews and African Americans have had a long, complex and sometimes difficult relationship. Both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King cited the animosity of American black people towards Jews as originating in landlord-tenant relationships, where Jews were, if not the landlords themselves, then often agents for landlords. Baldwin, in his complex article of 1967, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”, argues that African Americans regard Jews as white, and thus a part of the structure of oppression: “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere,” he wrote, “is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”
Owolade himself understands this complexity. In his book This is not America, he insists that we shouldn’t attempt to see race relations in the UK through a US lens. Things are different in the US. But Abbott’s misplaced observations about the Jewish and Traveller experience of racism can all too easily be read as the falling into the trap Baldwin describes: that white people are the oppressors and thus can’t be the object of racism. It’s offensive rubbish.
Playing Top Trumps with race is a dangerous business. There should be no hierarchy of bigotry. Diane Abbott got it badly wrong in her letter to The Observer. And she has got it wrong again. This time there should be no return. As the Campaign Against Antisemitism has put it: “two yellow cards make a red”. Starmer shouldn’t let her back.
