I stand with Diane Abbott

Not for the first time in her political career, Diane Abbott is getting a lot of flak online. She’s being trolled, heckled and denounced as an enemy of the United Kingdom. Only this time Ms Abbott is being hauled over the coals not for saying something silly, but for saying something sensible. Something true. Something fundamentally correct. Namely, that Nato bears a great deal of responsibility for the current crisis in Ukraine.

Browsing the Abbott-bashing headlines you could be forgiven for thinking she had upped sticks, flown to Moscow, and sworn lifelong allegiance to Vladimir Putin. ‘Diane Abbott backs Russia!’, says the Express. In its regular feature on mad things said by leftists, published under the banner ‘Loony Left’, Guido Fawkes grips its pearls over Abbott’s apparently bonkers belief that ‘Nato [is] to blame for Ukraine crisis’. Abbott is ‘parroting Kremlin press releases’, says Guido Fawkes, resuscitating the frankly crude old prejudice about Corbynistas being lackeys of the Russian regime.