"Our Time Has Come"

By Lloyd Garrison

Whether or not the Conservatives remain in power, Britain's new Parliament will almost surely be different in one significant respect: color. Although about 4% of the country's 56 million people are nonwhite -- mostly of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origin -- there have been no nonwhite members in the House of Commons in 58 years. Three Asians served briefly between 1892 and 1929, but no black has ever taken a seat. This time three nonwhite candidates, all running on the Labor Party ticket, are expected to be among the 650 members of the new Commons. Says Marc Wadsworth, a black television journalist who is not a candidate: "Our time has come."

Political momentum appears to be on the side of further change: last year more than 140 nonwhite candidates were elected to local councils in Greater London. In the current campaign for Parliament, the Tories, the Labor Party and the Social Democratic-Liberal Party Alliance are fielding a total of 27 nonwhite candidates. Virtually assured of winning are Lawyer Paul Boateng, who was born in Ghana; local Council Leader Bernie Grant, a Guyanan; and former local Councilor Diane Abbott, who was born in London of West Indian parents. All are Labor candidates in London constituencies with substantial Labor majorities. More than 30% of the districts' voters are nonwhite.

Future gains, however, may not come easily, in part because of Labor's poor showing in opinion polls. As the political home for most Asian and black voters, the party has long championed racial equality. But its leaders are fearful of a white backlash if Labor appears to support too many black candidates, some of whom are outspoken radicals associated with the party's "loony left." Racism also poses a formidable electoral hurdle. "In the U.S., at least it is never questioned that blacks are Americans," says Boateng. "The tragedy is that however long you are here, even if you were born here, you can never be British."

Abbott, 33, a Cambridge history graduate and now a press officer for the local council in Lambeth, says her politics was influenced by U.S. civil rights activists. "People like me in their 30s had our ideas shaped by Angela Davis and the black-power movement," she says. Grant, who heads the local council in Haringey, has been unflatteringly labeled Barmy Bernie by conservative tabloids. It was he who declared that police had been given a "bloody good hiding" after a 1985 race riot in Tottenham during which a patrolman was hacked to death. Grant has since kept a relatively low profile.

More militant blacks have meanwhile seized public attention with calls for affirmative action at the highest levels of the Labor Party. Journalist Wadsworth, for example, is chairman of the four-year-old Black Sections National Committee, which demands that nonwhites be named to all of Labor's decision-making groups. Party Leader Neil Kinnock, eager to soften Labor's radical image, is in no mood to bow to such demands. Nonetheless, Black Sections leaders have turned up the heat. At their fourth annual conference last March in Nottingham -- from which white journalists were banned -- delegates called for the repeal of Britain's immigration controls. They also drafted a statement describing the police as a "force of intimidation" in local housing projects and demanding an "end to their dubious presence in the schools."

At a subsequent rally in Birmingham, Sharon Atkin, a black Labor candidate, told a packed hall, "I don't give a damn about Kinnock and a racist Labor Party." That was too much for Kinnock, who removed Atkin as a candidate and replaced her with another nominee, Mohammad Aslam, who is Pakistani. Said Kinnock: "We will not advance the cause of black people in this country if candidates can call our party racist and simply get away with it."

Britain's minorities could certainly use a voice of their own. Racial attacks, particularly against Asians, are a continuing problem, and unemployment among blacks is running at more than 20%, double the rate for whites. Yet the notion of being cast as a leading black spokesperson leaves Abbott, for one, feeling somewhat overwhelmed. "Black voters," she says, "will expect a new heaven and earth -- expectations we cannot begin to fulfill."

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London