Diane Abbott
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2008
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the MP Diane Abbott. She was the first black woman to become a Member of Parliament and, after her election in 1987, she said she would find herself sitting on the green benches of the House of Commons wondering whether she was really entitled to be there.
It was not the first British institution she'd cracked - she had already propelled herself through Cambridge and then into the Civil Service. But she has not always sat comfortably inside these great bastions of the establishment; she says Gordon Brown booted her off an influential committee because she asked too many questions; she was a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq and she attracted a good deal of controversy when she decided to send her son to private school.
After more than 20 years in the House of Commons, she is, she says, happy for people to judge her on what she has done and what she has stood up for.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2008. My castaway this week is the MP Diane Abbott. The first black woman to be elected to Westminster, she's been the Labour MP for |
| 0:34.2 | hackney for more than 20 years. From an ordinary working-class background, she's |
| 0:38.7 | consciously propelled herself into the heart of the establishment. Cambridge, the civil service and Parliament have been |
| 0:45.0 | her surroundings. Yet she hasn't always been comfortable there. She says Gordon Brown booted |
| 0:49.8 | her off an influential committee for asking too many questions and she was an |
| 0:53.6 | outspoken critic of the Iraq war. My life has been a search for power she says and |
| 0:59.1 | every time I get to where it's supposed to be I've been told it's just gone. |
| 1:04.0 | Interesting that you are as up front using the word power. |
| 1:07.5 | A lot of politicians don't use the word power. |
| 1:09.5 | They say things like I want to make a difference. |
| 1:12.0 | It's always been about power has it? |
| 1:14.0 | It's never been about personal power but it's always been about change and in order to really change society you have to, you know, be where the leaders of power are. |
| 1:27.0 | In the introduction, and this will be common to you, I'm sure every time you are either interviewed or a profile is written about you in the newspapers, people say, |
| 1:34.6 | the first black woman MP. |
| 1:36.7 | I'm wondering how important that is to you. |
| 1:41.1 | Well, in a way, it's not important to me me but it's obviously important to other people. |
| 1:44.2 | I remember when I was first elected meeting an older West Indian woman somewhere and she said |
| 1:49.9 | you know every time I see under television I feel big and you know there were lots of people at the time |
| 1:57.0 | for whom to see something like themselves in Parliament was very empowering and that's good. |
| 2:04.0 | And that was June 1987. |
... |
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