Ethnic minority MPs and early roots in Parliament
DURING spring last year, before Covid stuff took over, I was planning to devote a Post column to a kind of golden anniversary recollection of the June 1970 General Election.
It was a ‘turning point’ election I still recall exceptionally well – partly for the thrashing taken by the opinion polls that throughout the campaign had Harold Wilson’s Labour Party ahead, only for a famous ‘late swing’ (greatly boosted in the West Midlands and beyond by votes attracted by Enoch Powell) enabling Edward Heath’s Conservatives to snatch a dramatic victory.
Even more significant personally, it was the first election on which I’d been employed, and even minimally paid, to offer my ‘expert’ insight and views.
Of which I had plenty, including some thoroughly rehearsed but apparently spontaneous thoughts on Clapham’s successful Labour candidate, Dr David Pitt, in becoming, at his second attempt, the first black MP in the modern parliamentary era.
Except that he didn’t, following the second biggest Labour-to-Conservative swing in the country – exceeded only by that unseating Jennie (later Baroness) Lee in Cannock.
Pitt’s result was personally disappointing for us both, a minor loss for BBC Radio Norfolk listeners, and a major one for the UK House of Commons, forced to wait a further 17 years before the Labour quartet of Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz would be celebrated as the first ethnic minority MPs elected in the modern era.
I should explain that one reason I was especially keen that that honour should have been David Pitt’s was that I knew lots about him, as he featured prominently in my sadlynever-to-be-actually-completed PhD thesis.
It was about the operation and particularly the elected members of the Greater London Council, the top tier of London local government from 1965 until abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1985.
It was a completely novel institution and attracted a diverse range of councillors, including David Pitt: Caribbean-born in Grenada, seriously clever, won scholarship to study medicine at Edinburgh University, returned to West Indies,
joint-founded West Indies National (Socialist) Party, returning post-war to the UK to open a genuine community medical practice in London’s Euston area.
He first stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate for Hampstead in 1959, receiving racist death threats for his pains.
He lost the election, but instead founded the Campaign Against
Racial Discrimination, and got elected first to the London County Council, then to its successor, the GLC – of which, by the time I talked him into a personal interview, he was deputy chair of the council, and the most hospitable and accommodating of subjects.
He later became the GLC’s first
ethnic minority chairman, and in 1975 finally made it to Parliament’s Upper House as Baron Pitt of both the North London and Grenada Hampsteads – surely another first.
None of which, sadly, quite earns him a mention in the House of Commons Library’s absorbing recent production: Ethnic Diversity in Politics and Public Life.
It summarises itself as a report on the currently 14% of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in a range of public positions across the UK. But in places it’s much more, particularly the Parliament chapter with its table of a dozen ‘Historical Ethnic Minority MPs’ from 1767 to 1922.
Yes, 1767. One at least I already knew: the memorably named Henry Redhead Yorke. As an erstwhile ginge myself (honestly – check out historic Google images!), it was the Redhead bit that immediately fascinated me when I happened across Amanda Goodrich’s 2019 book about him. That and the equally weird fact that Yorke really was a Whig/Liberal MP during the 1840s for the city of … York.
And indeed, until Goodrich researched his almost caricatured
life of a Victorian English gentleman – married to an aristocrat’s daughter, living in posh Eaton Square, in an age of few cameras and even fewer curious politics research students – that was what the definitely not titian-haired fellow was apparently taken to be.
Nowadays, though, Yorke crops up quite regularly in Black History Months – genuinely enough, for, while his mother was English and there’s some uncertainty about his actual skin colour, his father was son of an Antiguan slave and her middle-class ‘owner’.
But, while Yorke was almost the first of these ‘Historical ethnic minority MPs’ of whom I personally became aware, the diligent House of Commons Library moles have discovered a full dozen elected before the first Labour Government in 1923.
The first, they currently reckon, was James Townsend. One of 12 children of an English/African/ Dutch mother and English father (also an MP), he first entered Parliament at a 1767 by-election in West Looe, Cornwall, which he may or may not previously have visited.
He lost it in 1774, but would get himself re-elected in 1782 for Calne in Wiltshire. Meanwhile, he turned his political attention to the Corporation of the City of London, becoming successively an Alderman, Sheriff, and in 1772/3 defeating the radical journalist and politician, John
Wilkes, to become almost certainly the City’s first ‘black’ Lord Mayor.
A pretty impressive ‘double first’, you’d think, but evidently insufficiently eminent, pathbreaking or comic to merit an English Heritage blue plaque – like Sid James, Willie Rushton, Terry Scott, and, I’m pleased to report from the London Borough of Camden: “Lord Pitt of Hampstead (1913-94). Physician and civil rights campaigner; worked here 1950-84” – and jolly well earned it.
... a pretty impressive double first – but insufficiently eminent, to merit a blue plaque