Filed under: Anti-racism
It is now almost two years since the British National Party scraped over the 5% hurdle and won a seat on the London Assembly, so this is an appropriate point to examine the BNP’s political record at City Hall.
Over that period the role of the party’s London Assembly member, Richard Barnbrook, has been exactly what you would expect from a representative of the BNP. One of his first contributions to Mayor’s Question Time was to demand a ban on the Notting Hill Carnival. On whatever subject he has intervened at MQT, Barnbrook has invariably reduced the issue to the BNP’s obsession with race and immigration.
By way of variety, at last month’s MQT he treated us to an exposition of his party’s line that human activity is not the primary cause of global warming – despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. But then the BNP spent many years rejecting the equally incontrovertible evidence concerning the Nazi genocide against the Jews. From Holocaust denial they have now moved on to climate change denial.
Eighteen months ago I wrote that Barnbrook’s rambling and incoherent interventions at MQT had reduced him to an object of ridicule, which led to the first of three complaints by Barnbrook against myself to the GLA Standards Committee. They were all rejected, along with another complaint against my colleague John Biggs, who had referred to Barnbrook’s Nazi politics. The decision was reported by Searchlight under the heading “Rambling, incoherent and Nazi to boot”!
A central feature of Nick Griffin’s rebranding of the BNP has been an attempt to publicly dissociate the BNP from its Nazi-sympathising past. This has been seriously undermined by the discovery that veteran far-right activist Tess Culnane is working in Barnbrook’s office. Culnane was forced out of the BNP for several years because of her insistence on speaking at meetings of the British People’s Party, which advertises busts of Hitler on its website at £15 a pop.
As for Barnbrook, it would appear that Griffin has finally lost patience with him, and he may well step down from the Assembly next month, to be replaced by Bob Bailey, currently BNP leader on Barking and Dagenham Council. Unlike Barnbrook, Bailey does possess the ability to string two meaningful sentences together. But he suffers from a severe anger management problem and an inclination to shoot his mouth off – for example in his recent disgusting outburst against Nigerian churches at a council planning committee meeting.
Some people argue that it is a mistake to give publicity to the BNP, but in my opinion the more widely the party’s role on the London Assembly and borough councils is publicised the better. Now we have to make sure that we throw the BNP out of their local government base in Barking and Dagenham on the 6th of May by showing voters what you really get when they attain public office.
Published in Tribune on the 2nd of April, 2010.
April 9, 2010
Today when scanning the front-page headlines in my local newsagent one in particular caught my eye, and it did not surprise me to see it on the front of the Sun: “We Must Be Rental”. The story was of a jobless Somali family of nine supposedly being handed a luxury £1.8 million West End home at taxpayers’ expense. Turning to the full report on page 9, I immediately recognised the block of flats that had drawn the attention of the Sun.
Firstly, such commentary by the Sun and the other papers that took up the story is highly inflammatory. You have only to look at the email responses on the Sun message board to see what I mean, with hate-filled rants about asylum seekers and praise for the BNP. You can only imagine what the telephone messages left on the SunTalk number must be like!
As for expecting some accurate journalism, you can forget that. For example, the block of flats is neither in nor even near the West End. It has an NW1 post code. Nor is any property in the neighbourhood worth £1.8 million – the actor Sienna Miller is having enough difficulty trying to sell her propertyoff the Edgware Road a few blocks away, after dropping the price to under a million. Nor can the block of flats be described as a particularly desirable property, given that it directly backs onto the Marylebone flyover.
The block was built during the peak of the property boom in Central London, and when the developer was unable to sell any of the units it was taken over by receivers. As a result it has been lying empty for a number years. I have argued that such developments should be picked up by social landlords and rented out as social housing in a neighbourhood like this with acute housing need. I should know, having been one of the local councillors for eight years between 1998 to 2006, undertaking surgeries on Church Street where overcrowding and rehousing was the major issue. The Shirley Porter legacy had left every little council and social housing in this neighbourhood available for families in desperate need.
The real lesson to be drawn from the Sun story is that a means should be found to get this block into social ownership rather paying extortionate rents to the receiver – or anyone else taking the rent!
November 30, 2009
With Leroy Rosenior and Zesh Rehman at the SRtRC launch
I was very pleased to host the launch of Show Racism the Red Card’s new campaign office in London and the South-East at a well-attended event in London’s Living Room at City Hall on Wednesday night. I look forward to SRtRC bringing their successful anti-racist work with young people here from their base in the North East.
Most fans judge players by the colour of their jersey and not their skin, yet we are in danger of the seeing the beautiful game taken over by the likes of the English Defence League, who are misusing football to incite hatred. SRtRC’s campaign promotes the true spirit of football – respect, multiculturalism and diversity.
This will be well reflected at the World Cup next year in South Africa, as well as illustrated every weekend up and down the country in the Premiership and Championship games. And remember London won the 2012 Olympics on this basis as well.
On the back of this launch, l am glad to see that the Islam Channel and Eastern Eye have also picked up on the issue.
November 9, 2009
This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the murder of Kelso Cochrane. Two commemorative events were held, an unofficial one at Kelso’s graveside in Kensal Green Cemetery and the other official one at the place where he was attacked, off Golborne Road.
On such a sober occasion, lessons of the past can enlighten the present and the future by comparing the events and context of 1958-59 with the present day, and by noting the struggle against racism since then and what it says to us about resisting racism now.
Kelso Cochrane was born in Antigua in 1927 and migrated to London in 1954, settling in Notting Hill. On 17 May 1959, while walking home from Paddington General Hospital where he had received treatment after a work accident, he was attacked by a group of white youths and stabbed to death. More than 1,200 people attended Kelso’s funeral.
Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement was active in Notting Hill at that time, and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League had its headquarters in Princedale Road. The previous year, a series of violent attacks on black people had culminated in the Notting Hill “race riots” in which white mobs of up to 400 people attacked the houses of West Indian residents.
In 1961 a local Mosleyite named Peter Dawson told the Sunday People that a Union Movement member was responsible for killing Kelso. However, the police denied that the attackers were motivated by racism and nobody has ever been charged with the murder.
Looking back on the terrible events of 1958-59 – the Notting Hill riots and the murder of Kelso Cochrane – we are able to see how far we have come since then. Today, the sight of 400-strong mobs of white racists rampaging through North Kensington or indeed any multi-ethnic area of inner London, attacking the homes of minority communities, seems inconceivable.
Of course, racism and fascism remain a threat – the election of a fascist to the London Assembly last May bears witness to that. But the BNP’s support is mainly restricted to a few areas of outer London. In inner London, people are at ease with multiculturalism and diversity, and the far right are marginalised. In the West Central GLA constituency which includes Notting Hill, the BNP got a paltry 2.4% of the vote in last year’s Assembly elections.
This situation is a tribute to the activists who have fought racism and fascism during the half a century since Kelso’s death.
It was the whipping up of an atmosphere of violent racism by Mosley’s Union Movement and Jordan’s White Defence League that led directly to Kelso’s murder. Due to the subsequent campaigning by anti-racists, in 1965 the Race Relations Act criminalised incitement to racial hatred, so that racists and fascists are no longer free to behave like that today.
And the struggle against racism was conducted on a cultural level too. The 1958 riots and Kelso’s murder produced the train of events that led to the launch of the Notting Hill Carnival – a celebration of Caribbean culture that brings together hundreds of thousands of Londoners from all of our city’s diverse communities.
It is not accidental that since his election last year the BNP’s London Assembly Member Richard Barnbrook has repeatedly used Mayor’s Question Time to attack the Notting Hill Carnival and call for its suspension.
In that context, I think it is a disgrace, and an act of appalling political irresponsibility, that the current Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has cancelled Rise, the biggest anti-racist festival in Europe. I am pleased to report that at the next meeting of the London Assembly my colleague Jennette Arnold will be presenting a mass petition calling on Boris to reinstate Rise.
Unless there is a continuous struggle against racism and fascism they will return again. The best way that we can commemorate the death of Kelso Cochrane is to continue that struggle today.
And we also need to get justice for Kelso’s family, who have to live with the thought that his killers may still be walking the streets. At the official unveiling of the plaque on Sunday the family made a plea for the individuals who committed the crime to be found and prosecuted – not because they are looking for revenge but simply because they want justice.
May 18, 2009
It is rare that l find myself in agreement with my fellow London Assembly Member, Brian Coleman. However, on the general approach to hate preachers from abroad peddling their vile views on UK soil, we find common ground. In my case I supported a ban on Geert Wilders, the far-right racist from Holland, while Brian Coleman backed the exclusion of the homophobic US pastor Fred Phelps. Moreover, both of us congratulated the home secretary on her decision to prevent these individuals from entering the country.
Freedom of expression is not absolute. We are rightly governed by laws and conventions when we speak. As the mayor has recently learnt when abusing an MP on the phone, the public don’t like us using foul language. And we are not free to slander anyone as we please, since they can have legal recourse. So it is right and proper that incitement to hatred, and by those from abroad in particular, is treated as unacceptable in our society.
February 23, 2009
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