She's a fine, upstanding hypocrite.
Abbott's decision in 2003 to send her son to the private City of London School after criticising colleagues for sending their children to selective schools, which she herself described as "indefensible" and "intellectually incoherent", caused controversy and criticism.
Her son contacted a radio phone-in to say that his mother was following his own wishes: "She's not a hypocrite, she just put what I wanted first instead of what people thought," he told LBC. He added that he had wanted to go private rather than attend a local state school in Abbott's Hackney constituency.
In 2004, following a complaint made by Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, Abbott was investigated by the Committee on Standards and Privileges regarding payments she had received from the BBC. The committee found that she had failed to declare earnings of £17,300 in the Register of Members' Interests she had received for appearances on the television programme This Week. The Committee upheld the complaint and required Abbott to apologise to the House.
In 2017, Abbott was criticised after it emerged that in 2011, she charged the University of Birmingham £1,750 for a 50-minute speech. An online petition called on Abbott to repay the money to be used for educational purposes.
The Sunday Times in May 2017 reported that Abbott backed the IRA in a 1984 interview with Labour and Ireland, a pro-republican journal. In the 1984 interview, Abbott criticised the Unionist population of Northern Ireland as an “enclave of white supremacist ideology comparable to white settlers in Zimbabwe" and called for their views to be ignored on the question of Unification adding "Ireland is our struggle — every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed"
In a 1984 interview with the journal of the Labour Committee on Ireland (LCI), when asked if she saw herself as Black British, Abbott replied "No - I would self-define myself just as Black. Though I was born here in London, I couldn't identify as British and anyway most British people don't accept us as British. God! British people can be so racist".
In 1988, Abbott claimed at a black studies conference in Philadelphia that "the British invented racism."
Those last two paragraphs illustrate why she is reviled in the UK.
