Shadow health secretary Diane Abbott has been beating her left-wing drum loudly of late.
First, an article appeared on the Left Foot Forward website under her byline in which she praises her ex-squeeze Jeremy Corbyn and rails against economic inequality.
RT if you agree @jeremycorbyn ’s vision can win a general election & #RebuildAndTransform Britain.
Read my piece at https://t.co/x7p9H6VIr7
— Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) August 12, 2016
This excerpt leapt off the page:
“We live in the most unequal country in the EU. The growth in inequality here is of such a scale that it is helping to drive increasing inequality across Europe as a whole. It is utterly staggering. And yet it’s a fact which probably many of my constituents, for example, are somehow not surprised at. Here in our capital city gleaming glass towers overlook some of the most deprived areas of the country. Social and affordable homes are sacrificed for flats and houses which only the wealthiest can afford.”
According to Land Registry records accessed by Heat Street, Abbott bought the Victorian terrace house where she lives in Hackney for £325,000 in April 2001. At the time, she took out a mortgage with Spanish bank Santander.
Similar properties in her road now sell for £1.325 million, meaning that Abbott has probably made a paper profit of about £65,000 per year through buying the house.
Through luck and 29 years as an MP she has got herself into this situation and good luck to her – but for her to pretend she is anything other than a thriving member of the metropolitan middle-class elite would be absurd.
On top of her MP’s salary, now £74,000, she has also been able to take advantage of the House of Commons “London weighting” allowance, worth thousands more each year.
And she’s made hundreds of thousands through media activities and giving speeches.
The most lucrative of these probably came in 2006 when she was invited to appear in BBC1 series Play It Again. In this programme she took piano lessons paid for by licence fee payers. As part of the show, Abbott was flown to a piano school in France for a week. She also spent a week visiting relations in Jamaica to show off her (limited) skills. All expenses were paid. On top of this she picked up an eye-watering £14,326 appearance fee.
Surely all of this – career, housing, ability to earn large sums of money – puts her in the very bracket (“wealthiest”) she criticises in order to make political capital.
Then, on Tuesday, Abbott proclaimed that she would be speaking at a Labour Party anti-austerity event in October:
Join @HackneyAbbott @aliceperryuk @SteveT_Unite +more at the 3rd Labour Assembly | 22nd Oct https://t.co/6WjCjgNTSN pic.twitter.com/8wjrXL5Tfs
— Labour Assembly (@labourassembly) August 16, 2016
Abbott against austerity?
As Heat Street revealed this week, she thought nothing of spending 85% (£30,000) of her own education charity’s precious annual income in a single night throwing a party at the House of Commons. Documents show £12,539 of the total went on hiring three rooms and catering for 150 guests, and another £8,360 went on “production, sound and lighting” costs.
Does Abbott know the meaning of the word ‘austerity’?
