Abbott: My views on the IRA? They change like my hairstyle
DIANE Abbott came under fire yesterday after comparing her changing support for the IRA to choosing a hairstyle.
The veteran Labour MP refused four opportunities to voice regret for saying at the height of the Republican bombing campaign that “every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us”, saying instead only that she had “moved on”.
She is on course to be Home Secretary if Labour wins the election on June 8, a job she claimed her three years as a graduate trainee in the department helped qualify her to do.
She also defended once voting against banning terror groups, such as Al Qaeda, as some on the list were “dissidents” rather than terrorists.
Muddled
It was the latest interview given by the shadow home secretary to plunge many Labour election activists into despair. The leadership was urged earlier this month to keep her off the air after her disastrously muddled interview on the police.
Ms Abbott was grilled by BBC One’s Andrew Marr over her beliefs about a range of security issues. She first tried to dismiss her 1984 comment hailing defeats of “the British state” as coming from a now-defunct newspaper.
Pressed to say if she now regretted her support for the IRA in the 1980s, she said: “It was 34 years ago. I had a rather splendid afro at the time. I don’t have the same hairstyle and I don’t have the same views, and it’s 34 years on. The hairstyle has gone and some of the views have gone.”
Asked again if she regretted the remark, she said: “The hairstyle’s gone, the views have gone. We’ve all moved on in 34 years. Haven’t you, Andrew?”
Asked a third time if she felt regret, she asked to know what specifically she was being asked to take back. Told it was her comments about defeating the state and how IRA violence was caused by the British military presence in Northern Ireland, she repeated it was “34 years ago, I’ve moved on”.
She said the same when Mr Marr read out the exact quotation. Later, Home Secretary Amber Rudd condemned her remarks.
“What I’d say to Diane Abbott is I have changed my hairstyle a few times in 34 years as well, but I have not changed my view about how we keep the British public safe,” she said.
When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is under pressure over his own past closeness to Sinn Fein and the IRA, was asked about his exgirlfriend’s comments, he told ITV’s Peston On Sunday: “Diane’s hairstyle is a matter for Diane.”
Pressed further, he said: “We learnt, all of us, a lot from the whole experience of Northern Ireland. Remember what it was like in the late 70s and early 80s, the military presence all over Northern Ireland, the huge divide between communities, the idea that there’d be a military solution when we knew there wouldn’t be.”
Earlier, Ms Abbott said she no longer backed axing MI5, as it had been reformed since 1989 when she signed a parliamentary motion condemning “conspiratorial” groups.
She also backed the police having a DNA database of criminals. After claims she said in 2010 that guilty people’s DNA should not be stored, she said she did not know where the story came from but she had been thinking of a local child having their sample taken despite committing no crime.
She defended voting against a string of anti-terror laws, saying Tories including Theresa May and Brexit Secretary David Davis had sometimes joined her and Mr Corbyn in the voting lobbies as they shared concerns. Asked about voting shortly before the 9/11 attacks on America against banning Al Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups, she said it was because some on the list were “dissidents in their country of origin”, not terrorists.
Asked why she should be trusted to run the Home Office, the 63-year-old said: “I think there’s something to be said for a Home Secretary who’s actually worked in the Home Office. I worked in the Home Office for nearly three years as a graduate trainee and I know how it works from the inside.”
Her history of campaigning as a young woman “with diverse communities” and her 30 years’ experience as an MP seeing how political decisions “impact on ordinary people” were also good qualifications, she said.