In 1996, a youthful Andrew Marr (at the time he was either the editor or political editor of The Independent) interviewed Noam Chomsky, who spoke about the narrow range of opinions that are permitted within the mainstream media. Marr protested against any notion that he was self-censoring to please establishment paymasters, to which Chomsky famously replied:
"I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
There could hardly be a more conclusive demonstration of the truth of those words than the behaviour of the mainstream media over recent days, which has failed to reflect the common sense view held by millions of people that what Diane Abbott said was just a statement of the obvious, and that of course people whose skin colour is not white will experience racism very differently from ethnic groups that are not visually distinguishable from the majority of the population. Instead we've been gaslighted, in a way that looks highly organised but as Chomsky said probably isn't, by a tiny and wildly unrepresentative commentator class that wants us to swallow the contrived, convoluted and downright weird narrative that by refusing to agree that white ethnic groups experience racism just as severely as non-white groups, Abbott must have been saying that Jewish people do not experience racism at all, and that she is therefore anti-semitic and her suspension from the Labour parliamentary group is natural and unavoidable.
My blogpost the other day about the implications of all this for anti-Scottish racism was tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless the point is a genuine one. Anyone who has ever raised the issue will know that the response is generally that Scots are not a race requiring protection, because we are a 'mongrel people' descended from Britons, Gaels, Picts, pre-Celtic populations, Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, Norman French, Flemings and others. It's also usually pointed out that we look no different from anyone else in the UK and that it's ludicrous or offensive to suggest that we suffer from a racism problem that is in any way equivalent to the racism subjected to the Afro-Caribbean or South Asian populations. And yet all of those objections are identical to Diane Abbott's comments, which we are being invited to regard as repugnant and unsayable and as having no place in our politics. Unless our commentator class intend to be hypocrites, it is therefore totally unacceptable from this point on to sneer at or even question the idea that Scots require protection from racism in exactly the same way as any other ethnic group - including Jewish people, who just like Scots are usually white and have a mixed ancestry. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, have mixed European and Middle Eastern ancestry, with the European component being predominant.
If anyone is tempted to say that any of this trivialises anti-semitism, well I'm sorry but you're not allowed to say that. It means you believe in hierarchies of racism, that you are an anti-Scottish bigot, and that you have no place whatsoever in civilised society.
Which of course is ludicrous, but these are the problems that kick in when you properly jump the shark and try to mess with people's sense of reality. To look at the issue of hierarchies of racism more seriously, let me return to the story I recounted on Twitter about when I was on a bus with a group of lads who were singing violent anti-Catholic songs. I didn't feel under any sense of threat, for the obvious reason that they had no possible way of telling that I was a Catholic just by looking at me. I looked exactly like them. That is not a luxury open to black people on a bus full of racists.
Does that mean anti-Catholic or anti-Irish bigotry isn't or can't be a problem in Scotland? Well, no it doesn't, and in fact my dad apparently reckoned he was denied a place in Glasgow School of Art because he was a Catholic. I've no idea what led him to believe that, but he wasn't usually given to paranoia so I presume there must have been some substance to it. But that kind of discrimination is only possible once you actually see someone's surname and the name of their former school on a piece of paper. That creates a higher bar that protects white Catholics from the kind of instant racism that Diane Abbott might suffer from on the streets. For someone like Robert Peston or Rachel Riley, the level of protection is probably higher still, because there might well be nothing in their CVs at all that would indicate a Jewish background. (Incidentally, that also gives them higher protection against discrimination than Scots in England, who are usually instantly identifiable, not by their appearance but by their accents.)
Of all the gaslighting commentators, the most preposterous of the lot has been James O'Brien, who used method acting to make himself look really angry, and said that Diane Abbott must either be a liar or an idiot - there was no "third path". I presume what he meant was that her new comments indicated that her previous apology for causing offence to Jewish people the first time around must not have been genuine. Well, here's a third path for you, James - she made that apology under intolerable pressure and in the midst of a hysterical McCarthyite atmosphere. If you think politicians under that kind of pressure don't sometimes have to tack a little and say things they shouldn't really have to say or that they may not entirely believe, then you don't understand politics and you're not living in the real world. It also means you're a hypocrite, because you were one of the people who helped cultivate that McCarthyite atmosphere in the first place, and thus practically compelled certain forms of speech from Diane Abbott.🤔Peston thinks this is a tough one! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/rD6De9UImR
— The Daily Politik (@DailyPolitik) July 19, 2025
Do you know what a commentator class plugged in to the real world would be saying right now? They'd be hammering Starmer for totally losing the plot, and they'd regard his reasons for suspending Abbott as obviously risible. They'd point out that he and his advisers have clearly learnt nothing from the catastrophic error of suspending her for such a long period before, and would question whether someone with such poor political judgement can survive as Prime Minister much longer.
