Prof Karen Ross
Professor of Gender and Media at Newcastle University. Her teaching and research are focused on issues of gender/news/politics and a developing interest in gendered ageism. She has published numerous papers and books on these topics as well as developing teaching resources around gender justice in the media.
Email: Karen.Ross@newcastle.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 4: Parties and the campaign
34. A changed but over-staged Labour Party and the political marketing weaknesses behind Starmer’s win (Prof Jennifer Lees-Marshment)
35. To leaflet or not to leaflet? The question of election leafleting in Sunderland Central (Prof Angela Smith, Dr Mike Pearce)
36. Beyond ‘my dad was a toolmaker’: what it’s really like to be working class in parliament (Dr Vladimir Bortun)
37. The unforced errors of foolish men: gender, race and the calculus of harm (Prof Karen Ross)
38. Election 2024 and rise of Reform UK: the beginning of the end of the Conservatives? (Dr Anthony Ridge-Newman)
39. The Weakening of the Blue Wall (Prof Pete Dorey)
40. The Conservative party, 1832-2024: an obituary (Dr Mark Garnett)
41. Bouncing back: the Liberal Democrat campaign (Prof Peter Sloman)
42. The Greens: riding two horses (Prof Neil Carter, Dr Mitya Pearson)
43. Party organisations and the campaign (Dr Danny Rye)
44. Local campaign messaging at the 2024 General Election (Dr Siim Trumm, Prof Caitlin Milazzo)
45. The value of getting personal: reflecting upon the role of personal branding in the General Election (Dr Jenny Lloyd)
46. Which constituencies were visited by each party leader and what this told us about their campaigns (Dr Hannah Bunting, Joely Santa Cruz)
47. The culture wars and the 2024 General Election campaign (Prof John Steel)
48. “Rishi’s D-Day Disaster”: authority, leadership and British military commemoration (Dr Natalie Jester)
49. Party election broadcasts: the quest for authenticity (Dr Vincent Campbell)
The day after the general election was called, I began to make a few notes on my phone as I listened to, and watched, the news but nearly a week in, I was feeling a bit glum because I’d barely scribbled fifty words. But then *Dianegate* exploded onto the news agenda and I knew I’d found ‘the one’ or indeed ‘the two’, as it turned out. The political treatment of Diane Abbott and Fazia Shaheen manifested a casual if perhaps unintentional (a generous interpretation) gendered racism which masqueraded as an ethics of propriety which mostly went unchallenged by the mainstream media.
It started with an article published as an ‘exclusive’ on the front page of The Times on Tuesday 28th May, where those notoriously slippery ‘Labour sources’ said that Abbott was going to be barred from standing as a Labour candidate. Much was made (then and indeed in subsequent news items) of the fact that Abbott was Britain’s first black woman MP with a 37-year record of serving her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Her fall from grace was clearly news to Abbott who took to X the following day, writing that while she was obviously happy to have the whip restored, she was also, and showing considerable restraint in the circumstances, “dismayed” to hear reports that she had been barred from standing. On the same day, Fazia Shaheen, who had been selected to stand as Labour’s candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green two years earlier, had received an email from the Party saying that she had been de-selected and she then appeared on Newsnight that evening to tell her story.
What I found rather perplexing was that almost all news stories focused on their shared political leaning, suggesting that this was the reason for their dismissal, that they were casualties of ‘the purge of the Left’. To be sure, Shaheen did mention being a socialist (as a ‘bad’ thing) several times in her Newsnight interview but she also talked about her experiences of Islamophobia both within and outside of the Party. Although Abbott resisted making a similar point about racism, she has received more hate-fuelled abuse than any other politician, ever, most recently from billionaire Tory donor Frank Hester with his vile remarks. He subsequently apologised, albeit saying that his comments did not relate to her race or gender. Er, what???? Notwithstanding that news stories which lead with clickbait headlines and interviews which can be clipped into micro-content for the socials are the mode du jour, this lack of journalistic nuance is a worry.
Framing the Abbott-Shaheen debacle as merely a clash of political ideology meant that day after day, Starmer had to talk about the primacy of the NEC to approve candidates – it’s nothing to do with me, guv – while so many other points which are important individually but even more so collectively, were mostly ignored. One is that Abbott and Shaheen are both women. Two is that they are both women of colour. Three is that they were both accused of a form of reverse racism – in both cases by expressing or liking sentiments construed as antisemitic – while no acknowledgement was given of their own embodied experiences of actual racism. Four is that unnamed sources (young white men?) briefed against them, leaking their scoops to the media before telling candidates themselves. Five is that their very embodiment of intersectionality, that is, their race, sex and class position (class here standing as a proxy for political leaning) was entirely missing from news narratives.
As could be expected, supporters of both Abbott and Shaheen were quick to organise, Abbott speaking her truth to power at a rally on 30th May and Shaheen doing the same the day after. Unsurprisingly, prominent women of colour on both sides of the political spectrum wasted no time in using their media platforms to articulate their disgust. Baroness (Sayeeda) Warsi used her column in inews to say that “Diane’s treatment at the hands of some in the Labour Party has been difficult to watch” (29th May). Appearing on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on 2nd June, Baroness (Shami) Chakrabarti described a “…. sordid week of unauthorised anonymous briefings by overgrown schoolboys in suits with their feet under the table…”
On 31st May, Sir Keir was finally bounced, not least by Angela Rayner’s very public endorsement, into saying that “trailblazer” Abbott could stand for Labour. Meanwhile, Shaheen was formally replaced as PPC by Shama Tatler: call me an old cynic and absolutely no disrespect to Tatler, but replacing one Asian woman with another seemed more than a little calculated. On 5th June, Shaheen resigned from the Labour Party and launched her campaign to stand as an independent. On 6 July, Abbott was returned as an MP but Shaheen was not although she gave Iain Duncan-Smith and Tatler a good run for their money. While it most definitely was not the Sun wot won (and/ or lost it) for them, again, most news outlets did very little to help either of them. Plus ça change, sad emoji face.
