Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(13)
‘When I saw them I thought, God almighty,’ said John. ‘That was why I had to make sure that it had to be an anti-racist course. So that I could explain to them, not to blame them for holding those views. You explain to them how it comes about that they all think the way they do.’ Having acquired his evidence, he didn’t take the essays straight to the Police College. Instead, he wrote up a syllabus for the course, and submitted it to Kilburn Polytechnic’s academic board. When he got the permission he needed from the board, he took the syllabus to Hendon Police College. ‘They were not willing to let me take the anti-racist stance,’ he said. The college also asked him to hand over the racist essays that his course was based on. ‘They were then arguing that I should give it to them because the students wrote them on the paper that was the property of the police.’ John chose not to hand over the essays.
Faced with a predicament, he decided to stop teaching at the Police College. ‘It was impossible to stay there,’ he told me. ‘How could I, as a black academic . . . I would be colluding if I stayed there and did the multicultural course. So I had to, whether my job was at stake or not. In all consciousness, since I’m black and I take an anti-racist approach, I had to leave. There was no way that I could stay there.’
Viewing the college’s attitudes as indicative of a wider problem, he turned whistle-blower. The press had got wind of what was shaping up to be a scandal. Eastern Eye, a documentary TV series broadcast by London Weekend Television (now ITV London), aired a thirty-minute programme focused on what John had found. On the programme, a senior at the Police College responded to the scandal, saying, ‘If I had the slightest suspicion that one of the young cadets had serious deep prejudices rather than shallowly expressed prejudices like that, then I would not recommend him to be a constable.’50
I asked John what happened to those trainee police cadets. ‘There were no names, these [essays] were anonymous,’ he said. ‘Although I would know who they are, I would not give their names. It’s professionalism.’ It’s impossible to know whether or not the essay writers went on to take jobs in the police force, or started careers in other professions. What we do know is that John Fernandes uncovered archaic attitudes that may have influenced policing at the time. His anti-racism course was sorely needed.
As would-be black politicians watched what was happening to communities they came from, they began to push for better black representation. Despite a very white leadership, back then the Labour Party had become the political home for the country’s settled black and brown people. The party didn’t have to work particularly hard for black support; it was about necessity, rather than a broad range of choice. Just twenty years earlier, the Conservative MP Peter Griffiths was elected to represent the Midlands constituency of Smethwick aided by the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’.
Leo Dickson and Marc Wadsworth established the Labour Party’s Black Sections in Vauxhall, south London, in 1983. It was a movement inside the party with the aim of championing black representation in the party (used in a political sense, black meant everyone who was not white). A general election took place in the same year, and a low turnout of black voters saw the Labour Party admit that they needed to do more to attract them. A pamphlet from the Vauxhall Labour Party published in 1984 reveals the thinking behind the formation of the sections, and the fiery debate the sections sparked among the Labour Party membership in the early days of setting up. In the pamphlet, Leo and Marc wrote: ‘Our constituency covers an inner city area (Brixton) where manifestations of racism in Britain today are all pervasive.’51 It wasn’t surprising that the push for black representation in Britain’s left-wing party came from south London – an area of the country that, at that point, was in its third decade of settled African and Caribbean migrants.
By the time Vauxhall Labour Party’s pamphlet was published, a debate was raging in the national press about the legitimacy of the Labour Party’s Black Sections. To gain ground in the party, as well as access to other black members, the section’s organisers went to the party’s executive committee to argue their case. In turn, the executive committee took it upon themselves to notify Labour Party members of all races of a meeting of a ‘black caucus’. Leo and Marc were then put in the uncomfortable position of having to argue the case for black representation at some of the party’s local branches. They were met with largely white opposition.
When the press got hold of party debates on the logistics of it all, it was reported as a race row. In correspondence to the Vauxhall branch in July 1984, the Labour Party’s then leader Neil Kinnock expressed general support towards ending race discrimination in the party, but called the setting up of the Black Sections ‘racially segregationist’.
The Labour Party Conference of 1984 was a significant one. The membership was voting on whether the Black Sections would be formally established in the party’s constitution. Proposing the motion, the late Bernie Grant MP (then a councillor in the London borough of Haringey) said, ‘Our problem is that blacks are not a priority in the Labour and trade union movement at the moment. Black Sections are here to ensure that they become a priority . . . we are concerned because we have been told that our leaders are against Black Sections. One comrade has said that Black Sections will be turned into black ghettoes.’52 Writing a report of the conference in Race Today, activist Darcus Howe spoke of an organised effort to crush the Black Sections: ‘ . . . The argument was a simple one,’ he wrote. ‘Black Sections divide the working class.’53 The motion to formalise the Black Sections didn’t pass, but their organising led to the election of Britain’s first black Members of Parliament in 1987 – Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng and Bernie Grant.