Andrew Marr's interview today with Diane Abbott was extraordinary.
As you can see from the video, it's already being described as a 'car crash interview', but aren't all interviews with Diane Abbott 'car crash interviews' these days?
And to have a 'car crash interview' at the hands of Andrew Marr? That takes some doing, but Diane managed it effortlessly today.
It never seems to get to her though, does it? And I think that's because she comes to each and every interview clad in seemingly-impenetrable armour: the armour of her own supremely-confident stupidity.
All credit to Andrew then for at least trying to penetrate her armour today.
But, alas, Andrew Marr is no Andrew Neil and he, very evidently, found it extremely frustrating.
Her armour seemed newly coated with an extra layer of ultra-confident doltishness today, so there was no way he was going to dismount her from her high horse of total and utter ignorance. (No offence!)
She's right, though, that this is just being used as an excuse to get rid of Corybn. All these problems with the likes of Livingstone and Naz Shah and the others who have been expelled existed before he became leader. There's a reason why nobody seems to be defending Labour by saying, "Hey, we had a Jew as leader for the last few years. How would that have happened if Labour had a problem with Jews?" You'd think that would be an obvious line of defense, no?
ReplyDeleteBut Abbott agreed with Marr's suggestion that it's understandable for all Jews everywhere to face consequences for anger at Israel, which is why she went on to say that more work needs to be done to see the Israeli/Palestinian situation must be resolved. It's anti-Semitism to accept that Jews must face a backlash but the first thing society needs to do after an act of Islamic terrorism is to ensure there is no anti-Muslim backlash.
Labour's not doing that, the BBC isn't saying it, and they're bringing in Shami to investigate and make recommendations on combating racism and Islamophobia at the same time. There's a problem, and it's not just Corbyn.
She does have a point about it being used as an excuse by Labour in-fighters who don't really care about anti-Semitism - or at least, as per Peter Hitchens, don't care enough to confront the issue of Muslim anti-Semitism (the mammoth in the room) head on.
Deletehttp://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/05/everyone-howls-at-batty-ken-but-they-wouldnt-dare-tackle-racist-muslims.html
Another curious thing is that the AM Show posts transcripts of all the main political interviews. They posted all of today's quickly. All except one. It's been over five hours now since transcripts of the interviews with Mark Regev, Nigel Farage, Leanne Wood and Nicola Sturgeon were posted at the Marr Show website. There's still no transcript of the Diane Abbott interview yet. Which is odd.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3hshxFhHM4dKd3px6Q3NzRF/transcripts