Whatever happened to all-Black shortlists for political hopefuls?

Kingsley Abrams

Black activists in the Labour Party have reacted with astonishment and dismay to the news that the Government has bottled out of including the all-Black shortlist proposal from British Cabinet minister Harriet Harman's Equalities Bill.

We have long campaigned through the Black Section of the Labour Party movement for a change in the law which would permit political parties to choose parliamentary candidates from a list made up exclusively of Black hopefuls. Political parties would be allowed to use this measure in order to increase the number of Black Members of Parliament. Currently, there are only 15 Black MPs out of a total of 650. This is a national disgrace.

During Labour's deputy leadership campaign, Harman said she would like to see at least four times the number of Black people elected to the House of Commons than are at present. At last year's Labour Party conference, Harman, who now has ministerial responsibility for equalities, announced that she had commissioned Operation Black Vote to prepare a report which would put the case for all-Black shortlists. And Operation Black Vote duly advanced the view that all black shortlists could have a significant role in redressing the unrepresentative nature of the Commons.

But when Black activists looked though the draft Equalities Bill for the all-Black shortlist proposal, they looked in vain. Was this an administrative error or was something more sinister going on with the drafting of the legislation?

It turned out that the Government was not prepared to include the all-Black shortlist proposal in the Equalities Bill because some of the Black Labour MPs strongly opposed the idea.

Dawn Butler, Keith Vaz, David Lammy and Diane Abbott are all in favour of all-black shortlists. However, Khalid Mahmood, Parmjit Dhanda, Sadiq Khan and Ashok Kumar are against.

Khalid Mahmood even went so far as to describe all-Black shortlists as "political apartheid".

Harman has subsequently made it clear that she is not prepared to risk seeing the whole Equalities Bill wrecked by the disagreement between Black MPs on one specific issue. She has pointed out that it was only possible to get all-women shortlist legislation through Parliament because all female MPs were united behind it. These short-lists have worked wonders in increasing the representation of women MPs.

Unfortunately, we a have a long history in the Black community of people kicking the ladder away once they have reached the top, claiming that, if they can succeed without the help of special measures, other Black people should be able to do the same. But this is to deny the sacrifices that Black pioneers had to make in order to create these opportunities for the current crop of Black MPs. Have they no sense of history?

Sadly, those who reject all-Black shortlists seem interested only in their own positions and what job the Prime Minister might give them in a Government reshuffle. Those who oppose all Black shortlists have failed to come up with alternative proposals for making the British Parliament more representative of the country as a whole.

Meanwhile, Black Labour activists are at a loss to understand how such a small number of Black MPs are able to exercise such undue influence on Government legislation.

MPs must be lobbied to grasp this historic moment to make our parliament truly representative of the country it serves using all-Black shortlists as a vital political method for change.

* Kingsley Abrams is a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Lambeth and a former national officer of the Labour Party Black Section.

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