Christina Farr speaks to Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith, Shaun Bailey
Politician and youth worker Shaun Bailey, an under 40, British Afro-Caribbean who grew up in a council house in North Kensington asks the question that matters: “Why should someone like me have to stay close to the street?”
The Notting Hill Carnival exemplifies both the best and the worst aspects of London life. Thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds flock there every summer, drawn in by the cultural diversity and the music that pumps through the streets of Ladbroke Grove in a festival of colour and movement.
There is a darker side, however, with hundreds of armed police attempting in vain to prevent the inevitable violence – usually gang related- that occurs year after year. While street violence never fails to attract the attention of the news-casters, the story that remains untold is of the poor, young Afro-Caribbean dancers who sashay through the streets which were once their homes. They cannot afford to live in affluent West London anymore.
Unfortunately for those who’d like to sweep under the rug London’s ‘seedy’ underbelly, Shaun Bailey, whose politics were shaped on those very streets, has experienced this poverty and has seen this crime. As a result he is one of the few politicians who are not afraid to confront the social problems that need to be addressed: poverty, education, housing, to name a few. In fact, as a youth worker, it was his relationships with both the criminally involved and the dispossessed at his centre ‘MyGeneration’ in Ladbroke Grove that convinced Bailey that he would no longer be a man of words but of action, starting in West London and reverberating throughout the country. His political awakening came from the kind of honesty that you can only find on the streets, when he was informed just after he had just picked up a friend’s boyfriend from jail that he was not doing enough. “She said to me, Shaun, you should be showing our boys, not just telling them.”
It’s at ‘MyGeneration’ where I meet Bailey to discuss the next item on his agenda: his campaign to be elected the Conservative MP for Hammersmith. Facing stiff competition, Bailey is used to having to defend himself. And that includes against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, jokingly described by Bailey as “easy to deal with compared with the residents of Hammersmith”. His clear message to his opponents is that no amount of intimidation will make him shut up and he will not give in without a fight. One such example of criticism was when Bailey was bluntly told recently that he would never be successful in politics due to his unrelenting honesty. He responded with his usual toughness: “I’m not dying to be an MP. I will get over it.”
If Bailey were confronted with the choice of being politically successful or losing his integrity, there’s no contest: he both jokes and threatens that he will continue to be “honest to the point of trouble”. However, when he speaks with immense pride of the Hammersmith residents, the politically active, tough-talking citizens with whom he has been involved in various successful campaigns, including banning a strip club from the local area and revoking licensing laws on cheap liquor, he takes on a different tone and admits: “I have to confess I do want to be an MP. I want to have conversations and make a lot of noise.”
Bailey’s version of politics is very much based on the needs of the people he represents and he seems utterly adverse to the dirty politics and the PR machines. He sees himself as answerable and accountable only to his own conscience and when it appears to fail, to his community. And this is the way Bailey wants it: “I have nowhere to hide. I try not to do things unless I’m prepared to answer for them.” I personally experienced a small fraction of this honesty when I questioned Bailey on why a young, 21-year-old like myself should become politically involved. He incited me to action and informed me that my age was absolutely no excuse: “If you were a councillor today you would just about be our youngest one. Does it make a difference? Not a shadow of a doubt.” I don’t hear such frankness every day and this is apparently because the best politicians, according to Bailey, are either “elderly or full of integrity”. This is why he so admires Ken Clarke who could retire tomorrow and is subsequently “telling it the way he believes it. That kind of honesty is refreshing”.
Bailey is the latter, full of integrity, the antithesis to the suave, charming and dishonest career politician that is associated with the highest levels of partisan politics. Bailey believes it’s these people that are a big part of the wider problem of the lack of trust between politicians and the public: they are unconvincing as “they don’t have something in their life that ties them to reality. Tony Blair, for example, is a convincing statesmen but he’s shallow.”
According to Bailey, this is because many of these career politicians lose themselves once they become well-known and they adopt the obvious line in the hope that they might swiftly move up the party ladder. On the surface, his straight-talking approach appears at odds with the rest of his party, the Conservative Party, many of whom appear to be the perfect examples of these career politicians, conventionally conceived of as being backwards and out of touch with reality. However, Bailey is eager to dispel this stereotype, which he believes originates from the New Labour propaganda machine. “Most of the progressive policies come from the Conservative party and half our councillors our women.”
As an example of a politician who forms his own ideas, Barack Obama is a figure that Bailey often praises and he clarifies that Obama should be seen not as a “black politician but a politician who happens to be black”. However, Obama is just one man, important as he is, and for Bailey it’s nowhere near enough. He believes that it’s necessary for a healthy, ethnically diverse society to see more non-white men and women becoming school teachers, lawyers or doctors who will lead by example, bringing today’s youth out of poverty and dependency. Bailey’s aspirations rest on the next generation, who he hopes will surpass the achievements of his own and in the future, “it will become the norm for black children to see black people doing well. Eventually it will be just people doing well but we’re not there yet”.
As for the question on everyone’s lips, will there be an equivalent to Obama here in the UK? Bailey responds with conviction that the political system in this country was designed to be slow, “a war of attrition” but he remains hopeful that it will not be too many years before much needed change will occur: “Greater numbers and new types of people will make a change. I hope that will be the case at the next election but the system is bigger than any one man. It will take time.”
When asked to describe his kind of politics in a nutshell, he immediately responds: “I’m straight talking and from the street. If it needs to be said then I’ll say it.” This is his forte and his legacy; like Barack Obama and other hard-working black men and women achieving their dreams, Bailey hopes his success will send a message both in his community and eventually to the country as a whole: “I want to go on a bit further and show young white, black and poor people, everybody, that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.”
Christina Farr - www.sevenglobal.org
April 3, 2009