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  The story about the storeman was originally relayed to Stern by a local freelance journalist, and he accepted this testimony as sufficient evidence for the existence of a ban. The council were not contacted for verification. The Mail on Sunday claimed that this was because the story was supplied to them on a Saturday when there are no council spokespeople available for comment. In turn, the council denied this and said that its spokespeople could be contacted on a Saturday via the council switchboard.

  On 9 March 1986, the Mail on Sunday published a small and misleading update on the bin liners story. Under the headline ‘Race peace in the bag’, we learn that ‘black dustbin liners at the centre of a council race storm are not to be banned after all’. Thus, in a typical journalistic move, what had previously been erroneously presented as fact was now re-presented as a proposal which had been subsequently withdrawn as a result of its being revealed by the paper. However, having its cake and eating it, it continued to publish indignant letters by readers who had apparently not read of this new twist to the story.

  ‘Barmy’ Bernie Grant

  Grant himself crops up in another story concerning alleged antiracist measures, only here the subject is language. On 25 May 1986 the Mail on Sunday’s Liz Lightfoot ran a piece under the headline ‘Bernie’s banter is baffling’, with the strap ‘Parents’ fury at Caribbean dialect lessons’. The article claimed that: ‘Bernie Grant, controversial leader of Haringey council, has caused uproar over a scheme to teach West Indian dialect in the borough’s schools. Black parents have told him they want their children taught English and maths instead of the dialect known as creole’. Condemnations by the West Indian Leadership Alliance and the local Conservative opposition leader were also reported, and Lightfoot’s piece concluded with various examples of creole: ‘An angry bus conductor might say “Gwan girl, yo too jerky pickmount. Me doing dis work for me eyes deh a me knees” or: “Stop being such a fussy old woman. I’ve been doing this job since I was kneehigh to a grasshopper”’.

  The story was picked up by a number of other papers. For example, the Sun (27 May) ran a leader entitled ‘Barmy party’, which introduced

  the latest wheeze from Barmy Bernie Grant. The leader of London’s Haringey Council wants children to be taught the West Indian dialect Creole and they will be understood in the backstreets of Kingston, Jamaica, and probably nowhere else in the world …. But don’t imagine that Bernie’s antics will afflict only one suffering part of London. Remember he is a parliamentary candidate for Labour at the next Election … Labour is now the Official Barmy Party!

  Illustrating the way in which these stories regularly travelled outside London, it also appeared in provincial newspapers, including the Shropshire Star (30 May) under the headline ‘Now time he was agoing’. ‘What I want to know,’ the writer asked, ‘is when Bernie Grant and his friends are going? The sooner and the farther the better. That may be Double Dutch. But do you get my drift?’

  This story appears to have been based on reports in local newspapers about a conference held in Haringey on the subject of Caribbean languages in schools. Originally, the Weekly Herald had reported the conference under the headline ‘Creole for kids?’ (15 May). This reported, correctly, that the conference was organised by Haringey Community Relations Council (and not by the London Borough of Haringey, as Lightfoot asserts). Moreover, the conference had the support of a number of black parents’ groups and was not universally opposed, as the Mail on Sunday’s report insisted. This aspect had come out quite clearly in the Times Educational Supplement’s 23 May report on the conference, headed ‘Black parents in Creole campaign’. Haringey went to considerable lengths to counter the allegations, even calling Liz Lightfoot into the press office and going through the copy line by line with her. In her defence, Lightfoot claimed that her report had been cut, and so may not have been ‘too clear’ in its final form, which raises the suspicion that, at the sub-editing stage, the story may have been deliberately ‘modified’ in order to suit the paper’s ideological position on matters such as this – not exactly an uncommon occurrence in sections of Fleet Street.

  The Sun managed to couple Bernie Grant to one of English society’s most routinely demonised groups, namely travellers.7 In an article on 4 November 1986 entitled ‘Bernie spends £½m on toilets for gypsies’, Phil Dampier reported that ‘Barmy council leader Bernie Grant is planning to spend nearly £½m of ratepayers’ money on 24 superloos for gypsies. The loony leftie is splashing out on behalf of roving Irish tinkers, even though many of his longterm council tenants have no INSIDE toilet’. Local Conservative councillors were quoted as denouncing such moves as ‘outrageous and extravagant’. Readers were also informed that, at one site, ‘12 families will each be treated to private bathrooms at a cost of £395,000’.

  The story, which would have been highly likely to outrage those Haringey tenants with inadequate toilets, is highly inaccurate and misleading. Far from buying bathrooms at a cost of some £33,000 each, as suggested, the council had moved to spend a total of £395,000 over the next twelve months on all facilities for all travellers’ sites. Of this sum, £333,000 was to be spent on the construction of twelve permanent pitches on Wood Green Common in accordance with the council’s statutory obligations under the Caravan Sites Act 1968 (in line with increasing hostility to travellers on all fronts, these obligations were later abolished by Section 80 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994). The remaining £60,000 was to be spent on improving the existing temporary sites. Phil Dampier declined to comment on his article.

  A more extensively reported story attempted to link Grant with another favourite target of the Tory tabloids, namely the then newly elected government of Nicaragua. Under the headline ‘Barmy Bernie is going coffee-potty’, with the strap ‘Staff must drink Marxist brew’, the Sun (5 December 1986) reported that ‘the leftwing council led by “Barmy” Bernie Grant has ordered its workers to show “solidarity” with Nicaragua… by drinking the Marxist country’s grotty coffee’. ‘Only beans from the red Central American state will be bought by the council’, it claimed, and ‘a spokesman for “Barmy” Bernie said, “We have decided to purchase this type of coffee as a gesture of solidarity”’. The Sun reporter assessed the merits of this decision by asking the opinion of a ‘top Mayfair coffee-seller’, and reported that the Nicaraguan blend, while costing the council ‘an extra £820 a year’, was of inferior quality. However, the article did contain an official denial from ‘a spokesman for “Barmy” Bernie’.

  In fact, all the central claims of the report are false. Neither the council nor Bernie Grant had issued an instruction for only Nicaraguan coffee to be drunk. However, the story received wide coverage in other tabloids. The Mail ran the story on the same day as the Sun under the banner ‘Marxist beans Bernie’s cup of coffee’. The Labour-supporting Mirror also ran a nearly identical story, under the by-line of John McShane, on the same day under the familiar-sounding headline ‘Barmy Bernie goes coffee potty’, with the strap ‘Council’s cuppa must be Marxist’. The same fictitious ‘order’ was cited and the same Mayfair coffee merchant apparently sought out, duly to deliver the identical words. ‘The decision’, McShane noted, ‘is likely to leave ratepayers with a bitter taste because it will cost them an extra £820 a year’. However, he gave a more detailed contextualisation than had been forthcoming in the Sun. The view of the leader of the local Tory opposition was reported (‘absurd’), and the piece concluded by making a link to other examples of the council’s alleged folly:

  Haringey may soon have more staff to sample the true brew, however. The council is on the lookout for eight recruits to work in its gay services unit at a cost of £100,000 a year. Bernie Grant hit the headlines in October when he refused to condemn the rioters at Tottenham, where a policeman was stabbed to death. He said the police ‘got a bloody good hiding’.

  However, although the words allegedly uttered by Grant have been endlessly reiterated by the right-wing press and have come to oc
cupy pride of place in a certain kind of demonology, they were taken entirely out of context and presented in such a way as to represent Grant in the worst possible light.8

  This was another story that also spread to various provincial newspapers. The Manchester Daily Star (5 December) ran the story as ‘Bernie backs red coffee’. The nonexistent ‘order’ was referred to yet again, and the piece concluded by pointing out that Haringey ratepayers ‘will also have to find more than £100,000 a year for eight new staff in a unit being set up to help local gays and lesbians’. Wolverhampton’s Express and Star followed suit with ‘Bernie’s coffee bar’ (7 December). Here, the ‘order’ by the ‘idiotic “Barmy” Bernie Grant’ was said to have been enforced ‘despite the fact that his loony council faces ratecapping for overspending, and is £28 million short in its budget’. As if this were not enough: ‘Grant and his comrades have still committed £120,000 to a homosexual and lesbian unit. Life is certainly funny in Grant’s Marxist Haringey, but the joke is on the ratepayers’ (the story of the unit is analysed in detail in the subsequent chapter on Haringey).

  The Sunday People ran a story on 8 December 1986 entitled ‘Nuts to you and your coffee, Bernie’, which, in the space of four short paragraphs, discussed the ‘order’ in terms of ‘Barmy Bernie Grant … brewing up more trouble’, ‘coffee potty Bernie’, ‘Bernie old bean’ and ‘the loopy council leader’. The conclusion ran: ‘Mind you, I’d have thought he would have felt much more at home with coffee from Brazil. That is, after all, where nuts come from’. The Weekly Herald (12 December) featured ‘Coffee controversy stirs a bitter brew’, concentrating upon the taste of the coffee and the local Tory reaction, but not reproducing the fictitious ‘order’. Not so, however, the Birmingham Post’s ‘Bitter taste’ (19 December). This quoted Peter Bruinvels, Tory MP for Leicester East, to the effect that ‘it is just as daft and offensive as poor old Leicester City Council now trying to pair with Nicaragua’. The ‘order’ by Grant, ‘widely criticised recently for his comments on the riot at Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate’, was also presented for comment to Timothy Eggar, a junior minister at the Foreign Office. Eggar remarked that ‘I understand the comment was made that the coffee has a distinctive taste, which may not please the majority unless they are used to it. I think the same can be said of Mr. Bernie Grant’. Further reproduction of these statements by two national Tory politicians featured the following day in Greenock’s Telegraph (‘Coffee move slammed’), the East Anglian Daily Times (‘Coffee choice not to Tory’s taste’) and Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Journal (‘Daft claim’).

  ‘A total tissue of lies’

  Brent was a favourite subject of ‘loony left’ stories, and is the subject of a whole chapter in the previous edition of this book. Thus, for example, on 26 February 1987, the Sun claimed that the borough was providing cash to enable black youths to visit Cuba free but that the cash was not available to white ones, a story absolutely calculated to stir up resentment amongst white people. Billed as ‘Another Sun exclusive’, it was headlined ‘Freebie trip for blacks but white kids must pay. Barmy Brent does it again!’ Written by David Jones, it alleged that the council would spend at least £9,000 to make good any shortfall in the funds raised by the group organising the trip. Those chosen to go had to be unemployed, on low pay or rehabilitating after conviction for a crime. The article quoted the leader of the Brent Conservative group as saying: ‘For a hard-up, rate-capped borough like ours to waste cash like this is ridiculous’. ‘Youth worker Shirley Williams’ was quoted to the effect that ‘blacks are getting the subsidised places because we really only want to take them’.

  The article begins by stating that: ‘A Loony Left council is splashing out at least £9000 to send a group of black teenagers on an all-expenses paid jaunt to communist Cuba’. However, there is absolutely nothing in the article itself to back up such an assertion. Indeed, as the article itself admits, the whole event was being organised by a group called Caribbean Exchange, who were holding a series of fund-raising events to pay for the trip. Our own researches showed that the group’s only connection with the council was that they were affiliated to its Youth and Community Services, just like hundreds of other groups in the borough, including the scouts and guides. Brent told us that they allowed the group to use council premises for fund-raising activities but made it clear that they had not applied for a grant to help pay for the proposed trip, although they were eligible to do so. There was no evidence that Caribbean Exchange was favouring black youths at the expense of white ones, nor was rehabilitation after conviction a condition of going on the trip. Furthermore, we could not find any youth worker named Shirley Williams in Brent, although David Jones insisted to us that he did speak to such a person. We did manage to track down a youth and community worker for Brent Council named Lynne Williams, who had indeed been phoned by Jones, but she flatly denied making the statement attributed to ‘Shirley Williams’. She also told us that she had informed the Brent press office that the Sun was after a story, and that the press office wrote a very detailed statement about the trip, which they then checked with her before sending it to the Sun. She described the story which actually appeared as ‘racist’, ‘vicious’ and ‘a total tissue of lies’. Caribbean Exchange told us that the story had made it much more difficult to raise funds for the trip because it had sown racial divisions and exerted a highly destructive effect on the project.

  Caribbean Exchange actually complained to the Press Council about this story. In an unusually tough adjudication, the Council stated that:

  The headline, which was provocative and potentially racially divisive, was unsupported in the story below it by anything more than an assertion by the newspaper. On the evidence presented to it, the Press Council finds that the headline was inaccurate and misleading. The article contained inaccuracies, some of them significant, and unsupported assumptions. In the Press Council’s view it was loosely written and had not been investigated as closely as such a story should have been before a newspaper decided to publish it. The paper’s overall presentation was misleading and the complaint against the Sun is upheld.

  ‘Now the Lefties bar manholes’

  Another allegedly ‘loony’ council frequently in the news was Hackney. For example, on 27 February 1987 a story attributed to ‘a Standard reporter’ and headlined ‘Taking “sexist” man out of manhole’ appeared in London’s Evening Standard. Its substance, insofar as it had any at all, was that the council’s equal opportunities committee had proposed banning the term ‘manhole’ and that this was now council policy. The article quoted four people: an anonymous council spokesman, sewage worker Tom Jordan, Tory councillor Joe Lobenstein and deputy council leader Jim Cannon. It claimed that the council’s engineers and sewerage workers would in future have to use the words ‘access chambers’ instead of ‘manhole covers’. Jordan was quoted as complaining that:

  It’s absurd. We have a memo from the council telling us about the change. I can’t imagine calling manholes anything else, least of all an access chamber. Where on earth do they dig that description up? But I suppose we shall have to comply with the regulations – even though we all think it’s a joke. Most of us are sexist anyway – we love the topless models which the council hates. So they are asking us to be hypocrites.

  The council spokesman states that: ‘It is our policy to use non-sexist language. The word manhole clearly defines it. It is an insult to women. Why not call them womenholes?’ Lobenstein denounces the whole idea as ‘potty’ and ‘a total waste of money’. The most extensive quotation, however, is from Jim Cannon, who states that:

  I don’t see anything wrong with calling a manhole an access chamber. Language reflects people’s attitudes. At the moment it reflects a man’s point of view. Talking about manholes and access chambers strikes me as a marginal issue. But it should be looked at in the context that language should make women more confident of their own position and take away the restrictions that only men can do certain things.


  The following day, the Sun ran a short piece under the headline ‘Now manhole is a dirty word’ and the Standard headed its equally short article ‘Loony’. The Star, however, carried a full report by a ‘Star reporter’ entitled ‘Now the lefties bar manholes’. The story is almost identical to that in the previous day’s Standard, except that Jim Cannon is also quoted as saying that: ‘I am at the stage when the use of the word man grates with me’. A Sun editorial (1 March), headed ‘Not again’, opined that Hackney councillors were not fit to hold public office, adding that: ‘As for the idiot who first thought of banning “manholes”, we suggest he puts his head down the nearest access chamber and keeps it there’. The story also formed the subject of Keith Waterhouse’s column in the Labour-supporting Mirror (3 March), under the headline ‘The silly tendency’, in which he lumps in the Hackney councillors with those from Lambeth who had changed street names and declares them all to be ‘barking mad’ and a ‘gang of lunatics’. The story was also repeated in the Cumberland Evening News (3 March), Peterborough Evening Telegraph (4 March), Nottingham Evening Post (6 March), East London Advertiser, Southend Evening News and Municipal Journal (all 7 March). Letters about it featured in the Standard, Birmingham Evening Mail, Sunday Telegraph and Ilford Recorder.