Abbott, Diane 1953–
Diane Abbott 1953–
British member of Parliament
In 1987, Diane Abbott became the first black woman to be elected as a member of Parliament (MP) in Britain. Seven years later, although the number of black MPs had grown to six, she remained the only black female. When Abbott first decided to run for national office, she was perceived as a member of the “loony left” but has become less controversial the longer she has stayed in Parliament. Although well known for her radical, left-wing political views and her outspokenness, Abbott is one of the few politicians, observed Hunter Davies in the Independent, who “looks and acts like a human being.”
Abbott was born in 1953, in Paddington, a working-class neighborhood of London, to a welder and a nurse who had immigrated to Britain from Jamaica two years earlier. The family later moved four miles north to the lower-middle-class suburb of Harrow, where Abbott was the only black student at the Harrow County School for Girls. Even at this age, Abbott displayed her characteristic frankness. Frustrated with unchallenging English classes, Abbott informed the teacher that she would study the assigned books on her own instead. The fact that Abbott eventually earned an “A” did little to endear her to the teacher. Her parents, however, were always supportive; as she recalled in the Times, her father told her, “in order to get on, you have to be not just as good as white people, but better.”
Graduating with top marks, Abbott applied to Cambridge University, and was accepted, despite the doubts of her teachers. “My school didn’t send people to Oxford and Cambridge a lot,” she told the Times. “They were sort of proud of me, but only sort of.” Her history teacher had tried to dissuade Abbott from applying, claiming it would give her ambitions outside her social station, and make her a dissatisfied canteen worker in later life. Nevertheless, Abbott took her place at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she majored in history.
Abbott was one of three black female students at Newnham, but she was the only one to come from a working-class background. The traditionalism and elitism of Cambridge came as an unexpected shock; this time it was her class, rather than her race, that set her apart. “It was meeting class and privilege head-on,” Abbott explained in the Times. “I was terribly lonely.… In the end, though, I think it was a confidence-building experience.”
Although Abbott had been a high achiever at her grammar school, at Cambridge it was a different story, and she graduated
At a Glance…
Born Diane Julie Abbott, September 27, 1953, in Paddington, London, Great Britain; daughter of Reginald Abbott, a welder, and Julia Abbott, a nurse; married David Thompson, an architect from Ghana, 1991; children: James. Education: Harrow County School for Girls; Newnham College, Cambridge University, B.A. in history. Politics: Radical wing of Labour party.
Administrative trainee for Home Office; race relations officer for National Council for Civil Liberties; researcher for Thames Television, c. early 1980s; reporter for TV-am, c. early 1980s; equality officer for Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), 1985; press and public relations officer for Greater London Council; principal press officer for Lambeth Borough Council. Councillor, Westminster City Council, 1982–86; Member of Parliament, 1987—.
Member: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Addresses: Home —Hackney, London, Great Britain. Office —House of Commons, London, SW1A OAA, Great Britain.
with only average grades. She speculated in the Times that being “effortlessly top” perhaps had not been the best preparation for Cambridge, where all the other students had also been effortlessly top at their schools. In her final year, the college tutor asked her the standard questions about what career she wanted to pursue. “I said, ‘I want to do good,’” Abbott told the Times. “‘Ah,’ she said. ‘In that case, you should go into the civil service, and since you’re not very good at figures, the Treasury is out. But the next most powerful ministry is the Home Office.”’
Joined Civil Service
The Home Office, for which there is no equivalent in U.S. politics, has long been the catchall for responsibilities left over from other, better-defined cabinet departments. As the Guardian has described it, the Home Office is responsible for “subjects as diverse as fire and films, summertime and sentencing, cremation and computers, not to mention cruelty to animals, relations between church and state, and civil defense.” In her initial interview, Abbott was asked why she wanted to join the Home Office. “Because I want power,” Abbott replied, as she later recalled in the Times. Apparently this was a satisfactory answer, and she joined the ministry as an administrative trainee.
After 18 months, however, Abbott realized that she would be unable to reform the Home Office singlehandedly, and left to take a job at the National Council for Civil Liberties. Surprisingly, she was their first black employee. “I found it very cloying, like walking through glue,” she told the Times. “Full of creepy liberals falling over backwards to be nice to you because you were black. It also gave me a lasting distaste for the race relations industry and the hypocrisy of making a living out of race.”
Next, Abbott tried the television industry, working as a researcher at Thames Television, and then as a reporter for TV-am. During this time, she was a member of the Association of Cinematograph, Television, and Allied Technicians (ACTT), and in 1985, the union offered her a job as equality officer. Abbott later moved into governmental public relations, working as press and public relations officer for the Greater London Council, and later as principal press officer for Lambeth Borough Council.
Elected to Parliament
Meanwhile, Abbott remained an active member of the Labour Party, which she had joined in 1971. She first ran for office in 1982, when she was elected to the Westminster City Council representing the ward in which she had been born; she held this office for four years. In 1985, Abbott set her sights on Parliament, attempting to replace Ken Livingstone as the Labour candidate for the London district of Brent East. Livingstone, leader of the Greater London Council, was better known than Abbott, and he won the reelection contest easily by a margin of two to one. The following year, Abbott tried again, running for the Labour candidacy in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, part of London’s East End. Since Hackney was a “safe Labour seat” where a Conservative would stand little chance of being elected, the person chosen as the Labour candidate would be practically guaranteed a place in Parliament.
This time, Abbott was successful; however, she admitted to mixed feelings upon her selection as the Labour candidate, unseating Ernest Roberts, a 74-year-old MP who had first run for Parliament at the age of 67. First, she disliked replacing Roberts—a stalwart, if aging, left-winger— feeling that she would have preferred to put a Conservative out of a job. Second, she harbored ambivalent feelings about the House of Commons, just as she had about Cambridge. “There’s that club-like atmosphere which is both attractive and repellant,” she told the Times in the paper’s election run down. Still it looked certain that she was headed for Parliament. “And you notice how all the Labour and Tory members look so similar…. I think when I’m an MP, I’ll be spending a lot of time in Hackney, quite frankly.”
Abbott’s strong class-consciousness played an important part in her decision to run in this particular constituency. Although middle-class areas exist in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, it is generally the poorest constituency in Britain, with almost 50 percent of its population living in public housing. The East End of London has traditionally been a place of successive immigrations, from Jewish and French Huguenot in past centuries to Pakistani and West Indian in the twentieth century. In 1951, 70 people of West Indian origin were living in Hackney; by 1978 that number had swelled to 28,000, surpassing the area’s white population. “The working class of Hackney has been transformed in that time, and I thought it was about time the Labour party caught up with that,” Abbott told the Times.
When Abbott became Britain’s first black woman MP in 1987, she found that the British press—known for its ruthlessness—was tracking her every move. “When the media interest fell away, it came as a terrific relief,” Abbott confessed to the Times. “For the first six months it was overwhelming.” What particularly surprised her, Abbott explained, was the fact that even her Labour party colleagues had read the papers and believed the allegations that she was a member of the “loony left.” “I was in the tea-room once,” she recalled in the Times, “and this Scottish MP, Labour, said to me, ‘You don’t belong here,’ in a way that made me feel taken aback by the aggression.”
Expressed Controversial Views
One of Abbott’s longtime goals has been to establish a black caucus within the Labour Party, modeled after the black caucus in the U.S. Congress. In 1986, Abbott predicted that a black caucus would form in the next parliament; but the next year, when she tried to form such a caucus, she was the only MP to show up at the first meeting. In 1989, Abbott tried again, even as senior Labour party members attacked the idea, claiming that it would be fundamentally racist to create a “party within a party.” The fledgling caucus disintegrated a few months later, partly because Paul Boateng, the only black Labour party member to hold a shadow cabinet position, did not want to join.
Despite the difficulty she encountered in Parliament and within her own party, Abbott continued to express her controversial views. In 1988, while speaking at a black studies conference in Philadelphia, she accused Britain of being one of the most fundamentally racist nations on earth. A front-page story in the Times quoted Abbott as having said, “The British invented racism. They built an empire on which racism was the organizing principle.” Labour leaders reacted with a mixture of resignation and annoyance. A senior party official commented in the Times that Abbott’s views “bear no relation whatsoever to the views of the Labour party and will not be treated as important.”
As the Labour party and the media heaped criticism upon her, Abbott also ran into problems with her own constituency. Activists in Hackney tried to have her removed from Parliament because she spent too much time in the U.S. and Jamaica, and that she did not adequately defend the interests of blacks and immigrants in Hackney. Ironically, this accusation came while the Times dismissed her as a “one-issue MP,” whose first speech in Parliament denounced Britain’s racist immigration policies.
Two years later, Abbott admitted to the Times that although she continued to receive invitations to speak abroad, she was trying to spend more time in her constituency. To that end, in 1994, Abbott established a network for black women running small and medium-sized businesses so that individual businesswomen could exchange information and make business contacts. Although the network was initially limited to London, Abbott considered extending it to the rest of Britain.
In 1991, Abbott had married David Thompson, an architect from Ghana; one year later, their son James was born. The marriage broke up shortly after that, and Abbott became one of Britain’s “single mothers”—a group much criticized by the ruling Conservative party, which blames the rise in poverty and crime on the disintegration of the nuclear family. In a speech in Parliament supporting working mothers, Abbott asserted that, as a mother, she brought the following special qualities to Parliament, “First, I can manage with very little sleep. Second, I am very flexible. You have to be flexible with children who one morning will eat only Weetabix [brand cereal] and the next morning won’t touch Weetabix. And third … I can put up with a lot of childish babble.”
Along with her blunt speeches in Parliament, Abbott is known for her strong language—as the Times has observed, in the middle of a literary allusion she is likely to break into “those words which the press denotes with asterisks.” The same newspaper has described her as “smallish, chubby, and outgoing, the sort of person you would ask for advice if you were lost.” Abbott’s own description of herself, quoted in Parliamentary Profiles, read, “I have a short neck, waist, and legs and very square shoulders, and I’ve always yearned to be a willowy Somalian woman; I’m always on a diet.” Nevertheless, as Parliamentary Profiles observed, “Her only truly outsize attribute is the massive chip on her shoulder.”
Harbors Literary Ambitions
As a child, Abbott had three ambitions: to be an MP, to have a family, and to write a book. Having fulfilled the first two goals, she speculates that maybe when she turns 50, she will retire from politics and fulfill the third. Before she leaves office, however, she would like to see some changes made in Parliament, such as 50 percent female MPs, and mandatory retirement at age 60.
Abbott admitted, however, that she has not managed to accomplish very much in her time as an MP. She blames this not only on the fact that the Labour party is out of power, but also that politicians are simply not as powerful as many people think. “I came into politics to change the world,” she told the Independent. “When I turned 40 a couple of months ago, I looked into the mirror and said, ‘So, have you changed the world?’ The answer’s no, but I’m trying.”
Sources
Guardian, August 25, 1985.
Independent, January 18, 1994, p. 20; March 16, 1994, p. 8.
Parliamentary Profiles, edited by Andrew Roth, Parliamentary Profiles, 1988.
Times (London), April 29, 1985, p. 1; December 15, 1985, p. 34; October 3, 1987, p. 4; April 10, 1988, p. 1; October 6, 1990, p. R4; March 28, 1992, p. R25; May 3, 1994, p. 32.
—Carrie Golus
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Abbott, Diane 1953–