A Woman Like Me
By Diane Abbott
Published by Penguin Books, 2025, £10-99
Reviewed by Paul Kershaw
Responding to the news earlier this year that some of the suspended Labour MPs who stood out against the Labour leadership were not being reinstated Diane Abbott posted on social media that this was a badge of honour.
She has been in the news warning that Labour’s move to the right opens the way for the far right, criticising Labour’s failure to counter the anti-immigrant drift of public discussion and defending the WASPI women, who Labour had promised pension justice but then abandoned. For powerful reasons, Britain’s first black female MP is seen as an inspiration by many.
She has been subject to a mountain of racist and sexist abuse, not only from social media trolls but by leading establishment figures aligned to both the Tories and Labour.
For a few years, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Dianne Abbott was on the Labour front bench. But there has been a ruthless counter-revolution in Labour – against Corbyn, his supporters, and his ideas – and Abbott says Starmer has treated her as a ‘non-person’. For a period, she was suspended – for alleged antisemitism – and it appeared she would not be able to stand again for Labour. However, the leadership relented following an outcry shortly before the last election, and this period falls after the end of the narrative of her book.
The memoir traces Diane Abbott’s life from her earliest years in working-class Paddington, where she describes the tight-knit vibrant Caribbean community and also the threat of violence from racist gangs. At school, a teacher assumed wrongly that one of her first essays at grammar school must have been plagiarism because of its wide vocabulary. When she asked to try for the entrance to Cambridge University, a teacher told her she didn’t think she was up to it. Diane replied that she thought that she was – and that was what mattered.
At Newnham College Cambridge she was one of only two black women in that year’s intake. When she attended a May Ball one of the students assumed she was there to work in the kitchen. On graduating she joined a civil service fast-track promotion scheme in the Home Office which she came to see as deeply opposed to civil liberties. It was partly in response to this that she was moved to join the Labour Party.
It is admirable that she remains clearly on the left of the party when others have caved in to the establishment. This memoir demonstrates her personal determination, and willingness to stand her ground. But for readers looking for political insights and possible lessons, there are serious omissions and political limitations.
In 1978 she attended her first Labour Party conference and “loved the political intrigue”, “loved being able to observe the deal-making late at night in the back bars of conference hotels”. But the historically important political debates at that conference are not discussed.
In contrast to the Labour Party conferences today, then there were genuine debates on the floor of conference, which was seen as a parliament of the working class. A young delegate from Wavertree Labour Party, a Militant supporter, successfully moved a resolution rejecting the Labour government’s 5% limit on pay increases – effectively rejecting the centrepiece of its economic policy. This debate foreshadowed huge strikes, a deep crisis for the right-wing leadership of Labour, as well as for left trade union leaders who ended up supporting pay restraint.
Diane moved back to Paddington and from 1982 served as councillor for Harrow Road ward. A key local issue was the closure of the hospital in which Diane was born, although this is not covered in her book. The local Labour Party backed the campaign to prevent closure after debating a paper presented by Militant supporters. This was a period in which grassroots activists were debating and coming to terms with the need to fight against the Labour government which had been elected in 1974 on a manifesto calling for a “fundamental and irreversible transfer of wealth in favour of working people and their families”.
There was an epic struggle to keep the hospital open involving an occupation and work-in in 1981, four years after the closure plan had been announced. Notably, many of the leading trade unionists involved were black. The struggle was supported by Tony Benn and other left Labour figures, illustrating how a process of radicalisation within the working class was reflected in the growth of the left.
Diane deals with the struggle to defeat Thatcher’s poll tax from a limited parliamentary standpoint: observing that after the huge demonstration in March 1990, for example, she could “feel the buzz” and that Thatcher’s opponents in the Tory party seemed emboldened. But there were crucial tactical debates and a huge grassroots mobilisation in which the Militant played a central role that go unmentioned.
The defeat of the poll tax was the key factor that finished off Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the ‘iron lady’ – in 1991. An estimated eighteen million people were involved in the non-payment campaign. Some MPs, including Militant supporters such as Dave Nellist, stood in solidarity with this movement and refused to pay. Militant-supporting MP Terry Fields was jailed. Others, including Diane, paid while conducting a parliamentary opposition.
Another absence from her account of the 1980s is the struggle over rate-capping and council cuts, even though this was a central issue within Labour. Dawn Butler MP caused consternation among the Labour right at the 2018 Labour conference during Corbyn’s leadership by referring favourably to Liverpool city council’s struggle in the 1980s and its slogan, ‘better to break the law than the poor’. Although numerous left-led councils committed to refuse to implement cuts almost all backed down, leaving Liverpool and Lambeth alone.
There were real achievements in terms of jobs and services. The Militant-led socialist Liverpool council built more council homes than the rest of the country put together between 1983 and 1987. Although Diane’s time as Lambeth’s press officer between 1986 and 1987 is described, the memoir is silent on the issues of the rate-capping struggle and the fact that so many councils backed down.
Rather than encouraging councils to refuse to implement austerity, early in his leadership Jeremy Corbyn and the shadow chancellor John McDonnell wrote to Labour councillors instructing them to set a balanced budget. Inevitably, this was interpreted as an instruction to continue to ram through cuts. In fact, those arguing for councils to resist, made the case for them to set legal balanced budgets based on prudential borrowing, but the effect was to miss a huge opportunity to fight austerity. Again, this question is not considered.
Referring to the right-wing coup against Corbyn, Diane comments that some elements of the party no longer believed in it as a “broad church”. That is a huge understatement. The right was committed to a fight to the death to keep control of the party.
In a chapter headed ‘What Next’ she says that it is sad that a young person she meets believes that the Labour and Conservative parties have moved so close that she was uncertain which to join. As she says, it would never have occurred to her to join any other party despite her many reservations about Labour. This appears to be an acknowledgement of the fundamental changes that Labour has undergone, yet she says she will always belong to the Labour Party ‘at heart’.
She surveys the increasing distance between the working class and their parliamentary representatives, and points to Starmer’s silence on race and education and the wider prospect of ongoing cuts. As she puts it: “Working people have been bled dry over more than a decade of austerity under the Tories, yet the Labour leadership is emphatic there will be no new money for services that poor people depend on”. But even now, after the publication of this book, and as the crisis has deepened under Labour, Abbott advises young people to join Labour.
She points out that a vacuum on the left opens the way for the far right but has no strategy for filling it from the left. Instead of clinging to Starmer’s Labour she should join Corbyn, the independent MPs and the suspended Labour MPs to give workers’ struggles a voice in parliament. Linked to the unions this would give a pointer to what is possible in terms of workers’ political representation beyond Labour.