MAKING BLACK HISTORY SPECIAL
BREAKING NEWS – Diane Abbott, Labour MP, to be the first Black person to speak for the party at Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament
when she stands in for party leader Jeremy Corbyn this week

MPs Butler and Abbott, investment manager Miller lead in the public realm

By Thomas L Blair © 1^st October 2019

“Black history is British history”, proclaimed Dawn Butler MP Labour’s Shadow Women and Equalities Secretary at the Labour Party Conference 2019 in Brighton.

Unleashing a staccato of damning phrases, the first elected African-Caribbean woman to become a Government Minister in UK said:

• “There needs to be a greater understanding of Empire, colonialism, and imperial migration.
• False framing of these histories reinforced the artificial separation between their history and our history. It reinforces an ‘us’ and ‘them’.
• This false division can develop into hate”.

These ills must be remedied, said Butler, 49, of British Jamaican parentage. And she promised aid to the most affected groups:

“If you are in social housing, if you are LGBT+, if you are straight, if you are a traveller, if you struggle to pay rent, if you wear a hijab, turban, a cross, if you are black, white, Asian…you  have a future and you are worthy of equality dignity and respect”.

Emancipation Education in schools will trail blaze this promise, she said. And pledged support for the Bernie Grant youth leadership programme, named after the first Black male MP.

Tories: no vision, only division

Diane Abbott MP directed her fire at the Prime Minister.  “Boris Johnson and his Tories have no vision for our country. Only division, said Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, speaking to the Labour Party conference.

As she warmed up to her theme, Abbott, 65, said: “the government’s own race disparity audit highlighted that its policies have had a detrimental effect on Black, Asian minority ethnic people”.

To remedy these deficiencies, Abbott of Jamaican heritage and Britain’s first Black woman MP let forth a volley of promises:

• “We WILL end the Windrush scandal. We WILL ensure justice for Grenfell.
• And we will uphold all the rights of the EU 3 Million.
• We will tackle the scourge of knife crime and the underlying causes of crime.
• We will repeal the 2014 Immigration Act and end the Tory ‘hostile environment’ “.

Veteran of the Black Radical tradition of Bernie Grant and the first Black MPs elected in 1987Abbott pledged:  “We will create a standalone women and equalities department headed for the first time by a Secretary of State”.

She hammered home this crucial policy, saying “the fact is that Black women can be discriminated against because they are both Black and a woman”. The conference exploded with a round of applause for the country’s first black woman MP as well as the longest serving Black MP in the House of Commons.

Forcing government’s hand

Jubilant Gina Singh Miller celebrated her latest victory against the government.  The momentous ruling that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had unlawfully suspended Parliament was a triumph.  After all, she did the leg work, took the case to court and put in the time, said a seasoned observer.

Unbowed, the investment manager and philanthropist has faced years of gender bias, death threats and racist taunts. Writing in her acclaimed book RISE, Gina Miller, 54, of British Guyana heritage, said: “When we speak up as women, we must own the space we are in and not let others encroach on it. That’s not a hobby: that’s a

mission”.

Noted for business-like approach to social issues, a kind of “caring capitalism”,  Miller wrote “No one is ever going to convince me racism is acceptable, just as I’ll never believe that giving women the right to vote was wrong.”

Called “a heroine for our times” Miller’s book RISE spells out her “Life Lessons in SpeakingOut, Standing Tall & Leading the Way”.

TOGETHER We Advance Further, Faster                                             

MPs Butler and Abbott and entrepreneur Miller, have raised the concerns and perspectives of women of colour in public affairs. Moreover, they have targeted a can’t-miss opportunity to place gender and racial equality in the annals of Black History and British governance.

Sources
Saturday 21 September 2019 / 4:19 PM Dawn Butler / Women and Equalities
Sunday 22 September 2019 / 2:34 PM Diane Abbott
Gina Miller https://binged.it/2oVK3Rw
Gina Miller photo (Picture: Tolga AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images) appears in METRO 25 September 2019

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Prof Thomas L Blair is a leading digital provider of informed actionable insights on Black British people and their homelands in the African Diaspora. His Chronicleworld Weblog chronicleworld.co.uk  founded in 1997 is honoured in the British Library’s archive of “social, historic and culturally significant web-based material from the UK domain”.