Respice Prospice

As they used to say round Stoke Newington. Seriously, they did. Look it up. In their way, they still do say it.

One year on from her questioning of the corporate advertising that masqueraded and masquerades as a healthy eating strategy, and only a little over a year since her denunciation of the deleterious effects of the pornogrification of mainstream culture, Diane Abbott has today decried the effects of feminism on that most fundamental of institutions, the family. No one should be remotely surprised.

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 for Leader; he would not have won, but he would have ensured that important issues were aired. However, Abbott was repeatedly cheered to echo by the Any Questions audience in leafy Worcester in November 2011, 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 cheered her to the echo there. 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 Leadership Campaign, website made and 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. Making it doubly unsurprising that she decries the effects of feminism on that most fundamental of institutions, the family.