Abbott and Reid regain Labour whip two weeks into Burnham's premiership
Two suspended MPs returned to the parliamentary Labour party within days of Andy Burnham taking office, in a move the leadership insists was driven by independent processes but which critics call an early test of his authority.
Diane Abbott and Joani Reid have been readmitted to the Labour party and had the parliamentary whip restored, the party confirmed, less than a fortnight after Andy Burnham became prime minister. Labour stressed that both decisions followed separate independent disciplinary proceedings and that the leadership played no part in either outcome.
The timing is unavoidable. Burnham has told Labour MPs he intends to loosen the disciplinary culture inherited from his predecessor, Keir Starmer, and allow backbenchers to voice disagreements without fear of retribution from the whips' office. Two readmissions in his first weeks in office will be read as a marker of that promise.
Abbott, 72, the longest-serving sitting MP and so-called mother of the House of Commons, received a formal warning after an investigation into remarks she made last July. Speaking to the BBC, she had argued that racism linked to skin colour was fundamentally different from prejudice directed at Jewish, Irish or Traveller people, calling it "silly" to treat them as equivalent. That suspension followed a first loss of the whip in April 2023 over a letter to the Observer in which she made similar distinctions.
In a statement posted to X on Thursday, Abbott apologised for a separate tweet in which she had referred to the Israeli Defence Force as the "Jewish Defence Force," acknowledging the wording conflated Israel's actions with the broader Jewish community. She described herself as a lifelong anti-racist.
Reid's case is unrelated. The 39-year-old MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven voluntarily gave up the whip in March after her husband, David Taylor, was arrested by counter-terrorism police on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service in a matter linked to China. Reid has never been accused of wrongdoing and, according to Labour sources, was never party to the police investigation. She stepped aside, she said at the time, to avoid becoming a distraction.
Both investigations were conducted under the Labour rulebook and approved by the party's independent review board. A Labour spokesperson said the party "expects the highest standards" and that allegations are assessed "independently of the leadership and political interference."
Not everyone was reassured. Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, called the reinstatement "an early test of resolve" for the Burnham administration. He noted that the Jewish community was experiencing historically high levels of antisemitism, citing the murder of two Jews last October at Heaton Park synagogue, and warned that restoring the whip was hard to justify without "clear and sustained evidence of genuine remorse."
A government source pushed back on the idea that the readmission reflected a political calculation tied to the change in leadership, saying that if Abbott repeated her comments or made antisemitic remarks, "she'll have to go again."
For Burnham, the episode crystallises a tension he will carry throughout his premiership: how to signal openness to internal dissent without appearing soft on conduct that the party has spent years trying to police. The independent-process framing gives him cover. The politics, as Rosenberg's intervention suggests, will be harder to manage.
