Black History Month

Siân Berry Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful to be called to speak in this debate. Like others, I thank the Minister for her commitment to further action on redress for the Windrush scandal. I also commend the Commonwealth nations, which are making sure that there is a conversation internationally about redress and action on reparations for the transatlantic trade in trafficked and enslaved Africans. I applaud the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) for her powerful arguments on that point earlier.

I will take the opportunity to talk a little about Brighton today, particularly the Brighton & Hove Black History group. It was formally launched in 2002 and is now a thriving team of local volunteers from very diverse cultural backgrounds. It owes its existence to the passion and dedication of Bert Williams MBE, who has spent so much of his retired life researching and presenting the multicultural history of our city. The Brighton & Hove Black History website is an amazing resource for finding out about the impact that black residents have had on the city throughout its whole history, and it is full of beautifully presented photographs. Everyone should visit it.

Today, there is a lot to celebrate about Brighton and how it looks at its history, including its black history. Afrori Books in North Road has been running since 2021 and was founded by Carolynn Bain as a safe space for black people and their allies. Carolynn was inspired to open the shops because

“I was tired of going to bookstores and having to search for ages to find the tiny BAME section that had been allocated to Black authors. Surely, they deserved more than that?”.

Afrori delivers anti-racism training to adults. It runs anti-racist clubs in schools across Sussex. It has hair workshops, author events, women of colour yoga sessions, writers’ workshops, music events, a book festival and so much more.

In Brighton we are also very lucky to have the brilliant Black & Minority Ethnic Community Partnership centre, a sustainable resource centre that champions the black minority ethnic community in Brighton and Hove, owns its own building—such a big thing for groups like that —and supports BME communities and their families in so many ways. I have met young refugees there, and long-retired Caribbean nurses, all playing their part in our brilliant community.

I cannot omit to mention some of our incredible local artists. We have AFLO. the poet, an amazing spoken-word artist who uses poetry as a vehicle to address racism and mental health issues. We have Fox Fisher, an incredible non-binary artist, author, film-maker and educator who is cherished in our LGBTQ community. We have Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule, better known as Rizzle Kicks, and QM Records, a Brighton-based label and events company founded and run by Ned and Nicholson from the well-known local band Normanton Street. I could go on, because those are only a few of the amazing, creative people who are leading the way in Brighton.

Now in its third year, led by its directors Carolynn Bain of Afrori Books, Althea Wolfe and John Mayford, Brighton book festival is a grassroots festival with equity at its heart. The directors’ aim was to create another space in Brighton where writers from under-represented backgrounds would be the main focus, and where diverse audiences could see themselves reflected.

In August, for reasons that should not have been required, I became just one of thousands of people who joined in powerful collective action in response to far-right riots and threatened racist action against members of our community. As always, Brighton and Hove came together to say loud and clear that those who spread hatred, fear, fascism and racism have no place in our city. As has happened earlier in our history, thousands of Brightonians defended the values for which our city is well known. This is an important part of building a better history for our future, and confronting and defeating the racism in our communities.

Brighton faces challenges, as all places do—we have heard Members say that powerfully. We have seen the rise in hate crimes nationally, with hundreds of racist hate incidents and crimes every year. The safety of black people in Sussex is not helped by the fact that, according to the most recent statistics, they are more than eight times as likely to be stopped and searched by police as white people. According to Home Office data on rates of stop and search by race found that the equivalent of nearly 30 black people in every 1,000 living in our area were stopped in a 12-month period. That is not proportionate, and it does not help to keep people safe.

Strip-searching children is also one of the most racialised tactics used by the police, who are six times more likely to strip-search black children, and I am glad that the Children’s Commissioner for England has taken up this countrywide children’s rights issue. Every police service needs to take action to prevent this traumatic practice from causing further harm. I recently met representatives of StopWatch, which does fantastic work on strip-searching, as well as on institutionalised racism in the justice system more broadly. The Runnymede Trust has conducted excellent analysis, adopting an evidence-based approach to tackling the causes of the racist riots during the summer. We must continue to pay attention, and do much more to ensure that all the ways in which overt and systemic racism affects black people in our city and our country are brought into the open and confronted honestly.

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

Let me first thank all Members for their contributions to the debate. This week, when asked about reparations for slavery, the Prime Minister replied that he was facing forward. Does the hon. Member agree that in order to face forward we must know our past, and does she think that it should become compulsory in our education system to learn about race, empire, colonialism and slavery?

[Siân Berry]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member about education. As for his point about reparations, the echoes of this injustice will not simply fade away; we need to talk about it and take action.

Let me end by talking about one more injustice. Jay Abatan was murdered in Brighton outside a nightclub in January 1999. No one has ever been convicted for his killing, and his brother Michael, who was there on the night Jay was attacked, has spent 25 years campaigning for justice. I have met him several times over the past year at community events, and at a vigil on the anniversary of Jay’s death. Sussex police have apologised to the family for how the case was handled, but I know that Members supported my predecessor’s early-day motion expressing concern about the fact that Jay’s murderers have still not been brought to justice. I hope I can rely on the same support from Members here for any action that I take on the Abatans’ behalf, for the echoes of this injustice, too, will never fade until we take such action.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I now call a fellow Brummie, Paulette Hamilton.