Diane Abbott: The Left needs to understand that identity politics will never challenge power structures - Bill Carmichael

Her father was a welder and her mother a nurse, and she went on from a state grammar school to study history at Cambridge, before working as a civil servant and a journalist and then entering politics, eventually reaching the heights of Shadow Home Secretary under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in 2016.

Regardless of whether you agree with her far left politics or not, it is undoubtedly an impressive CV, and one of which she, her family and her party can be immensely proud.

In fact I’m proud of Diane too; she is a working class woman from a disadvantaged background who has gone on to achieve great success in her chosen field.

And predictably and sadly, as a black person and female, she has come in for a huge amount of vile abuse that shames us all. By all means criticise her politics, but leave the woman alone.

I am certainly not going to add to that abuse. But equally, if we go easy on her when she fouls up, simply because of her ethnicity or her sex, we are in danger of treating her as something less than equal, so I don’t want to do that either.

And last weekend she fouled up massively, writing an appalling letter to the Observer newspaper, that in effect downplayed the suffering of the Jewish people and the reality of the Holocaust.

In it, whether she intended this or not, she appeared to equate the suffering of Jewish people - six million of whom were slaughtered by the Nazis - with the sort of teasing dished out to redheaded people in the school playground.

She wrote that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people, and “white people such as redheads” experience prejudice but “they are not all their lives subject to racism”.

The big, glaring gap in her analysis was any understanding of the reality of Jewish experience in mainland Europe in living memory, and the attempted genocide of an entire people based on race.

To her credit she quickly explained the letter was a first draft sent in error (although she has not revealed any later edited version), and she then went on to say she was completely disassociating herself from her own views. Very strange.

It wasn’t enough to placate Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer who condemned her for anti-semitism, and very quickly the Labour whip was withdrawn, so she now has to sit as an independent MP.

To be fair to Ms Abbott her views are certainly not unusual on the far left, where British Jews are seen as somehow rich and privileged, regardless of their background, and are blamed for any sins committed by the Israeli government.

This is clearly wrong - just as blaming British Muslims for the evils committed by the governments of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan would be equally unfair.

But the Abbott affair reveals something else about the way the Left in the UK, and more widely in the western world, has been completely derailed by divisive identity politics

In the past socialists would try to minimise differences between ethnic and demographic groups and instead emphasise a common struggle against the boss class.

That type of Marxist class-based materialism has now been largely replaced with identity politics, which instead emphasises the differences between various groups.

Instead of uniting people, the modern left seeks to divide them, and place them into different boxes, which are then ranked according to the scale of their oppression.

And as Ms Abbott demonstrated, this leads to an absurd hierarchy of desperately competitive victimhood, with each minority group shouting against one another that “we’re more oppressed than you!”.

Victimhood today carries such social prestige that everyone - even white people whose lives are comfortable and privileged - wants to play at being the victim.

You get extra points if you are on the intersection of more than one vector of oppression, for example being black and female, like Ms Abbott.

The problem is this promotes a heightened subjective individualism that completely undermines the virtues of the old fashioned Left - universalism, solidarity and comradeship.

The Left needs to understand that identity politics is divisive and ineffective and will never be capable of challenging the structures of power.