Stephen Bush has just reviewed some new books about what it means to be black.
I’ve merely skimmed but am happy to report that he’s made short work of Tomiwa Owolade.
Tomiwa wrote an article in the Guardian that led to Diane Abbott effectively being kicked out of the Labour Party.
The whole thing felt like a McCarthyite operation.
Yes maybe Diane Abbott worded herself extremely clumsily, but you’d have to be Keir Starmer himself to pretend she didn’t have a point.
I bumped into Tomiwa in the bookshop recently. He certainly didn’t lament Diane Abbott’s expulsion. I told him that This is Not America, the title of his book, was exactly Enoch Powell’s point when he made the Rivers of Blood speech following Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968. Powell said that race riots in the US were the norm and that this was what he saw happening in the UK if immigration wasn’t stopped. Tomiwa didn’t appear to understand what I was saying, but he was very nice and I left him alone.
This is a recent video publicising Tomiwa’s book at the London School of Economics. Perhaps I’m being unfair on him, I’m sure he makes some good points.
I’ve just watched some of the Q&A, and have linked to the inevitable Diane Abbott / antisemitism question at the end.
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