07.06.2000

Bernie: whose hero?

BBC2 African rebel Wednesday May 31

This tribute to Bernie Grant was screened the day before supporters of the London Socialist Alliance gathered to select a candidate to contest the vacant Tottenham seat following the Labour MP's death.

Part of the 'Black Britain' series, it came as a timely reminder of the dangers, that some in the LSA may fall into, of claiming to follow in Grant's footsteps. Yes, he "fought for black people", as the documentary was only to keen to point out, but his 'struggle' had the full backing of the liberal bourgeois establishment.

This was made more than plain from those who paid tribute to him. Tony Blair was shown eulogising about the "inspirational lead" he gave for black people to aspire to, while Jack Straw pointed out that he had been a valuable go-between, helping to defuse tension between the police and black youth.

This was far from the picture of Grant painted by the tabloid press back in 1985, when he sprang to prominence in the wake of the riots following the death of Cynthia Jarrett, following a police raid on her home. As the leader of Haringey council, which ran the Broadwater Farm estate where the rioting erupted, he was interviewed by the press, looking for a local leader who would condemn the anti-police actions of the local black youth in no uncertain terms.

Instead Grant famously 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." This remark caused outrage in the media, especially since PC Keith Blakelock had been killed - stabbed in a skirmish as youths sought to defend their estate against the police onslaught.

But, as Straw pointed out, Grant had merely "sought to explain why" the youths had reacted so furiously. Outright condemnation would have been worse than useless from the point of view of the establishment (in fact, as leader of the council, Grant had at first been viewed with suspicion as a representative of the powers-that-be). After all what was needed was a "bridge between the police and the community" - and Grant was praised on the programme by senior police officers for filling precisely that role: "He knew that law and order was important and he knew he had to work with us," one officer commented.

The reality was that Grant had played an invaluable part in bringing the situation back under control - a role he repeated later following the killing by immigration officers of Joy Gardner, an 'illegal immigrant' whom they were attempting to deport. Instead of condemning the inhumanity of a system that makes being in the wrong place a 'crime', Grant placed the blame entirely on the alleged racism of the individual immigration officers and of the system itself. A white person from Romania or Albania would have been separated from their family and chucked out much more humanely, it seems.

By and large the left also misfired its salvoes in the Joy Gardner case, and their cries of 'institutionalised racism' dovetailed neatly with those of official society. Similarly, in the Greater London Assembly campaign most LSA components put the agreed call for an end to all immigration controls on the back burner, preferring to concentrate on safe anti-racism as far as the treatment of asylum-seekers was concerned.

In his later years Grant's method of 'fighting for black people' was to demand government grants to allow them to return "home". It is true that in the 70s Grant was a staunch trade unionist and a revolutionary socialist (even if his passionate commitment was tragically diverted into the unhinged sectarianism of the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party). But this phase of his life did not merit a mention in African rebel.

It is the young Bernie Grant, the working class partisan, that the LSA should honour - not Straw's hero, the highly valued member of the home secretary's race advisory forum, attempting to win over the rebel black youth to the mainstream and keeping them safe for the establishment.