Hackney Hope

The Labour poll lead until the very last weeks on 2011, and its fifth consecutive by-election victory after the polls had apparently turned due to the nonexistent Euro veto, indicate, inter alia, strong public support for a government including Diane Abbott. She has been prominent again today, questioning the corporate advertising masquerading as a healthy eating strategy. She was recently, denouncing the deleterious effects of the pornogrification of mainstream culture.

Abbott has her faults. She has been a lazy critic of Blue Labour, initially very much a Hackney phenomenon. John McDonnell had a broader and more interesting base of parliamentary support. But she was repeatedly cheered to echo by the Any Questions audience in leafy Worcester in November, not least when she denounced neoliberal economics in general and benefit cuts so that bankers could carry on paying themselves gargantuan bonuses in particular.

Well, of course they did. Any examination of the Mail and Telegraph newspapers confirms that the Coalition’s savage cuts in services and in spending power, the road to yet further economic ruin, are no more popular with Conservative supporters, Middle England, or what have you, than they are with anyone else. The Coalition of Resistance to them can and must include Conservative supporters, Middle England, the Mail and Telegraph newspapers, and what have you.

The Labour Leadership Election greatly heightened the profile of Diane Abbott. There has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish commercial schools, and Harold Wilson used them as a parent while he was Prime Minister. It is altogether another question whether or not they are any good, since they are merely adept at putting pupils through the examination system that they are the first to castigate as deficient and defective.

They are often also the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the assumption that the relationship between parents and children is thoroughly distant and purely financial, organised towards the living out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments, and unsurprisingly producing politicians of the sort that voted through Thatcher’s Children Act and other such legislative attacks on family life. But there has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish them.

Abbott’s ordinary, rather than her campaign, website makes clear her sympathy for the 11-plus, for single-sex schools, for Oxbridge as academically elitist, for universities’ flexible approach to entry grades if they see potential in the applicant, for the prevention of social rather than academic elitism by improving the schools attended by the poor, for raising poor pupils’ aspirations so that they actually apply to the top universities, and for reinstating full grants so that they can afford to go.

She has also been consistent in her opposition to European federalism, in her role as a voice of her ethnic community on immigration by people who cannot speak English or who come from countries with no historic ties to Britain, in her support for action against such things as not giving up seats to elderly people on public transport, and in her opposition to the New Labour assault on civil liberties.

All in all, no wonder that she hated both Thatcherism and Blairism so much. And no wonder that the electorate is now keen on a government in which she would be one of the most recognisable figures.