12.04.2000

Changing man

Bernie Grant February 17 1944 - April 8 2000

I first met Bernie Grant when I began working as an international telephonist in 1973. I knew him as a dedicated union fighter, popular and likeable, and a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Coming to Britain with his family from Guyana in 1963, Bernie had become politicised by the Post Office strike of 1971. It was then he threw himself into union work, subsequently holding many posts in the London Overseas Telephones No2 branch of the Union of Post Office Workers (today part of the Communication Workers Union).

The 1,000-strong LOT2 branch was feared and despised by the UPW leadership for its uncompromising militancy. For most of the 70s it was completely dominated by Communist Party members. John Haylett, currently editor of the Morning Star, was branch secretary in the second half of the decade, and the branch committee was for a time almost entirely composed of CPGB comrades. Post Office management, struggling to cope with high turnover of staff and rapidly rising international traffic before the days of direct dialling, was forced to make concession after concession to the union branch.

I remember one occasion, during industrial action by some tubeworkers, when branch officers negotiated an agreement whereby telephonists were allowed to go home 90 minutes early in case their journey home was disrupted. In fact the strike was ineffective, but when management unilaterally rescinded the agreement after a couple of days, the branch told members to ignore official instructions and continue to leave early until the deal had been renegotiated. The members obeyed.

However, for much of this period, Bernie was an ultra-left oppositionist, accusing the branch leadership of taking half-measures. This of course had very little to do with the actual reality, but was dictated by WRP dogma, according to which 'Stalinists' inevitably sold out workers' struggles. In fact the 25-strong Exchange branch of the CPGB - then the biggest industrial branch in the country - included those like myself on the left of the Party and a fair smattering of anarcho-syndicalists (not to mention those who joined the Party to advance their union or even PO career). Comrade Haylett may subsequently have risen to high places in the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain, but he was hardly a tool of the CPGB leadership. We were, first and foremost, union militants, acting quite independently of the Party.

In the mid-1970s the union bureaucracy suspended our branch leadership for insisting on taking strike action in opposition to UPW instructions. Our reaction was to occupy union headquarters in Clapham in a move planned and coordinated by the Communist Party branch. EC members who came to placate us were subjected to abuse for daring to call us "brothers", and had to run a gauntlet of mock Nazi salutes by the 30 or 40 branch members assembled. The occupation was called off after a couple of hours when an executive member all but promised to reinstate our branch officers (within a week the EC had done so). But we refused to leave before we were all served tea and biscuits.

I saw Bernie phone through his report to the offices of News Line, the WRP's daily paper. Sure enough, it contained the obligatory condemnation of the Stalinists, who had apparently done their utmost to hold back a spontaneous workers' action.

Bernie joined the Labour Party during his period of WRP membership, although it is likely he had parted company with Gerry Healy's group by the time he became a councillor in Haringey in 1978. Sent in to win workers away from Labourism, it was Labourism that won him. In the same year he left the Post Office to take up a full-time post with the National Union of Public Employees (subsequently incorporated into Unison). He later claimed to have been the "organiser in all Nupe strikes from 1978".

By 1985 Bernie had become the leader of Haringey council. On October 5 of that year anti-police rioting broke out on Broadwater Farm in response to the death of Cynthia Jarrett, who died during a police raid on her home. During the riots a policeman, Keith Blakelock, was killed and Bernie came to national prominence for the comments he made in his capacity as council leader, which were interpreted by the tabloid press and Tory politicians as siding with Blakelock's killers.

In fact he had said: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding." Whether he was at the time indeed making a principled stand in solidarity with the black youth against the police is uncertain, for he always maintained afterwards that he was merely trying to put forward the rioters' point of view and calm the situation down.

Be that as it may, the press and Tories were not about to call off their attacks on "barmy Bernie" - especially as he was in the process of replacing Norman Atkinson MP, the Labour left who had held the Tottenham seat for 20 years. Despite the press crusade against him, he held the seat for Labour in the general election of 1987, albeit with a reduced majority.

It was five years later, during the general election campaign of 1992, that I next saw Bernie face to face, when he returned to LOT2 branch - by now firmly in the hands of Labour 'moderates' - to urge us to vote for Neil Kinnock. Kinnock had of course condemned his Broadwater Farm remarks and tried to stop his selection as Tottenham's parliamentary candidate. I was shocked, not only by his obese appearance, but by his obvious rightwing orientation. Although he would still from time to time describe himself as a Marxist, by then his revolutionism had descended into a combination of black nationalism and crude populism.

Typical was his comment, "I am not English. And in the Caribbean we have a different way of looking at things." He now considered himself primarily a representative of black people, no longer a representative of the working class. His solution to racism had long since ceased to be workers' revolution: instead he suggested that black people should be given government grants to return "home". He made the absurd claim that the west's war on Iraq was "racially motivated". 'Comrade' Grant in his later years also made glowing remarks in favour of both the monarchy and private education.

It seems that Bernie was a highly valued member of the home secretary's race advisory forum, who, in the words of Tony Blair, provided an "inspirational lead" for black people to aspire to. Personally I prefer to remember the union militant who would fight for all his members - as workers, not as black or white people.

The life of Bernie Grant is in some ways a reflection of the left's failure in the 20th century. Neither the CPGB, with its disdain for theory, and certainly not the blindly dogmatic WRP, came anywhere near providing answers to life under capitalism, let alone pointing the way to human liberation. It is little wonder that so many once good comrades abandoned the workers' movement in order to pursue personal solutions.