Prejudice or racism?...

In respose to claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism”, Diane Abbott has written a letter (pubished in today’s Observer). “They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable. It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships”.

Racism is still a ‘hot potato’ in civil discourse, and we can’t even agree what race and racism actually mean. For example, does the word ‘Jewish’ indicate a race, an ethnicity, a belief system or a set of cultual norms?

Keir Starmer has acted swiftly. Diane Abbott has lost the Labour whip, and there are calls for her to be expelled from the party altogether…