Black Sections out of Birmingham

Black Sections out of Birmingham

Indicative of the leadership’s attitude toward Black Sections, was the actions of Roy Hattersley. As MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook, which did and still has a large South Asian community, Hattersley was concerned about the impact Black Sections would have on his standing. Birmingham’s Black Sections chapter was also a particularly strong wing of the national caucus. In 1986, Hattersley allegedly orchestrated the expulsion of Birmingham Labour councillor Phillip Murphy. A year later in 1987, in the run up to the general election that year, Grant and Linda Bellos, then Leader of Lambeth Council, were invited to an anti-racism rally scheduled on 7th April in Birmingham, and were “virtually ordered” not to enter the city and attend, by Deputy Leader Roy Hattersley and four other Birmingham-based MPs, who stated to Grant and Bellos that “As Labour MPs in Birmingham, fully committed to racial equality and ending discrimination, we want to make it clear that neither Birmingham District Labour Party nor the city council needs any advice from you or Haringey and Lambeth councils”.

Grant was in fact in hospital on the day of the meeting, but wrote from his hospital bed that the letter from Birmingham MPs was “most arrogant”, asserting that he would “continue to go to such meetings wherever both Black and white wish to hear what I have to say”, and that so far as he knew, there were “no pass laws” yet in the UK – a reference to the apartheid laws in South Africa at that time. The then Leader of Birmingham City Council also wrote saying the meeting would cause an embarrassment to the Party. The rally, organised by the Birmingham Black Sections chapter, was in the event attended by Sharon Atkin who had already been selected as Parliamentary Candidate for Nottingham East. It was here that Atkin, in the context of Labour’s attempts to thwart Black Sections, called the Labour Party racist. As a result of her assertion that the Labour Party was racist, she was suspended from the Labour Party, preventing her from running in the 1987 election. In its role as a supportive network for those few Black individuals in the Labour Party who had managed to gain positions of leadership, Black Sections’ imperative was to expose the Party’s punishment against Sharon Atkin. As a socialist woman, and having been scorned by the Party she argued for the need to “establish a National Organisation that is socialist and that fights for Black and White working class interests and incorporates both Black and white women in membership and decision making on equal terms”.