A black British lawmaker apologised Thursday for a Twitter comment saying that white people “love playing divide and rule”, a day after two men were jailed for the country’s most notorious race murder. Labour MP Diane Abbott, the public health spokesman for Britain’s main opposition party, made the comment during a conversation about the sentencing of the white men for the killing in 1993 of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
“White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game,” she said in a tweet on the social networking site late Wednesday in response to a comment about solidarity in ethnic communities.
She added a “hashtag” — a way Twitter users highlight topics — which said “#tacticasoldascolonialism”. Her comment quickly sparked a storm, with her own party calling it “wrong” and lawmakers from Prime Minister David Cameron’s ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition calling for her to apologise or resign. One Conservative MP, Nadhim Zahawi, said a “healthy society should not tolerate any form of racism”.