Stormzy keen to perform at Stephen Lawrence concert
Stormzy is in talks to perform at a memorial concert dedicated to Stephen Lawrence, to mark the 25th anniversary of his murder.
The musician met Lawrence’s mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, at the Brit Awards last Sunday; she is currently working with Universal to put on a series of shows dedicated to the memory of her son, telling the Mirror that the grime star was keen to lend his support. “Stormzy spoke to me about getting involved. He’s amazing,” she stated. “We’d like to put on a few different concerts around London rather than one single memorial.”
Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in Well Hall, Eltham on the evening of 22 April 1993. After an initial investigation, five suspects were arrested but not convicted. A public inquiry in 1998, however, concluded that the police investigation had been influenced
by institutional racism, with the law being changed in 2005 to repeal the double jeopardy rule in murder cases, allowing a retrial upon new and compelling evidence.
Doreen Lawrence has spent years campaigning for better reforms of the police service, establishing The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, and was awarded the OBE in 2003 for services to community relations. She has stated this will be her last year of campaigning. “Then it’s time to move on,” she added.
Stormzy won both best British male solo and the British album of the year at the Brits, closing his performance at the ceremony with lyrics aimed at the Prime Minister’s handling of the Grenfell Tower tragedy: “Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell? What, you thought we just forgot about Grenfell? You criminals, and you’ve got the cheek to call us savages. You should do some jail time, you should pay some damages, you should burn your house down and see if you can manage this.”
The PM’s official spokesman told a Westminster briefing: “The Prime Minister has been very clear that Grenfell was an unimaginable tragedy that should never have happened and must never happen again. She’s determined that the public inquiry will discover not just what went wrong but why the voices of the people of Grenfell were ignored over so many years. In terms of support for the people affected by this tragedy, more than £58m has been committed.”
“There have still been no arrests, hundreds of survivors remain homeless, and 297 other towers in the UK are still covered in flammable cladding,” campaigner Yvette Williams recently stated. “Furthermore, requests from survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire to appoint a diverse decision-making panel to sit alongside the head of the public inquiry have been denied.”