Word: labored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people are nonwhite -- mostly of Asian or Afro-Caribbean origin -- there have been no nonwhite members in the House of Commons in 58 years. Three Asians served briefly between 1892 and 1929, but no black has ever taken a seat. This time three nonwhite candidates, all running on the Labor Party ticket, are expected to be among the 650 members of the new Commons. Says Marc Wadsworth, a black television journalist who is not a candidate: "Our time has come...
Political momentum appears to be on the side of further change: last year more than 140 nonwhite candidates were elected to local councils in Greater London. In the current campaign for Parliament, the Tories, the Labor Party and the Social Democratic-Liberal Party Alliance are fielding a total of 27 nonwhite candidates. Virtually assured of winning are Lawyer Paul Boateng, who was born in Ghana; local Council Leader Bernie Grant, a Guyanan; and former local Councilor Diane Abbott, who was born in London of West Indian parents. All are Labor candidates in London constituencies with substantial Labor majorities. More than...
Future gains, however, may not come easily, in part because of Labor's poor showing in opinion polls. As the political home for most Asian and black voters, the party has long championed racial equality. But its leaders are fearful of a white backlash if Labor appears to support too many black candidates, some of whom are outspoken radicals associated with the party's "loony left." Racism also poses a formidable electoral hurdle. "In the U.S., at least it is never questioned that blacks are Americans," says Boateng. "The tragedy is that however long you are here, even...
More militant blacks have meanwhile seized public attention with calls for affirmative action at the highest levels of the Labor Party. Journalist Wadsworth, for example, is chairman of the four-year-old Black Sections National Committee, which demands that nonwhites be named to all of Labor's decision-making groups. Party Leader Neil Kinnock, eager to soften Labor's radical image, is in no mood to bow to such demands. Nonetheless, Black Sections leaders have turned up the heat. At their fourth annual conference last March in Nottingham -- from which white journalists were banned -- delegates called for the repeal...
...parliamentary- election campaign last week, the portraits that political leaders painted of their country were starkly different -- and the conflicting images at once turned into political battle flags. To the strains of Brahms' Fourth Symphony in London's Queen Elizabeth Conference Center, Neil Kinnock, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, strode onto the podium to describe a joyless, divided Britain, an "economically and socially disabled" country afflicted with Dickensian misery. Two hours later, at Conservative Party headquarters near Westminster Abbey, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at the helm for the past eight years, evoked a very different nation, one with...