Diane Abbott warned students yesterday on the record of previous Tory governments, writes Mark Hennessy
DIANE ABBOTT yesterday launched her bid to become Labour Party leader in the B6 College in Kenninghall Road in Clapton. This was where Sir Thomas Cromwell once plotted in the days of Henry VIII, and where Sir Alan Sugar, later to become Lord Sugar of Clapton, first started earning money as a teenager in a nearby car park.
The highly regarded college is one of the fruits of the Labour years in powers and offers both second- and third-level courses, Abbott, the local MP for 23 years, told about 100 pupils how she remembered the last Tory government.
“Some of you younger ones won’t remember Hackney under a Tory government. Money was literally taken away from Hackney to give to Tory shires. And you will see that happen again, mark my words.
“You may think Mr Cameron is soft and cuddly. You younger ones are in for a surprise.”
She warned of the impact of the public spending cuts to come under the Conservatives/Liberal Democrats alliance.
So far, Abbott has just one of the 33 nominations from Labour MPs that she needs to take part in the election, which see David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and John McDonnell also in the hunt.
“I am concerned that everybody, including my main contenders in this leadership election, seems to think that the only way out of this crisis is big public sector cuts. The only difference on this is the phasing, the timing of the cuts.”
However, she argued that the banks, not the public, should pay. “After all, when the banks were earning the bonuses, they pocketed them. When things have gone bad, why should we pay for a crisis that was not caused by ordinary people?
“One man’s public expenditure cut is another woman’s job loss. In Hackney and in most of inner-city London, most people work in the public sector and, even if they work in the private sector, they are often dependent on people who themselves work in the public sector.
“Unless we have a more open debate about public sector cuts, the cuts will do to communities like Hackney what closing down the mines did for pit villages in Yorkshire and the midlands under the last Tory government of Mrs Thatcher,” she told the audience.
Abbott never signed up to the New Labour philosophy under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and is still regarded as an irritant by many of those close to both of them.
On BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night, Blair’s former press chief Alastair Campbell was disparaging, saying that Labour would never have lasted “five minutes in power” if it had listened to the Hackney/Stoke Newington MP.
“I was honoured to be mentioned by Alastair, but I say to him that if Labour continues with the policies that he has espoused, then Labour will never in be power again,” she told the B6 audience.
Abbott, a left-wing MP, now finds herself competing with leadership challengers who are increasingly adopting ever more left-wing positions as they push for the nominations to enter the race proper.
The exception is immigration, however, where most are echoing the more negative attitudes that became prevalent during the election campaign, best illustrated by Gillian Duffy in Rochdale in her famous encounter with Brown.
“I don’t believe that my party should be going down the road of cheap, anti-immigrant rhetoric. It doesn’t represent the best of the British people,” said Abbott, the daughter of West Indian immigrants.
“Without immigrants, Britain would not be what it is today. It is immigrants that helped build London: Irish immigrants built the railways; West Indians working in the hospitals or African-East Asian immigrants who have built the shops,” she said.