Giving Credit to the Long Unsung Grassroots Heroes of Newham
By Martin Spafford
The fast pace and odour of power, the frenetic building boom, the obvious wealth of whole sections of the city — these can create a wholly mistaken view of London and its deep inequalities. Parts of east and south London are as isolated and distant from prosperity as many towns in the north of England. According to the government in 2015, seven of the ten worst local authorities in the whole of the UK for older people’s deprivation are in London, as are eight out of the worst ten for child deprivation: Newham is third and seventh respectively.* It takes longer to make the 13-mile journey from Chelsea to Beckton by tube and DLR (Docklands Light Railway) than it does for a train to cover the 120 miles from London to the city of Birmingham.
This makes the Beckton Globe Learning Centre an ideal venue for Journey to Justice. It is located right in the heart of a working-class community in the poorest end of a borough that shares with Sunderland a story of dying docks, collapsing industries and the feeling of being totally left behind. The difference in Beckton is that the poorest people can see ostentatious wealth on their doorsteps, as expensive apartments spring up on the footprints of forgotten industrial plants. Nevertheless, next door to a huge ASDA supermarket and a thriving secondary school, the warm and welcoming Globe is always busy and buzzing.
Two days before the launch of the Journey to Justice exhibition, it seemed doomed by the weather. The core exhibition materials were stranded in snowbound Newcastle and couldn’t be transported on time; the heating had failed in the youth centre sports hall; and a key speaker, our patron Leyla Hussein, was stuck in the USA with flights to the UK cancelled. However, we had all put so much into creating a fantastic line up of events that nothing was going to prevent us from going ahead.
As we set up, surrounded by students concentrating on their assignments, families were arriving downstairs for a film showing and choirs were practising in the side rooms. We knew that all 120 advance places had been booked and that more people had said they were coming — but would snow and rain mean poor attendance? Well, by the time the young Newham choir leaders, Amina and Itoya, opened by getting us all to sing “Oh Freedom”, the place was so packed that the large team of Journey to Justice London volunteers — and several latecomers — had to stand. We counted 143 people! Naomi Scarlett — local singer and DJ and our emcee — then got things rolling. We had the first of several speeches by Newham activists, Amina Gichinga on how the Renters Union are organising and supporting people in private rented accommodation. No issue, perhaps, is more pressing here than housing.
Then, a real emotional treat: a 1996 ITV film made by Year 7 pupil Shamima Patel and her class, who campaigned successfully to stop the deportation of their Angolan classmate — followed by Forest Voices singing “Let Natasha Stay”, their song created in tribute to that campaign. This was followed by Maria Xavier, Newham community worker, telling the story of her railwayman father Asquith who singlehandedly overturned the ‘colour bar’ at Euston Station. As she ended, the exceptional youth choir NewYVC sang “Lineage” and the Tanzanian song “Imbakwa” (Sing from the Heart), followed by Solid Harmony — a choir based at Newham’s sixth form college — with “Justice for All”, created especially for the event.
Next, another local activist, Halima Hamid, spoke with courage and honesty about her Health is Wealth organisation, which addresses mental health issues locally. She was followed by internationally acclaimed Bengali musician Gouri Choudhury who taught us all to sing “Jodi tor dak shune”. I introduced the local stories in the exhibition, which show that it was unsung grassroots campaigners in Newham who first won key advances benefiting people all over the UK — free legal aid, tower block safety, combatting police racism, and providing safety for women with learning disabilities suffering domestic violence. Then Goga Khan, the youngest of the “Newham 8” whose landmark case in the early 1980s brought hundreds of Newham school students out on strike, told his story and reflected on its significance while thanking Steven Timms MP, who was sitting in the front row, for his support all those years ago. As Goga spoke, I looked out over our audience in all its diversity and at the young people of colour happily using the library and thought how this was the very part of town that Black and Asian youngsters could not set foot in a generation ago for fear of extreme violence. Cases such as “Newham 8” helped drive the change.
But communities face other threats now. We heard, and participated in, a deeply moving performance by the ASTA singers, a group of residents of Royal Docks, a community ignored as they suffer isolation and an epidemic of murderous youth violence. Older and younger residents together sang their own composition, “We Have a Voice”. Then the formal event concluded with an exquisite rendering by Solid Harmony of Mary J. Blige’s “Mighty River”, dedicated by the choir to the river Thames.
We’d thought the weather and the absence of our core exhibition materials might mean that few would linger. In fact, after the MP and Peter Mawengi — a young member of NewYVC — cut the ribbon, people stayed for ages. One unexpected result of the nonappearance of our core exhibition (about civil rights in the United States) was that people really focused on the local stories of the Plaistow Land Grabbers, Stardust Asian Youth Centre, the Domestic Violence Revolutionaries, the Poor Man’s Lawyer, the Ronan Point Safety Campaign, Asquith Xavier taking on British Railways, and the school students’ strikes in support of the “Newham 8”.
Our exhibition arrived five days later, on International Women’s Day, and is open to the public until April 30th. Please support the many events coming up over the next two months: http://journeytojustice.org.uk/projects/journey-to-justice-newham/
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*Newham is an urban borough in east London. Beckton is a neighbourhood in that borough.
