Tributes to Nelson Mandela

David Hanson Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

It is a great mystery to my children that it was not until I was 33 that I saw the face of Nelson Mandela in 1990. While I enjoyed a good life, going to primary school, secondary school and university, getting a job and developing my life, getting married and having children, Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his belief in a non-racist society in which everyone had an equal vote and could contribute, and in which people felt valued for who they were, not what they were seen to be by others.

I first felt the ripples of Nelson Mandela’s influence when I went to Hull university in 1975. I knew nothing of him before then, but to meet South Africans in exile, both white and black, bishops and students, who had come to the city with a message against South African oppression and about the work of Nelson Mandela in prison, calling on people on the other side of the world to join them in their struggle to help to relieve the pressure on lives in South Africa, was an immense privilege. Like many speakers today, I did not buy Cape apples or Stellenbosch wine, and I did not support the purchase of such goods from supermarkets. I, too, did not allow my university to profit from companies such as Barclays and Reckitt and Colman that invested in South Africa at that time.

Those were big challenges, but to people who ask whether it was worth it and whether anything changed, I believe that the ripples of Nelson Mandela came to us, and we put one pebble on the roof of the apartheid regime, and pebbles across the world were put on that roof until it fell in and Nelson Mandela was free. Those were difficult times. Steve Biko was murdered in a police cell. People routinely fell out of windows, or fell downstairs; they drowned in the bath; they were shot with a shotgun in the back of a vehicle for demanding the right to vote. We meet today to celebrate that life and to say to the people we represent, “Thank you for your small pebble on the roof of the apartheid regime—thank you for your contribution.” We stand here to celebrate the life of someone who stood for equality of opportunity¸ for fairness and justice, and who believed in the right to vote.

When I take school parties round the House of Commons I stop at two spots: first, the statue of Viscount Falkland, to which women chained themselves to get votes for women, to ensure that they voted in this community. I will now stop, for ever and a day, as long as I can serve in the House, at the plaque in Westminster Hall, and say to schoolchildren that I was privileged to stand in the Hall as a Member of Parliament and hear a man who had given 27 years of his life in the struggle for freedom speak to us as a free man. I will reinforce for those young people the fact that he did so, not just for freedom and for justice but for the right for all people to vote as equals.

That is a lesson for democracy for the future, and it is a lesson for us now. I am privileged that, although I never shook hands with Nelson Mandela—he walked just past me on that great day on 11 July 1996; I was three rows in—I saw him speak, I learned of his struggles, and I put one small pebble on that roof and helped in a small way, with many other people, to make South Africa the place that it is today, and I hope to encompass the values of Mandela for future generations.