Black History Month

Apsana Begum Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) on securing this debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. It is an important debate, and I look forward to us continuing it in the main Chamber.

As we all know, Black History Month is a chance to celebrate and reflect on the many achievements of the black British community here in the UK. This year, it is also important to celebrate black Britons across the country who have faced huge challenges as a result of the pandemic.

Whether we know it or not, we are all affected by the brave men and women who have gone before us. I am proud to stand on the shoulders of so many of those greats—women such as the abolitionist Mary Prince, the first black woman to have a memoir of her experiences of slavery published in the UK; the amazing Mary Seacole, whose statue stands tall just over the river at St Thomas’s Hospital; Lilian Bader, one of the first black women to join the British armed forces; and the activist and campaigner Olive Morris, who was born in my Battersea constituency.

As I mention those great women, I must also mention John Archer, who was elected in Battersea in 1913 as London’s first black mayor. In his election victory speech, he rightly cited his election as a critical moment for racial equality. Being a Bristol girl, I must certainly also mention those who led the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s: Paul Stephenson, Roy Hackett and Guy Bailey, who was my youth worker when I was growing up. Their campaign led to the overturning of that racist colour bar, and the boycott also paved the way for the Labour Government’s Race Relations Act 1965.

Learning about our history is essential. That is why, this time last year, I called for black history to be part of the national curriculum, so that all children are taught about black British history. There are great examples where this is already happening, such as St George’s Church of England Primary School in my constituency. At this point, I pay tribute to The Black Curriculum social enterprise, which is helping to deliver black history across the UK. As we have all said today—and I know we all agree—black history is British history, after all.

This year’s Black History Month comes 40 years on from the New Cross fires in south-east London—a tragic event that killed 13 young black people between the ages of 14 and 22. I think we would all agree that their lives had not even begun. It is also 40 years on from the uprisings across the country, including in Brixton, Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, in response to the devastating reality of many black people in the UK: mass unemployment, poor housing conditions, police brutality and racism. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) alluded to the Scarman report, which was commissioned as a result of many of those uprisings in the 1980s.

We should therefore ask the question: how far have we come in our fight for racial justice? Last summer, we were all captured by the Euros, when our brave England team proudly took the knee in solidarity and a call for an end to racism and injustice. Sadly, though, rather than supporting them, their Government chose to sow division and hatred, which led to the ugliest and most awful racial abuse of Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka at the European cup final. My heart went out to them. As the older sister of a professional footballer, I could only imagine how their families must have felt.

Those young men and the rest of the England team united our nation, in all its diversity and difference, and showed the best of modern Britain. However, sadly, we still face deep-rooted inequalities in health, education, employment, immigration and our criminal justice system. In maternal health, we know that black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth. In the labour market, unemployment rates are up to four times higher for black people. School exclusion rates are five times higher for black Caribbean pupils in some parts of the country. We must be honest about that reality, and the Government must be bold in their response. Unfortunately, to date they have not been.

[Apsana Begum (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has mentioned some important, though depressing, statistics about the reality of things in the country today. To add to that, there are fewer than 200 black university professors among 23,000 in the UK. Does she agree that that is a shameful figure, and one that needs bold action from this Government?

[Marsha De Cordova]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We must address the issue of representation in education, right the way from school through to colleges, universities and at professor level. Perhaps the Minister, in his response, can address the point on those disparities in the education system.

The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, catalysed by the brutal murder of George Floyd and by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, was an opportunity for this Government to tackle structural racism. Instead, they produced a divisive and now discredited report seeking to deny the extent of structural racism.