Diane Abbott

Diane Abbott
Shadow Home Secretary of the United Kingdom
In office 6 October 2016 – 5 April 2020
Preceded by	Andy Burnham
Succeeded by	Nick Thomas-Symonds
Born	27 September 1953 London, England
Political party	Labour
Spouse(s)	David Ayensu-Thompson (divorced)
Children	1
Alma mater	Newnham College, Cambridge

Diane Julie Abbott (b. 1953) is a British far-left career politician and champagne socialist. A member of the Labour Party, she has represented the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington since the 1987 Conservative landslide under Margaret Thatcher, who obliterated Abbott in a 1990 Prime Minister's Questions. Serving as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016-2020, a post in which she was notorious for incompetence, Abbott is also a failed Labour leadership candidate.

With a long history of politicizing race, Abbott is known for her racist comments about Finnish nurses and white people in general. She has also expressed support for IRA terrorists, praised Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, made insensitive comments about Islamic terrorist attacks and appeared in livestream with a Uyghur genocide denier.

Abbott has one son, who is known for anti-social behavior.

History and controversies

1970s

During the 1970s, Diane Abbott and fellow future Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn went on a motorcycle tour of communist state East Germany.

1980s

Abbott expressed vehement support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a terrorist group responsible for thousands of deaths, in a 1984 interview. Abbott stated that "every defeat for the British state is a victory for all of us".

In the 1987, in which the Thatcherite Conservatives won their third victory in a row in a landslide, Diane Abbott won the seat of Hackney North and Stoke Newington for the Labour Party with 48% of the vote. She took over from the retiring Ernie Roberts (1912-1994) who performed 4 points better than her in the 1983 election.

1990s

In 1996, Abbott made a racist attack on her local hospital for hiring "blonde, blue eyed Finnish girls" who have "never met a black person".

2000s

On 21 February 2008, during an interview on This Week alongside Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo, Abbott defended Chinese genocidal dictator Mao Zedong, claiming that "I suppose that some people would judge that on balance Mao did more good than harm". Even the liberal-biased Fullfact.org acknowledges this in 2019.

2010s

In 2010, Abbott failed miserably in that year's Labour Leadership election, being eliminated in the first round with 7% of the vote, the lowest share of all candidates.

Another failure by Diane Abbott came in the form of her unsuccessful bid in 2015 to become the Labour candidate for the 2016 London mayoral election. Abbott came third with 17% of the vote.

Abbott speaking at an August 2016 rally.

In a delusional rant at the September 2016 Labour Party conference, Abbott called Brexit voters "racist" and blamed them for hate crimes. Claims of a rise in hate crimes following the Brexit vote were based on a single press release with no substantiating evidence, with convictions for hate crimes having fallen between the vote in June 2016 and September that year.

Abbott and Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn came under fire on 9 December 2016 from Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones for their "London-centric" views.

Abbott made perhaps her most notorious interview blunder on 2 May 2017. She gave vastly confused numbers when interviewed by LBC about Labour's police and crime policy in which she suggested that Labour would hire 10,000 officers for £300,000, which would would have meant officers would earn £30 per anum.

On 6 May 2017, it was revealed that Abbott had acquired over £100,000 of taxpayer's money from BBC television appearances.

On 19 June 2017, Breitbart exposed Abbott's hypocrisy of calling an attack on a Mosque in Finsbury Park (which caused 1 death and 10 injuries) a "terror attack" yet referring to Islamic terrorist attacks at Westminster (6 deaths, 48 injuries), London Bridge (11 deaths, 48 injuries) and Manchester Arena (23 deaths, 1017 injuries) as "incidents".

On 21 February 2018, Diane Abbott was blasted for comparing British people's concerns about mass immigration to the scapegoating of minorities by Nazis in the 1930s. UK Conservative Party politician Philip Hollobone commented that Abbot's London-centric and anti-Brexit views were "more warped than ever".

2020s

In May 2021, Diane Abbott was among numerous left-wing politicians who joined an antisemitic, pro-Palestine march which compared "Zionist Israel" to Nazi Germany.

Diane Abbott, in October 2022, voted in favor of an authoritarian, anti-free speech bill to make it a criminal offense to pray or offer support outside an abortion clinic.

Public opinion

As a subject of humor

On 7 June 2017, British Christian comedian Milton Jones tweeted a joke "Stuck in lift with Corbyn and Abbott. She can't work out what floor number, he won't press the button."

Opinion polling

According to YouGov on 24 December 2022 Abbott is disliked by 46% of the UK public, with only 15% having a positive opinion of her.

Personal life

James Abbott-Thompson

Abbott's son James Abbott-Thompson was born in 1992. In 2020, Abbott-Thompson admitted to biting and attempting to punch a co-worker and spitting at a police officer.