“The most dangerous thing is to elect the anointed heir”: The Diane Abbott interview

Diane Abbott is the backbench MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and a candidate in the Labour leadership election. She met Katie McCrory on Friday, September 3rd, 2010.

Now the ballots have dropped, what’s the feeling in Camp Abbott?
Well, in Camp Abbott, we think there’s everything to play for. What we keep reminding people is that although the Westminster insiders say I’m coming last and can’t win, the polls show that among Labour Party members and trade union members, who will also have a vote, I’m easily third, easily beating Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, and in some polls, I’m second behind David Miliband. So we’ve got everything to play for. We also remind people that when Harriet Harman won the deputy leadership election, everyone wrote her off in the lead up. She didn’t have the money, she didn’t have the trade union backing, but she won on second preferences. So we’ve got everything to play for. And I think a lot of people who think I can’t win don’t understand the electoral system.

And yet you made the ballot only thanks to David Miliband. Some people, particularly feminists, say you were patronised into running. Is that fair?
I made the ballot because John McDonnell stood down. That’s what everyone forgets. John McDonnell had, I think, 16 or 17 votes, looked at it on Tuesday night, the evening before the ballot closed, and realised he wasn’t going to be able to get up to 33, but that I possibly could. He stood down in my favour on Wednesday morning. Without that I don’t think David Miliband would have… well, I know he wouldn’t have, because he always said that he would nominate me if I needed a couple. But it was John McDonnell who made the difference. And feminists who say I was patronised into running need to be careful because Andy Burnham got nominated by people on Wednesday who have since said they’re not voting for him. So, I wonder why if a man gets lent nominations, that’s fine, but if a woman gets lent nominations, that’s problematic.

The hustings have been a prominent feature of the leadership campaign, and one of the few ways voters can see candidates in the flesh. But I’ve heard you are bored and tired of them. With so many of them happening, do you think they’re valuable?
They’re extremely valuable and I didn’t say I was bored and tired of them so I’d question where you’ve picked that up. It’s been extremely challenging. We’ve all been up and down the country, but I think they’ve been very interesting and exciting, and party members have packed them out. It’s Westminster journalists who have dismissed the hustings, mainly because I think they see the Milibands at smart North London dinner parties anyway, and say “why bother to have the hustings; let us, the insiders, decide”. But I think the hustings have worked. They’ve allowed party members up and down the country, from Glasgow to Southampton, Cardiff to Exeter, to see us all in the flesh. For many voters, that’s been their first opportunity – but also to see us all on a level footing, which is good.

Would you change the format?
I think it’s very difficult to change them. The format the party has devised, where you don’t have long speeches and everyone gets to reply for two or three minutes, is difficult to improve because it allows the candidates to be on a level playing field. And during the televised hustings we’ve done, a lot of people have said they’ve been interesting but there have been more instances of people talking over one another, people not getting as much time. So I think within the Labour Party hustings, the format has worked well.

Your regular appearances on This Week have given you plenty of media experience, and arguably should have given you the edge over the other candidates in maintaining your media profile over the course of the campaign. But your rivals have been more prominent and better reported, haven’t they?
Well, that just reflects the whole Westminster bias, doesn’t it? I haven’t had more media attention than my rivals because, obviously, at various points ministers have received the coverage that goes with their role. During the campaign what’s happened is that when the coalition has done things, like trying to scrap the Building Schools for the Future programme, they’ve spoken to the shadow spokesperson, and in that case it was Ed Balls. Because I wasn’t a shadow minister, I wasn’t asked to respond to things in that capacity. But, as I’ve said throughout the campaign, what it reflects is that I’m the Westminster outsider and therefore the Westminster insiders don’t give me the coverage that comes with that game. I think the strength of my candidature is that I’m not part of that game.

You’ve established quite a few firsts simply by virtue of who you are in Westminster. What has that responsibility felt like and how has it influenced your leadership bid?
Other people get preoccupied with me being the first to do certain things, but I’m not preoccupied with it. I do my job, and what I thought was important about this leadership campaign was bringing policies onto the agenda that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. I’m the only candidate for scraping Trident, for instance, and likewise I stood up very strongly at the beginning against the line that Ed Balls took – and to a greater or lesser extent that the others were taking – that we lost the election because we were soft on immigration. Once I got on the ballot paper and was very clear about immigration in the early hustings, the others backed off it. Even Ed Balls has softened his line.

It has been widely noted that issues have been raised in the hustings that might not have had such prominence previously, like equality and social mobility. Do you think the leadership campaign has changed because of your presence?
Yes, I think I’ve moved the whole debate to the left. I’ve certainly put a stop to the runaway “immigration was a real issue” idea which had happened at the beginning because no one had come out against it. And I’ve moved it to such a degree that a few weeks ago The Times, I think, claimed that David Miliband was too left-wing. The debate has moved onto new terrain which it wouldn’t have been on if I hadn’t been running. And also the others have picked up all my lines.

You mean your jokes?
Well, not just that – my policy lines. I was the first candidate to talk about the importance of putting up taxation, and the others have followed. The others have followed on tuition fees. I was the only one to vote against tuition fees, while they were all for it. So the others have followed my policies too.

What are your thoughts on the proposed graduate tax?
I’m prepared to look at a graduate tax, but there are certain drawbacks. You could end up paying much more than your university education actually cost. The other thing about graduate tax is that it doesn’t go directly to universities. With tuition fees the money goes directly to universities. I’m not saying I’m supporting it but I wouldn’t reject it out of hand, paying for higher education out of general taxation. At the end of the day, it’s the fairest way. If you earn more, you pay more, and I think you could do it for less than a penny on the basic rate. It doesn’t cost as much as people think.

The debate about tuition fees illustrates a wider point though. I was the first person in my family to go to university. The other candidates, the Milibands and Ed Balls, their fathers were university professors. When the whole issue of tuition fees was raised, I just thought about what my Dad would have said. He left school at 14, and if I’d said to him: “One: I’m staying on at sixth form; two: I’m going to university; and three: I’m piling up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt”, he would have said, “Nonsense, go and become a nurse like your mother”. Ed Balls and Ed Miliband eventually said on tuition fees that, having supported them, throughout this election they knocked on the doors of working-class people and discovered that tuition fees were a big burden for them. I knew this all along.

That’s the biggest difference between us as candidates, that I’m more in touch with ordinary people than they are, partly because of my background. And in terms of the technical answer to this, going back to the original question, I’m prepared to look at a graduate tax but I don’t rule out funding out of general taxation. Let’s see what formula people come up with.

We’ve talked about you being the most to the left of all the candidates…
We’ll, I’m the only general left-wing candidate.

And someone told me they would vote for you because they wanted to remind Labour of its socialist roots. Are you the most socialist candidate, and how important it is to remind Labour of this heritage?
I don’t think it’s about a heritage issue, I think it’s about a 21st century issue of what the Labour Party is for. Under New Labour, the Labour Party just seemed terribly managerial and didn’t seem to have any underlying principles. I think it’s very interesting that the place where my rivals have not been able to follow me is foreign policy. They’ve been able to blur some of the other issues, but not foreign policy. To say what the Labour Party is for? I think we have to be a democratic party, and under New Labour we were a very presidential party, a very top-down party. All the others were part of that, and I wasn’t.

I think we have to be a party that puts civil liberties at the centre of what we do. It is shameful that it took this Tory-led government to say we would no longer put children in detention centres, to say we would do away with compulsory ID cards, to have a revue of anti-terrorism legislation. The others supported all that – children in detention centres, compulsory ID cards, shocking anti-terrorism legislation, including the attempt to have 90 days detention without a trial. I took a very clear line on these things. Civil liberties have always been associated with the Labour movement and we should get back to that.

Ultimately, it’s a question of recalibrating activity between the private and public sector. The characteristic thing about New Labour was that it believed the market had the answer to everything. Ed Balls believed this when he was working for Gordon Brown, and it was Brown who forced the Private Finance Initiative for London Transport which has been such a disaster. So it’s not that I want to go backwards, but we have to ask ourselves, as a party, does the private sector do everything better? No, it doesn’t. I don’t think we should ever privatise any aspect of the prison service, and I think that PFI in the National Health Service has left us a huge burden going forward. And finally, on foreign policy, it’s about moving away from what, at times, seemed like a neo-liberal approach, following America into everything. I’m very different to my rivals, and I’m much closer to where the party members are.

That’s interesting, because what we see in terms of “brand Abbott” is that you’ve been a back-bencher who holds the party to account on things like the Iraq war, Trident, civil liberties. Would that still work if you were party leader?
I think doing the right thing always works. If we hadn’t gone to war in Iraq we’d be a much stronger party now. People forget we’ve lost five million voters in 11 years – one million of them went to other parties, and four million of them don’t vote at all. Labour voters are very disillusioned. I think doing the right thing works because voters give you credit for consistency, and voters give you credit for actually believing in something. You get back to asking “what is the party for, what does the party believe in”, and I’m the only candidate that can answer that clearly.

You say your rivals are all “‘continuity candidates”‘, while you’ve been an MP for 23 years, and haven’t had a cabinet role. You’re a Westminster constant and yet, as you say, you’re an outsider. Do you think voters want that kind of consistent, long-serving but outsider MP, or someone who knows Westminster right now from the cut and thrust of recent events?
I think I know how Westminster works. I’ve been in Westminster longer than my rivals. I was a career civil servant, I worked for Liberty, the pressure group, and I’ve been the only one that’s been a councillor and the only one that’s been a Trade Union official. I know how the Labour Party works better, because my rivals are all great but they were fast-tracked through the system and I worked my way through it. I think, frankly, the voters are a bit weary of Westminster, and they don’t necessarily think the Westminster elite got everything right, like the expenses scandal. I don’t think voters share the opinion that the Westminster elite know how to do things better.

There has been a lot of discussion about working class versus middle class voters, and recently attention has been focused on the Milibands because of this. You wrote in The Independent that “the danger that the concerns of the middle class will be forgotten in modern politics is illusory”, implying that we need to leave New Labour behind, and not worry about pandering to middle class voters…
That’s not what I said. I didn’t say we didn’t need to worry about the middle-class voters. What I said is that there is an artificial distinction between appealing to votes from the industrial working class, if you like, and appealing to middle-class professionals. That is a false distinction. Some of the voters whose doors I knocked on who felt most passionate about the Iraq war, for instance, were middle-class voters. Everyone in London lost 10% of their vote whether they voted for it or not, in the election before last, because it was middle-class voters who were angry about Iraq. And yet Tony Blair would have you believe that worrying about Iraq, and worrying about civil liberties, isn’t something that concerns middle-class voters. Numerically, when the Labour Party had the most middle-class voters we were led by the impeccably middle class Clement Attlee. There isn’t a contradiction between appealing to middle-class voters and working-class voters. What people are most exercised about, whatever their class, are public sector cuts and it’s possible to build the fight-back in opposition to those and offer a real alternative.

So do we blow class out of proportion? Or is it race, or gender, or religion, for example, which divides us more?
People are concerned about their living standards and their life chances, and their children’s living standards and their life chances. One of the reasons New Labour lost support was because it was associated with increasing labour-market flexibility and the rise of agency workers. Under my fellow contenders, who were ministers at the time, EU directives for agency workers were refused. We had agency-worker job insecurity, not enough housing, and so on, which led to a general feeling of insecurity among voters of all classes, about their living standards and their life chances. That’s what we’ve got to address.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt from the May election?
How disillusioned people were with New Labour. I alone among my contenders actually doubled my majority, but a lot of my voters and voters in other areas where we polled well voted in spite of New Labour, not because of it.

Who has surprised you most since the election – generally, or among your rivals?
Well, I’m surprised at how all of the other contenders are now expressing concern about New Labour policies which they seemed perfectly happy about before.

The state of women in politics in the UK is disheartening to say the least. What practical steps do you think we can take to redress that balance?
Harriet Harman has done a lot to push women’s issues. She’s often derided by other MPs but she’s been very consistent and very brave. One of the proposals, for 50% [representation of women] in the shadow cabinet, is a very good one. Frankly, if people are concerned about women’s issues, they have to recognise that having a woman at the head of party would be a transforming thing for women. One of the things I get from the campaign is people saying “you’re on the ballot, can I have a picture of you with my daughter, I want her to remember this?”. And, as we’ve seen in America, if you have a leader that represents a real break with the past, it can re-energise politics, and bring new groups into politics. And I think that’s what would happen if I became leader.

In practical terms, we need 50/50 in the shadow cabinet, we need to end the manipulation of the selection process where we parachute people in and fast-track them, because that hasn’t helped, and we have to give support to councillors, so that people can come up through the party, in terms of better representation.

In terms of women more generally, we have to do much more about low-paid work, as women sit at the lower paid end of the spectrum, and we have to give much more support to trade unions. I was a trade union equality officer in the 1990s and the types of work and the types of companies, like the public sector more generally, where there is strong trade union organisation have a much better record of equality. Trade unions are still the most important thing for getting practical policies on equality.

According to the latest polls, you’re considered one of the favourites among the unions. How do you propose we stop low pay, end discrimination, and close the inequality gap, particularly in the current economic climate?
We need three things. We have to raise the minimum wage, we have to strengthen trade unions to help them grow the work place and defend workers, and I really do think we have to fight this notion that public sector expenditure is bad and private sector expenditure is good just because people are disproportionately employed in the public sector. Even Tony Blair is supporting coalition cuts in the public sector, and I think that’s wrong. Expenditure in the public sector and in public sector jobs helps regenerate the entire economy. Remember, there are millions of people in the country in the private sector who are on government contracts. If we raise the minimum wage, deal with issues of job insecurity – because people who are insecure on casual and short-term contracts find it hard to fight for equality – and defend the public sector, then these are the ways in practice we deal with these issues.

What’s your response to the Fawcett Society launching a legal challenge to the government, saying the budget is potentially illegal?
I think that’s right. The information that Yvette Cooper got through the House of Commons’ library, which looked into it, says women are disproportionately impacted by these cuts and I think it’s right that Fawcett is doing this.

It almost feels obligatory to ask how you justify where you sent your son to school, but I’m more interested in knowing how you marry the disconnect between your public profile and the values you are expected to demonstrate, including those of your party, with the decisions you need to make for yourself and for your family…
I don’t think there’s a disconnect between my public persona and what I believe in, and if there is then maybe people don’t think I was completely serious about being a mother. I come from a background – and this has been much misinterpreted and much derided – that’s rural, working-class West Indian, where children are very, very important. In the same way that I oppose privatisation in the health service, because so many of my female relatives were nurses and worked in the health service and suffered with privatisation that started in the Tory era and continued under us, and suffered when jobs were outsourced, so I feel very impassioned about privatisation because so many of my relatives in the public sector were hit by it. It’s the same person who wants to do the best for their child. I think the schools issue has been used against me by both the left and the right, but it did happen 10 years ago.

But how do respond to voters who say they like your direction and agree with many of your policies, but say you lost them on this one issue?
I think some people are hiding behind that issue, I really do. It happened 10 years ago. I think people are using it, that’s all I’m saying.

What’s been your biggest political mistake?
Not realising early enough in my career that people don’t like jokes, and if you say something ironic and jokey to a politician, people take it literally.

What’s the most dangerous thing for Labour right now?
The most dangerous thing is to elect the anointed heir, and I say that because I was an MP in 1997, and I vividly remember being in Westminster and seeing Mrs Thatcher literally tow William Hague around the corridors, like a recalcitrant toddler, and her message was – a kind of biblical message – “Here is my anointed son”. The Tories voted for the heir and then they were out of power for 13 years. The truth is that New Labour did some great things in the past 13 years, but I think the electorate wants to see we’ve moved on, and we won’t look as if we’ve moved on if we appoint an heir.

You mean David Miliband?
You can say that, I’m not.

Are you in it to win it, or are you looking for a shadow cabinet role?
I’m absolutely in it to win it. It’s interesting that the people who knew least about me were most quizzical about the candidacy, and have been casting around for another reason. No – I’m in it to win it.

Who will your second preference go to?
I don’t have a second preference. They’re all wonderful.

If, hypothetically, we say you don’t win, what will be the biggest thing you take away from the campaign?
Win, lose or draw, I’m doing this for the same reason I came into politics in the first place – to advance ideas and give a voice to the voiceless, and to try to help shape the party. That’s what I’ve always done. The leadership campaign has offered me a particular platform. I plan to win but, if I don’t win, I will continue to campaign on issues I have always campaigned on – issues to do with equality, diversity, justice.

Would you take a shadow cabinet role if it were offered?
I’m not thinking about that, I’m thinking about winning this campaign.

Have you read Tony Blair’s book, A Journey?
No, I haven’t had a chance to yet. I dare say I’ll get round to it, but I don’t think it has anything new. All you need to know about it you can see from the interviews where he’s increasingly a little delusional. Even this idea that he can affect the leadership race, I don’t think that he fully understood that him attempting to anoint David Miliband was counter-productive as far as most party members were concerned.

Some people say they’re more disgusted with what he’s done outside Downing Street than what he did when he was prime minister. Do you agree?
I think that what’s happened since he was Prime Minister is that he no longer has the constraints of being in the Labour Party. What he’s said in interviews is very interesting – that going against fox hunting was a mistake, that he supports the coalition’s public-sector cuts, and that he didn’t want too much state interference in banking. This was always Tony Blair. From the first time I saw him in close quarters, nothing he’s done since has surprised me.

Have you enjoyed the leadership campaign?
It’s been really interesting. It’s been really challenging, because I haven’t had the budget the others have had, but it’s been really interesting and I’m very glad I did it.

Finally, did you get a summer holiday?
Not really. But I was campaigning in Scotland, and I managed to catch some of the Edinburgh Festival, and that was fantastic.