City’s first black lord mayor to take office

LEEDS CITY Council has announced that its first black mayor will take office later this year.

It was announced yesterday at a meeting of the full council that Councillor Eileen Taylor will become the city’s 126th Lord Mayor following the authority’s annual general meeting on May 23.

Coun Taylor’s father came to England in the early 1960s as part of the Windrush generation and she joined him in Leeds in the early 1970s when she was just a teenager.

Coun Taylor, inset, studied at Park Lane College and then began working for the NHS in the Learning Disability and Mental Health department from the age of 19 until 2012, when she retired early to concentrate in local politics.

Her work in the NHS inspired her to get involved in politics, which led to her being first elected as a councillor to represent the Chapel Allerton ward in 2008.

Coun Taylor, said: “I feel extremely delighted and grateful for the huge honour of representing our fantastic city of Leeds by becoming the new Lord Mayor for 2019-2020. Being the first black Lord Mayor and a woman is a position which I am very proud of and really shows how great and diverse our city is.”

Those arriving in the UK between 1948 and 1971 from Caribbean countries were labelled the Windrush generation – a reference to the ship MV Empire Windrush. The ship arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on June 22, 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK.

Early last year, Prime Minister Theresa May had to apologise to Caribbean leaders over deportation threats which were made to the children of Commonwealth citizens, who despite living and working in the UK for decades, were told they are living here illegally because of a lack of official paperwork.