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Haringey Council vs the Press
BG_P_11_5_2 Black Focus on Elections (1)
This document contains papers presented at the 1990 World Conference on Reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora, outlining the legal basis, historical precedents, and moral arguments for reparations for slavery and colonial exploitation. It is useful for understanding Bernie Grant’s campaign as it provides context on the reparations movement’s demands for justice, acknowledgment, and compensation, highlighting the broader global struggle that informed and inspired his activism.
During his time as Council Leader (and indeed afterwards), Grant received the brunt of media abuse by the gutter press and dealt with regular attempts to spread mistruths, misquotes and general misrepresentations of his policies, ideas and character.
Media camped regularly outside his home, and intruded into the personal lives of his wider family on many occasions. Photographers & journalists followed him in cars for many months. His widow and former political assistant, Sharon Grant, reflected on the personal toll this took on them in a 2024 Guardian article that “We lived by our wits, always alert to the next hostile onslaught, externally or internally. It was enduring and exhausting, damaging to both mental and physical health”. In his position as one of the few representatives of the Black community in British politics, and a fervent anti-racist, it was clear that many of these media attacks were racist in nature. Indeed, one article reported that “The Black community say that this is because Bernie Grant is Black and the first Black Council Leader in the United Kingdom”.
For many, even within his own party, media attacks provided a useful tool to undermine him as a progressive Council Leader, and as a Parliamentary candidate after his selection for the Tottenham Parliamentary seat in 1985, which angered Labour traditionalists. There were suspicions that many colleagues felt compelled to generate adverse press stories for their own purposes.
This mistreatment by the press was at its height during the Broadwater Farm Uprising of 1985 and it was in the aftermath of this event that the Sun newspaper labelled him ‘Barmy Bernie’, a nickname that the gutter press clung to for much of his career. Grant lamented that this label “has meant anything I say or do is either twisted to reinforce the level of craziness, and reported, or, if it can’t be so twisted, ignored completely”. This blatantly racist and politically motivated treatment received by Grant was acknowledged by members of the wider public, beyond the local or Black communities. He was even approached by the late Kevin Morris , a social justice activist and lecturer, who in 1987 was conducting a Masters course and approached Grant to form a part of his case study regarding racism and prejudice in the media. It was also suggested that he might include Sharon Grant in the study, who was receiving her own share of press abuse. As Haringey Council represented a socialist approach to local government, Grant was not the only individual to be spotlighted in the press. Other leading councillors including Deputy Council Leader Steve King, Niger Knowles, Andy Love, Phillip Jones, and Sharon Grant (nee Lawrence) who led on the Women’s Committee and gender equality were also to receive attention. To that end, Grant as an individual, Haringey Council as an entity and its leading members, were all labelled as part of the so-called ‘Loony Left’, a term used by the Conservative Party and the media. Local authorities and their leaders were usually the victims of this pejorative term, as they represented a challenge to the centralising policies of the Thatcher government..
With a local election imminent in May 1986, some hoped that negative press coverage might bring Grant, and possibly the local Labour Party, down in the the borough, and adverse coverage intensified. In fact this had the reverse effect, and Grant led the Council to an increased majority as Council Leader in 1986. It appeared that the might of the tabloid press, over many months, had not been sufficient to undermine confidence in his administration!
Nevertheless, as the 1987 General Election approached Grant remained a whipping boy of a right wing press, as did other left leaning trades unionists and leaders of local authorities. Some hoped that Labour would drop him as a candidate. So far as Grant was concerned however, there was a distinct racist innuendo to such coverage, which incited vile unsolicited mail in huge quantities, from newspaper readers clearly incensed with prejudice.
This caused the Council to formally challenge newspaper editors for their erroneous stories and to enlist the support of the National Union of Journalists. An attempt was also made to ban the purchase of offending newspapers by the Council, although this was deemed to be unwise by council officers, on legal advice.
