BERNIE GRANT
Labour MP

A PASSIONATE LEFTWING MP AND TIRELESS ANTI-RACISM CAMPAIGNER, WHO WILL BE MISSED BY MANY

Bernie Grant, the Guyanese Labour MP for Tottenham since 1987 was a red rag to the bulls of rightwing politics. A black man with a leftwing trade union background, he was also an anti-apartheid campaigner, a supporter of revolutionary governments, feminist causes, black studies and a multi-racial school curriculum.

Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant was born in 1944 in Georgetown, Guyana, His parents, Eric and Lily were schoolteachers, and he attended St Stanislaus College, a Jesuit-run secondary school. The family arrived in England in 1963, and he attended Tottenham technical college, before doing a degree course in mining engineering at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh.

In the 70's Bernie began working for the Post Office at the International Telephone Exchange, in King's Cross. His radical engagement in student politics had already made him well known throughout the network of black students. Bernie soon had a chance to flex his muscles when the Post Office strike began, and Bernie became one of the chief organisers.

He then became a full-time official for the National Union of Public Employees. Haringey, where he had lived and been a student, was an almost inevitable port of call. The borough's growing ethnic population was confronted by hardline racist organisations. He became a local councillor and then leader of the council.

He became the figurehead and tireless activist in cases of official harassment or misconduct, notably the Joy Gardner case, where a black woman died after immigration officers entered her house and put her under restraint. And In 1985 when a riot exploded on Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate and a policeman, Keith Blakelock, was murdered, Bernie commented that the youths on the estate felt that the police had received "a bloody good hiding." The remark made him a notorious hate figure in the pages of the tabloids.

However, during the last 10 years of his life he suffered chronic diabetes which begun to disable him. In turn his condition gave him little time to attend the House of Commons.

Bernie Grant died at the age of 56 on the 8th of April 2000. He is survived by his three children from his first marriage and by his wife and devoted assistant, Sharon.

In 1987 he won the Tottenham Parliamentary seat, ousting Norman Atkinson, who had been the MP for 20 years.

He entered Parliament dressed in African robes, and his career entered a new more internationally-oriented phase.

When the volcano erupted in Monserrat a row broke out about British aid and policy towards the refugees. Typically the Monserratian chief minister immediately telephoned Bernie Grant and invited him to plead the island's case.

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