Poor Diane Abbott. Just because she is a woman and black, she has been forced by her own party into being on the ballot for Leader of the Labour Party.
Although she herself was able to get only a handful of supporters for the Labour leadership contest and so could not on her own merits make it to the ballot list, she has been pushed and shoved into the race at the 11th hour by other Labour MPs who wouldn’t otherwise support her and all, supposedly, in the name of diversity.
As late as a few hours before the ballot list deadline last week, Abbott had the backing of just 10 MPs out of a required 33. So, because it looked as if the leadership contestants would be embarrassingly all-male, all-Oxbridge and all-white, the parliamentary Labour party machine cranked into action: Harriet Harman, the acting Labour leader, encouraged enough other MPs to nominate Abbott, after they had been persuaded that a privileged all-white male line-up would not go down at all well with the public or the unions.
The name for this is not diversity. Its name is tokenism, aggravated by PR manipulation and the deepest of undemocratic cynicism. It is positive discrimination at its most depressing.
Yet Abbott seems quite oblivious of her humiliation. Abbott seems to feel thoroughly entitled to run, even though several people who in the end nominated her have no intention of voting for her and even though Harman has made it entirely clear that her reason for nominating her was to ensure that a woman was on the ballot paper.
To ensure no humiliation she must get 33 votes in the first round, in September, otherwise her nomination has been a fix.
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