Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Hugh Bayley Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

I have my South African godmother, Mary Grice, to thank for a lifelong interest in Africa. When I was a child, she used to send me books about Africa and African artefacts. She stood in line with other members of the Black Sash in Durban, where she lived, to protest against apartheid. Her daughter, Jenny, worked her whole life—she recently retired—for the multiracial National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa trade union.

I do not think that hon. Members have said enough this afternoon about the role played by Africans in South Africa in securing their freedom. That freedom did not happen because of the global solidarity movement, important though it was, but because South Africans themselves demanded the rights that they now have. Mandela’s genius was not simply to win the argument and the political struggle, but to win over his opponents and to persuade them that he and the ANC had been right all along.

There has been huge consensus across the Chamber today among hon. Members, many of whom have shown that they learned their politics in the South African solidarity movement, but there has not always been such consensus. I published a poster—I think it was the first in the UK—demanding freedom for Mandela in 1973, when he had just been made vice-president of the National Union of Students. I named a bar after him at my student union in Bristol at about the same time. Members of the ANC came along to the opening, but were a bit sniffy about our naming a bar after their great leader. I was hugely relieved to find, after his release, that he drank.

Ten years later, when the Anti-Apartheid Movement moved its headquarters from Charlotte street to Selous street, as it then was, in Camden Town, I ran a campaign to get the name changed to Mandela street, which is the one it enjoys today. Such minor acts of solidarity were roundly condemned at the time. I still have a cutting from The Rhodesia Herald, as it was then, and from a prominent British national Sunday newspaper expressing incredulity that anybody wished to honour and show respect for the name of this political prisoner.

I served for quite a few years on the executive or national committee of the Anti-Apartheid Movement under the chairmanships of both the noble Lord Hughes in the other place and John Ennals, who was the brother of David Ennals, the Health Minister under Harold Wilson. I led campaigns to persuade local authorities and trade unions to sell their investments in South Africa.

When I was first elected to the House in 1992, I wanted to become involved with anti-apartheid work, but I found that we had apartheid among our all-party groups, which in those days could be set up without needing to have members from all parties. There were two South African groups—the all-party group on South Africa, which argued against disinvestment and for white rights, order and no change in South Africa; and the all-party group on Southern Africa, led by Peter Pike, the former Member for Burnley, who was mentioned by the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt). I joined the Southern Africa group, because it was closely aligned to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The two groups merged a few years later, and it was because of the experience of reconciliation in South Africa that we felt we should join together into a single group.

One of the greatest privileges I have had as a Member of this House was to be selected to observe the first genuine democratic, all-race elections in South Africa in 1994. The practice was to put an African politician with one from further afield, so that there was a multiracial observer team, and I had the great good fortune to be twinned with Mose Tjitendero, who was the Speaker of the Namibian Parliament. Just five years before, Namibia had gone through a similar transition—nobody has mentioned it this afternoon—managing to move to democracy and majority rule without destroying the state and without that leading to civil war and chaos. I learned a lot from him during our three days of observing the election.

On the first day, in one of those long lines of voters that many of us will remember from our television screens—the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) described them in his speech—I saw an old African women with snow-white hair, and I asked her how long she had been waiting to vote, because I was trying to find out whether it was taking people two, five or 10 hours, and she simply said, “All my life.”

After the election, I went to the Alexandra health centre, a progressive centre that had fought to extend health care to people of all races during the time of apartheid. I met a midwife who first qualified in what was then called Northern Transvaal—the Northern Province—who said that when she qualified, she was given her equipment, which consisted of a kettle to boil water to sterilise whatever instruments she might use and a candle so that she could do deliveries in the dark. We started talking about the sort of support that South Africa would need to build a health care system that provided for all its citizens, and she said that the challenge was not one of resources—after all, in South Africa the doctor Christiaan Barnard had carried out the first heart transplant operation many years before—but of how those resources were distributed.

Mandela was a revolutionary. Many refused to support him when he was in prison, because he refused to repudiate the armed struggle. Amnesty International would not make him a prisoner of conscience because of that refusal. We should not forget, however, that while the victims were citizens, the violence of apartheid came overwhelmingly from the security forces of the state—as in Sharpeville, the Soweto student uprising in 1976 and the Durban strikes in the early 1970s.

Mandela’s first goal was to achieve democracy and universal suffrage, and that goal has been achieved, but his vision went far wider. He wanted to achieve equality and full human rights and justice for all citizens in his country and the wider world, and those goals remain to be achieved. If we want to honour his reputation, we need to work to do our part, as political leaders in our country, to ensure that those goals are achieved.

We therefore need to concentrate on making the argument to the public in our country that we should spend 0.7% of our gross national income on international development. We need to retain the focus of our development programme on the elimination of poverty, and recognise that that requires us to challenge inequality globally, in our own country and in the developing countries that we are seeking to help.

I believe it was a mistake when, earlier this year, the United Kingdom decided to close its aid relationship with South Africa, which is a middle-income country. It does not need our money, but we have a lot to gain from continuing to work with South Africa and its Government in examining how they are tackling inequality there and in transferring the lessons we can learn from them back to the United Kingdom and other developing countries where we have programmes, because unless we deal with the problem of inequality, we will never end the global scourge of poverty.