Politics & Power Quote by Diane Abbott

Abbott’s line is engineered to shock, but not to scandalize for its own sake. By reaching for the biblical horror of “the massacre of the first-born,” she grabs a moral absolute - an act so indefensible that any political compliance with it becomes instantly grotesque. The hyperbole is the point: it turns parliamentary procedure into a mirror held up to power, asking why the House of Commons so often behaves less like a check and more like a conveyor belt.

The specific intent is to accuse a government with a strong majority of operating with near-automatic consent, where party discipline, patronage, and career incentives override scrutiny. “The honest truth is” is a neat rhetorical feint: it frames the coming exaggeration as plain realism, as if she’s merely reporting the weather. Then comes the real knife: “no difficulty.” Not “might pass,” but would glide through. The line implies the scandal isn’t just a hypothetically evil proposal; it’s the institutional habit of saying yes.

Subtext: Parliament’s legitimacy rests on the idea that debate matters and votes are earned. Abbott suggests that in modern Westminster, the decisive argument isn’t reason but arithmetic - the whips, the tribal fear of breaking ranks, the assumption that governing equals being obeyed. Contextually, it lands in Britain’s recurring anxiety about executive dominance: when a majority government can treat the Commons as a formality, outrage becomes one of the few tools left to force attention. Hyperbole here functions as democratic alarm bell, not mere insult.