Labour was in disarray on Wednesday after veteran MP Diane Abbott said she was banned from standing for the party at the general election, only for leader Sir Keir Starmer to say this was not the case.
Abbott, Britain’s first Black female MP, regained the Labour whip this week after an internal investigation into remarks she made last year suggesting Jewish, Irish and Traveller people only experienced “prejudice” rather than racism.
She told the Financial Times Labour would not permit her to stand as a candidate on July 4 but had allowed her to rejoin the parliamentary party until then.
“Although the whip has been restored, I am banned from standing as a Labour candidate,” she told the BBC on Wednesday morning.
The apparent move to stop Abbott, leftwing MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, from representing Labour at the election triggered criticism of Starmer from MPs and six trade unions affiliated to the party.
The controversy comes as the party finalises its candidates for the general election as it attempts to regain power for the first time in 14 years.
Momentum, a leftwing pressure group, said blocking Abbott from standing was a “slap in the face” for people who had been inspired by her courage in the face of discrimination and abuse.
“It is a dark day for the Labour party when Diane Abbott isn’t welcome as a Labour MP, but a hard-right Tory like Natalie Elphicke is,” it added, referring to the defection of the former Conservative MP to Labour this month.
But Starmer later insisted no decision had been taken to prevent Abbott standing as a Labour candidate.
The Labour leader told broadcasters it was “not true” that the veteran left-wing MP had been barred from standing again.
“No decision has been taken to bar Diane Abbott. The process that we were going through ended with the restoration of the whip the other day,” he said.
“She’s a member of the Parliamentary Labour party and no decision has been taken barring her,” he added.
Starmer has sought to pull Britain’s main opposition party back to the centre ground of UK politics after his hard-left predecessor Jeremy Corbyn lost the 2019 election. Corbyn himself has been forced out of the party and is standing as an independent candidate on July 4.
But some MPs have accused Starmer of ruthlessly sidelining his internal opponents.
Amid confusion over whether Abbott could stand again one centrist Labour MP said there was a “lot of rage” over Abbott’s situation and that it “looked terrible”.
A second Labour MP said Starmer’s inner circle appeared to be “clearing people out. You wait to see the stitch-ups for the plum seats.”
Abbott, who has a majority of more than 33,000, was suspended by Labour in April last year after suggesting in a letter to the Observer newspaper that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experienced “prejudice” rather than racism.
Starmer pledged to root out antisemitism within Labour after the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the equalities watchdog, found in 2020 that during Corbyn’s time as leader the party had failed to rein in anti-Jewish sentiment among some members.
Abbott apologised and retracted her comments shortly after the Observer letter was published, but remained suspended from the Parliamentary Labour party, meaning she remained an MP but sat as an independent.
An investigation into Abbott was completed by Labour’s ruling national executive committee in December, when she was instructed to apologise, according to a Labour figure who declined to be identified.
Starmer said last week that Abbott’s case would be resolved before June 4, when Labour finalises its list of parliamentary candidates. He had said Abbott was “going through a process” that was “not finally resolved yet”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seized on the row on Wednesday: “The Labour party has been telling everybody this investigation into Diane Abbott is ongoing, it now appears it concluded months ago.”
The Times first reported on Tuesday that Abbott would be forced to step down as Labour figures briefed that the party was considering who would stand in her stead.
There is a meeting of Labour’s governing national executive committee next Tuesday to decide who will be the candidate in the seat.
Abbott said in a post on X that she was “very dismayed” at the initial reports, which had meant she was unable to step down quietly after serving 37 years in parliament.
She had been offered the opportunity to step down “with dignity” ahead of the election in return for not standing again, according to people familiar with the matter.
Allies of Abbott said she was upset at the way that someone had briefed this arrangement to The Times.
“Why would the chief whip write [to Abbott] restoring the whip and then within 10 minutes someone is briefing the situation to the press,” said one ally.
First elected to parliament in 1987, Abbott spent most of her career on the backbenches before being appointed shadow home secretary by Corbyn. She returned to the backbenches when Starmer took the helm.
Abbott has long been the subject of online abuse: research by Amnesty International found she received 45 per cent of all abusive tweets sent to female MPs on Twitter, now X, in the run-up to the 2017 general election.
This year Frank Hester, the Tory party’s biggest donor, apologised after he was reported to have said in a private meeting in 2019 that looking at Abbott made “you just want to hate all Black women”.
