With Andy Burnham not two weeks into his tenure as PM, the new Labour leader has restored the whip to both Diane Abbott and Joani Reid. Both MPs went through independent disciplinary processes.
Starmer suspended Abbott for a second time back in July 2025. Both suspensions related to a 2023 letter in the Observer, in which Abbott claimed that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people experience prejudice but not racism. The letter triggered the first suspension, and her defence of that opinion in a 2025 interview triggered the second.
Reid, for her part, relinquished the whip voluntarily in March 2026. The Metropolitan Police had arrested her husband, David Taylor, on suspicion of assisting the Chinese foreign intelligence service.
A spokesperson for the Labour Party said:
The Labour party expects the highest standards from our elected representatives and party members. The party assesses any alleged breaches of such standards independently of the leadership and political interference.
Following a process conducted under Labour party rules and approved by the independent review board, Diane Abbott and Joani Reid have been readmitted to the Labour party and have had the Labour whip restored in the House of Commons.
Diane Abbott has also apologised following the independent process coming to an end. All Labour elected representatives must be mindful at all times of their platform and the responsibilities that come with that privilege.
Diane Abbott
In her 2023 Observer letter, Abbott wrote that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people:
undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
Abbott later withdrew her statement and apologised, stating that:
there is no excuse, and I wish to apologise for any anguish caused.
Racism takes many forms, and it is completely undeniable that Jewish people have suffered its monstrous effects, as have Irish people, Travellers and many others.
However, Starmer suspended the Hackney MP pending an investigation. The Labour Party only restored the whip to Abbott in May 2024. Around 40 prominent Black public figures signed an open letter calling Labour’s mishandling of Abbott’s case an example:
of the systemic racism highlighted in the Forde report on factionalism in the Labour party commissioned by Starmer himself.
However, in a July 2025 interview BBC Radio 4’s James Naughtie asked Abbott if she regrets the comments that triggered her first suspension. She replied:
No, not at all. Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism, because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street. You don’t know. You don’t know unless you stop to speak to them or you’re in a meeting with them. But if you see a black person walking down the street, you see straight away that they’re black. There are different types of racism.
Keir Starmer once again rushed to suspend Abbott over her remarks. Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti, among others, highlighted that Starmer had no right to criticise Abbott after the naked racism of his infamous ‘Island of Strangers’ speech.
Joani Reid
Joani Reid was first elected to Parliament in 2024, as MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven. Her husband, David Taylor, was a former special adviser to the Welsh government.
Reid served as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism. Notably, when over 80 MPs signed a letter calling for sanctions on Israel, Reid’s name was absent.
When the Supreme Court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ under the Equality Act referred to sex-assigned-at-birth, Reid wrote in Labour List to celebrate. She called trans rights campaigners a “men’s rights movement”, and accused trans people of promoting homophobia and “dangerous body dysphoria”.
She also accused the Scottish National Party of having:
turned Glasgow into a sanctuary for asylum seekers through their own virtue-signalling policies.
We know that modern Labour is a racist cesspit, but ‘sanctuary’ is the literal definition of ‘asylum’. That’s the whole fucking point of the thing.
Back in March 2026, the Metropolitan Police arrested David Taylor and two other men, citing violations of Section 3 of the National Security Act 2023. The arrests, supported by Welsh and Scottish branches of Counter Terrorism Policing, related to Chinese intelligence services.
Reid released a statement holding that:
I have never seen anything to make me suspect my husband has broken any law.
I am not part of my husband’s business activities and neither I nor my children are part of this investigation, and we should not be treated by media organisations as though we are. Above all I expect media organisations to respect my children’s privacy.
The Guardian reported its understanding that Reid “has never been party to the police investigations” into Taylor, according to Labour Party sources.
Welcome back to the Mother of the House
The Canary has previously reported that Burnham abandoned his support for trans rights on the Makerfield campaign trail. The former Manchester mayor was once a vocal critic of ‘single-sex’ restrictions on bathrooms.
However, back in May, he U-turned to back the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new deeply transphobic code of practice.
Likewise, despite his pledge to “put pressure on the Israeli government”, he’s still stopped short of naming Israel’s actions as genocide. He’s also voiced support for Shabana Mahmood’s racist immigration ‘reforms’, demonstrating that his views on asylum seekers align far too closely with Reid’s deplorable statement.
As such, we see Burnham’s reinstatement of the whip to Joani Reid as a demonstration that he fully intends to continue down the path of right-wing Labour politics. At the very best, he clearly doesn’t consider Reid’s out-and-out bigotry a deal-breaker, and that bodes ill for all marginalised people under a Burnham premiership.
Our congratulations to Diane Abbott, mother of the house, on getting her place back in party she helped build.
Featured image via the Canary
By Grace
