28 Apr LABOUR peer Ruth Anderson says the scandal engulfing Dianne Abbott is “depressing”
LABOUR peer Ruth Anderson says the scandal engulfing Dianne Abbott is “depressing” and that she doesn’t want her colleague’s career to end this way.
Speaking to GB News, Ms Anderson, the National Vice Chair of Jewish Labour, said: “It is so sad and thoroughly depressing on every level. Diane and I, we’re not on the same wing of the Labour Party. She is friends with lots of people who have made my life quite difficult.
“But she was also the first black woman to be elected and she is an icon in her own lifetime. That is an extraordinary thing, and I don’t want her political career to end like this. I find all of this so sad and honestly.”
In a candid interview with Gloria De Piero, Ms Anderson commented on the anti-semitism row that continues to dog the party.
“I’m tired of being used as a political football within the party that I have dedicated my life to,” she admitted.
“We need to move on from this chapter. I want us to be talking about how we form a government. I want us to be talking about how we beat the Tories.
“I want us to be talking about how we’re going to fix the communities that I live in. I want us to provide a level of hope for the future, for the country.
“This is sad and miserable and takes us back to a place I don’t want to be in. We need to find a way through this. We need to find a way through where there is a level of dignity for Diane too, because it’s really important for her community.
“There is no hierarchy of racism. Racism is racism. I want everybody to just move forward. We’re meant to be on the same side.”
Ms Anderson, the former Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North & Kidsgrove, also opened up about the experiences in the party under former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
He said: “I said it to Corbyn at the time, that he would rue the day he made me a Jewish member of Parliament. Because up until that I’d been campaigning for the Labour Party, I’d been part of the Labour Party my whole life.
“I come from a family that’s part of the Labour movement. It’s who we are, it’s what we were. I door-knocked , for the first time during the 1992 general election when I was eleven, this was just who I was and I’d never been a Jewish anything. I was a Labour activist. I was a feminist.
“I was a Brit who happened, all of those things who happened to be Jewish. And suddenly from 2016 onwards, the only bit of my identity that seemed relevant for certain people was the fact I also happened to be Jewish. And I can’t tell you how much I resented it, not because I’m Jewish which I am so proud of, but because they turned it on its head and they made that as if that was all I was and I wasn’t.”
