Diane Abbott, the MP for Hackney North & Stoke Newington, has been readmitted to the Labour Party following a suspension in relation to antisemitism.
Ms Abbott has repeatedly courted controversy in relation to Jews and was twice suspended from Labour.
First, she was suspended over a 2023 letter to The Observer in which she claimed that Jewish people suffer prejudice similar to red-headed people but not racism.
Labour subsequently withdrew the whip from Ms Abbott, pending an investigation, although she remained sitting as an independent MP. She was suspended for a year and apologised.
She had the whip restored in May 2024, ahead of the July General Election. In the election, Ms Abbott retained her seat in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
Then in a 2025 interview with the BBC, she said that she did not regret her remarks and was suspended again, also having referred in a tweet to the Israel Defence Forces as the “Jewish Defence Force”.
Now, apparently following a “process conducted under Labour Party rules and approved by the independent review board”, she has been readmitted once again, with a ‘formal warning’.
Ms Abbott has previously refused to condemn antisemitism in the Labour Party.
In 2016, she said Labour’s antisemitism problem was a “smear.” In 2017, she said she was proud of the Party’s record on combatting antisemitism and refused to comment on whether Ken Livingstone should be expelled. More broadly, in 2024 she organised a ‘Stand Up to Racism’ protest, where some protestors apparently shouted “Palestine is Arab” and “Israel is Arab.”
A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This really is pathetic. Labour has given Diane Abbott a ‘formal warning’ – but it’s a warning against what? Not to repeat the same behaviour for the umpteenth time? She still has pinned to her Twitter profile an interview saying she has no regrets about the very incident that got her suspended in the first place. A warning serves little purpose to someone so brazen.
“Not only does she herself represent a throwback to the Corbyn years when she was so prominent – the period when Labour became institutionally antisemitic according to the EHRC – but so does her readmission to the Party, whose processes were widely viewed as unfit for purpose. We were supposed to be past all this, but it seems like the moment Sir Keir Starmer makes way for Andy Burnham, Labour risks turning the clock back. Her readmission is a bad omen.”
