Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

How fitting that this day of all days in Parliament should have begun with prayers led by the Rev. Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the first black woman to become Speaker’s Chaplain. I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to speak in this debate, but I am grateful even more to colleagues on both sides of the House for the privilege of listening to their reflections on Nelson Mandela and the inspiration that they have drawn from his life.

At the time of the South African Barbarians rugby tour of 1979, my wife Caroline and I were young newlyweds, and I remember that we made the journey only a few weeks into our marriage to protest against the tour. We were not politically sophisticated—my colleagues will no doubt attest to the fact that not much has changed—but we recognised the simple injustice of apartheid and we had to express our revulsion to it.

I was privileged in 2006 to be shown into Mandela’s cell on Robben Island by Ahmed Kathrada, the youngest of the defendants in the Rivonia trial. He allowed me a few quiet moments to reflect on the 27 years of my life that had passed since going on that first demonstration—the same period that Mandela had spent in that cell. It was profoundly humbling.

I am here today not to express my personal reminiscences, but to express the respect of my constituents who feel that their lives are enlarged by the knowledge that they have lived at the same time as Mandela. My borough of Brent is perhaps the most diverse place in Europe, and perhaps it is for that reason that it was the first to honour Mandela by naming a street after him. Brent understands his essential message that people of different race and different belief can and must live alongside one another.

It is said that power corrupts, but the truth is that power reveals. It allows the powerful to show their true nature. The reason that power seems to corrupt is that too often it reveals the corrupt nature of those who gain power. The glory of Nelson Mandela is that power revealed in him not rancour and bitterness but the extraordinary noble nature, the great soul of one who had suffered and not forgotten the purpose to which he had dedicated his life—the dignity of all human beings and their right to justice.