TMP Online

Senator Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary on Saturday taking 55% of the vote to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 27%. Notably, he picked up a greater proportion of white Democrats’ votes than expected.

The Democratic nomination juggernaut swings into Florida today for the controversial primary there which, like Michigan’s, has been outlawed by the Democratic Party. Floridian Democratic delegates will not be able to take their seats at the party’s national convention as the state party is being penalised for holding its primary before 5 February.

Obama has not campaigned in Florida but Clinton has, and it is widely believed she may challenge the national party’s ruling as commentators predict the race could come down to the delegate count at the Democratic Party’s national convention in August. A candidate needs 2,025 delegates to win the nomination and it is estimated that Obama currently has 63 delegates, whilst Clinton has 48.

Yesterday Obama received a massive boost with the endorsement of Senator Edward Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were both assassinated in the 1960s. Flanked by ”JFK’s” daughter Caroline and his son Congressman Patrick Kennedy, “Ted” Kennedy declared “I feel change in the air”.  He went on,
“With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.
“With Barack Obama we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.”

Comparing Obama to his older brother JFK, Kennedy said,
“There was another time, when another young candidate was running for president and challenging America to cross a new frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic president.
“That president, Harry Truman, urged patience. And John Kennedy replied: ‘The world is changing. The old ways will not do. It is time for a new generation of leadership.’ So it is with Barack Obama.
“[Barack Obama] will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past.
“He is a leader who sees the world clearly without being cynical. He is a fighter who cares passionately about the causes he believes in, without demonising those who hold a different view.”

Over 20 states vote in primaries and caucuses next Tuesday in a race that appears to be wide open.  You can watch Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama below.

TMP readers will have been interested to hear that Helen Grant (right), a black, female lawyer was selected as the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate in the safe Tory seat of Maidstone and the Weald last weekend. 

Helen Grant is highly likely to succeed the sitting Conservative MP, Ann Widdecombe, in the seat.  She is the owner of Grant Solicitors a specialist law firm dealing with the problems of family breakdown in London, Surrey and Kent. 

Of Grant’s selection, Conservative Party Chair, Caroline Spelman MP, said “Helen’s selection as the candidate for Maidstone and The Weald is great news and further proof of the changes that have happened in the Conservative Party under David Cameron.

“As you’d expect the calibre of applicants for this Parliamentary seat was very high indeed and Helen’s success is a credit to her and the local association.
“Helen has a high standard to live up to but I have no doubt she will excel.”

But controversy erupted over the weekend following revelations in the Mail on Sunday that Grant was only recently a member of the Labour Party.  Commenting on her past association with the Labour Party, Grant said,

“I have never been a member of the Croydon Labour party. I was a member of the Reigate & Banstead branch from mid 2004. I never attended any of their meetings, made no donations and did no canvassing or campaigning work for them at all. I have never denied my association with the Labour party and talked of it in a newspaper interview published in the summer of 2006.

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Despite a difficult two months, during which the Evening Standard newspaper has waged a concerted campaign against him and his advisors, and Channel 4 broadcast a “Dispatches” programme highly critical of him, the latest You Gov/ITV poll shows that London Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone has increased his lead in the polls over his Conservative rival, Boris Johnson MP.

The poll shows Livingstone on 44%, whilst Johnson – who is strongly supported by the Evening Standard – is on 40%, with the Liberal Democrats Brian Paddick on 8%. Notably the poll was conducted after the broadcast of the Dispatches programme which was widely reported.

A spokesperson for Livingstone’s campaign said:
“This is a welcome opening up of Ken’s lead, especially as Internet polling has always underestimated Ken’s support compared to actual elections and other opinion polls.
“The election for Mayor will be decided on the key issues of transport, crime, affordable housing, good community relations and the environment and Londoners will refuse to be distracted by nonsense and falsifications being spouted out daily in media storms from his opponents.
“Ken will run on his record and extending London’s success into a third term. He has already announced two new commitments – to extend the hours of the Freedom Pass to a twenty four hour service and his plan to extend student travel discounts – and others will follow on the environment, crime, good community relations, transport and housing.”

Meanwhile, Johnson’s campaign came under fire during the weekend amid charges of conflict of interest when it was revealed that his London mayoral campaign is receiving financial support from a controversial Japanese company that has clashed with Livingstone’s office over multimillion-pound plans for development in the capital.

The Mayoral poll takes place in May, later this year.

TMP columnist, Lola Adesioye, reflects on the performance of Nigeria’s new president and what the future holds for Africa’s most populous nation.

In 2007 the world began to see Africa through different eyes. The renowned Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference held its TED Global event in Africa for the first time; the global business community woke up to the fact that China has steadily been increasing its investment in Africa over the past few years because it views Africa as a worthwhile opportunity, and glossy magazine Vanity Fair even ran an edition devoted entirely to the continent. No longer was the world being fed African sob stories: there was finally some acknowledgement that there is more to Africa than just HIV/Aids and starvation.

The positive stories emerging from Africa have continued this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. African delegates such as Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua have reported that African leaders are “getting it right” and “people have learned what not to do”.

Whilst it is extremely important that another, more positive, side of Africa is being depicted, my recent trip to Nigeria has shown me that it is also important not to over-blow what is happening on the continent. I would disagree with Yar’Adua that African leaders are ‘getting it right’ – many are not. In fact, Yar’Adua (below) is yet to prove – through actions – that he himself is getting it right! The current state of affairs in Kenya is yet another example that all is not ok. The recent violence and civil unrest seen in Kenya is unsettling because of the ease with which the situation was ignited and has since escalated. It is a reminder that things in Africa, despite improvements, are still not on firm ground.

Yar’Adua’s words at the WEF are particularly interesting because Nigeria - his country - is one that still suffers from a multitude of dire problems. Basic provisions and amenities in Nigeria fail everyday. The power sector is overloaded: the provision of electricity is extremely unstable; electricity can go off several times a day and in some cities, like Ibadan, people can go months without it. In Lagos, road travel is dangerous; cars travel in every which direction with few traffic controls in place. Travel is also made extremely stressful by tyre-destroying potholes, and short distances can take hours to cover due to the sheer scale of traffic. The list goes on…

Nigeria is not short of money – it is the richest country in Western Africa – and many of its shortcomings quite simply have no other cause besides sheer greed and inept leadership. Nevertheless, despite controversy surrounding President Yar’Adua’s election – it is alleged that he was put into power by former president Obasanjo and that the election itself was rigged – he appears, publicly at least, to be making the right noises.

This week Yar’Adua openly criticized the Obasanjo administration, stating that “the $10billion invested in the energy sector between 2000 and 2007 has not translated into power generation, transmission and distribution”. He has also confirmed his support for the removal of the immunity clause for public officials and talked about pressing forward with anti-corruption measures, acknowledging that “…some companies have benefited materially from corruption, while we, the governments and the nations, are usually at the receiving end, because very few people benefit from corrupt actions. In nations where corruption thrives, the vast majority are shortchanged, so the measures and the steps you are taking really require courage.”

Yar’Adua has a mammoth task on his hands if he is to undo the many years of degradation and disrespect that Nigeria has suffered at the hands of previous administrations. Nigerians can only hope and pray that he is more than just talk and he will, unlike his predecessors, benefit rather than impoverish the country. Reactions to him are mixed. Nigerians hope he will make a change, whilst fearing at the same time that he is just like those who have come before.

I would like to see Yar’Adua encourage Nigeria’s extremely wealthy and well-connected elite to engage in philanthropy (of which there is little) and use their own money to also benefit the country and the majority of its poor inhabitants. The notion of taking care of one’s own individual interests at the expense, or in spite, of others has affected Nigeria from the highest level down, and must be challenged if change is to be made for the good of Nigeria as a whole.

I am cautiously optimistic about Nigeria – and Africa’s – future. The change that is most needed will take decades, if not centuries, to achieve but must be actioned on a day to day level, starting yesterday. If, as Yar’Adua says, leaders now know ‘what not to do’, let’s see them turn words into actions and do what’s best for their countries and the continent.

Lola Adesioye is a freelance writer who specializes in commenting on socio-political and cultural issues affecting the black community.

TMP asked Ade Sawyerr what it would take to get him to join the Labour Party.  Here he explains what Gordon Brown will need to do to seduce him.

What would it take for me to join the Labour Party in the UK? Surprisingly, it would take a lot of persuasion from Gordon Brown the current leader; this is because I have not seen much difference between the policies of the Labour Party and those of the Conservative Party.

I came into Britain near the start of the Thatcher years, in between when I was accepted into business school and when I arrived here from Ghana, there had already been changes – the fees for overseas students were doubled as soon as she came into power – so I was quite ready for the rough ride of monetarism without a care for whether one was a member of the Commonwealth or from any other country without ties with the mother country.

I watched the Labour Party lose an election in 1983 when there were 3 million people unemployed in the country; their major concerns then were more about unilateral nuclear disarmament and whether black politicians in the Labour Party could or could not form their own sections. At that point I realised that the Labour Party was still playing the big paternalistic imperialist, something it still tries to do. So though I continued to vote for it, I did not join the Labour Party.

After Kinnock (right) took over he transformed the party and though he lost the election of 1987, he started making the party electorally viable. But it took the elections of 1992, after Margaret Thatcher had been thrown out by her own party in 1990, for the Labour Party to make a surge. John Major had supervised a Conservative Party that was tearing itself apart with concerns about Europe and was reeling under allegations of sleaze. But in the 1992 elections, Labour was too triumphantlist and the tax calculations of John Smith just did not add up.

So after the great work that Kinnock had done in modernising the party, kicking out the Militant Tendency and purging some of the loony left ideologies, he handed over smoothly to John Smith who made the party even more respectable.

After John Smith passed on we all expected that the senior partner in the Brown-Blair tag team (below) of high performers in parliament would have followed Smith. But Brown passed up that chance; some believe that he was outwitted by meddlesome Mandelson to allow Blair ascend to higher office as leader of the Labour Party.

Soon we had Emily’s list, all women shortlists, to increase the number of women in parliament but no such list for black candidates, I did not blink – maybe the signs were there but I could not discern them. Blair led the party to a spectacular election victory in 1997 – there was so much excitement; the party of the masses had come into power and the politics for the working class back in fashion.

I did not worry too much that they were taxing the super rich corporations to pay for the National Health Service or that they had given the Bank of England its independence. I was actually impressed that they had promised the country fiscal prudence and that the economy would be left to grow at a faster pace than the Conservative Party had left it.

I even laughed off their desire to turn this country “cool”, in line with their modern agenda and their decision to pump some much needed money into the health service. I was ecstatic that they dared to put through the proposals for the minimum wage and less so that they screwed single mothers for the little that the state provided. Elections are won at the centre, so it is all right to ensure that the middle class stays the course with you.

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TMP columnist Tim Caswell returns and ponders the future for Britain’s three main political parties.

The Liberal Democrats increasingly remind me of Newcastle United. They have a distinguished history and a loyal band of friendly fans, but they never win anything and change their leader frequently. The latest looks a bit like Tony Blair and sounds identical to David Cameron (Nick Clegg that is, not Kevin Keegan). But there the similarity ends.

Keegan’s third coming was heralded by near hysterical adulation by the Geordie faithful and more than a modicum of interest, curiosity and goodwill from the population as a whole. Mr. Clegg assumed office with the endorsement of just over a third of his party’s members and was met with a wave of complete indifference from the general public. A third of the Lib Dem membership voted for his opponent, another Blair/Cameron clone; the other third abstained. It is hard not to marvel at the level of apathy entailed in an abstention by 20,000 people in their own party’s leadership election. But what is really surprising is not the narrow margin of the victory (dolly the sheep versus dolly the sheep was never going to be a landslide) but the size of the party’s membership, apparently a mere 60,000.

Labour’s membership has fallen from 405,000 in 1997 to less than 200,000 ten years later, a loss of one every twenty minutes. Cameron’s Conservatives claim a larger membership than Labour, which is plausible as it is rumoured that in some parts of Surrey buying a double Gin and tonic at the local “Con Club” qualifies one for life membership, if not a peerage, when they return to power.

Mathematicians among you will have already calculated that this gives the three “big” parties a combined mass membership of less than half a million in a nation where the National Trust has more than a million members and more than three and a half million of us belonged to a political party in 1950. Yes, membership has declined all over the world but in Britain participation and turnout are now almost the lowest in Europe, although the percentage of British adults who tell pollsters that they are “very or fairly interested” in politics has remained constant at 60% for the last thirty years.

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Senator Barack Obama (pictured left with Tyra Banks) is looking to regain the momentum in his pursuit of the US Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in South Carolina on Saturday, following Senator Hillary Clinton’s win in Nevada over the weekend.

Clinton won 51% of the vote to Obama’s 45% in the Nevada Democratic Party caucus. However Obama took 13 delegates to Clinton’s 12 in the contest. The delegates, who will attend the Democratic Party’s national convention in August, will vote on who will be the party’s nominee in November’s presidential election. Former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards won just 4% of the vote and no delegates and Nevada effectively marks the end of his hopes of winning, though he has said he will press on.

In South Carolina, which returns 45 delegates to the Democratic Party’s national convention, almost double the number of Nevada, Obama has a 10.5% lead over Clinton in the most recent poll of polls. The support of African American voters who are said to make up approximately half of the Democrat electorate in South Carolina is said to be crucial to victory. According to some polls Obama won 80% of the African American vote in the Nevada caucus.

Clinton and Obama are to go head to head this evening in a televised debate and Obama has recorded an interview in which he has criticised Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, for the increasingly strident attacks former President Clinton (pictured right with Obama) has been making on the Obama campaign. In the interview which is to be aired on ABC television’s “Good Morning America” show shortly, Obama says:
“The former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.
“This has become a habit, and one of the things that we’re going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he’s making statements that are not factually accurate.”

TMP columnist Lola Adesioye, writing in the Guardian newspaper today, argues that integration and separation need not be polar opposites.  Presently based in New York Adesioye asks whats wrong with people choosing to live among people of their own race.  Noting the differences between the UK and the US, she says that:

“Londoners who visit New York are often shocked by the “segregation” of African-Americans and white Americans. In the US, people socialise and live within their own racial groups – according to one study, only 5%-10% of families live in integrated communities.”

To read her piece in full, click here.

Africans for labour is hosting a fundraising dinner and dance at the Holiday Inn Hotel, London Bloomsbury, Coran Street, London WC1N 1HF on Thursday 21 February 2008.

The organisation was set up to increase political awareness and to mobilise support in the African community for the Labour Party. It was established in 2006 at a time when the Conservative Party started to vociferously court the Black vote.

In recent months Conservative front bench spokesmen have regularly written for publications such as the Voice newspaper and have been seeking to build links with Britain’s Black churches. This prompted the journalist and Conservative supporter David Matthews (right) to write a article at the end of last year suggesting the Tories and the Black community were new “best friends”; TMP editor, Chuka Umunna’s response to that article can be read here.

The main speakers at the Africans for Labour event will be the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman QC MP, and the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. Tickets cost £50. For further information, email: africansforlabour@googlemail.com.

The House of Commons International Development Select Committee has just announced it is holding an inquiry into the Department for International Development’s (DFID) programme in Nigeria.

Nigeria is one of the largest and most populous countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite oil wealth, poverty levels are high with over 70 million people living on less than $1 a day and one in five children dying before the age of five. Nigeria receives relatively little development assistance per capita (around $6) compared to the average for sub-Saharan Africa (over $20). DFID’s programme in Nigeria has increased from £35 million in 2003/04 to £80 million in 2006/07 and to £100 million in 2007/08. Nigeria is one of 22 countries DFID will be monitoring in relation to progress towards its 2008-11 Public Service Agreement Delivery Agreement.

The inquiry will look into, amongst other things, DFID’s support for the electoral process and to the National Assembly, the role of civil society and DFID’s support for the development of voice and accountability, Economic growth and the impact of DFID’s programme in this area, and Policy coherence in the UK Government’s approach.

The Committee has invited individuals and organisations with relevant expertise and experience to submit written evidence and is particularly interested in receiving evidence from organisations in Nigeria. The deadline for submissions is 8 February 2008. For more information, log on to the committee’s website at www.parliament.uk/indcom.