An urban phoenix
IT WAS while David Lammy was recalling his time in the Boy’s Brigade,
at the Miller Memorial Methodist church in Tottenham, that Bagehot and
he came across the memorial to a killing. A wilted bouquet wrapped in
cellophane, it was taped to a lamppost, across the road from the small
brick church where the 41-year-old Labour MP had once worshipped and
played. “Knife crime,” he said softly.
A hard line separates Mr Lammy’s childhood in Tottenham, as the son of hard-up immigrants from Guyana, from that of many other youths in London’s poorest and most unsettled constituency. His upbringing was marred by race riots in 1985—including the murder of a policeman on the tough Broadwater Farm housing estate where Mr Lammy spent much of his childhood—and an absent father. Yet his mother grafted and scraped. Mr Lammy went to a boarding school on a choral scholarship, then to the University of London and Harvard law school. “It was a typical immigrant story,” he says. It was also a better time to be poor, he suggests, supported by institutions, like the church, youth clubs and trade unions, which are all now weakened or gone. Recreating them is one of the ideas Mr Lammy, who is emerging as a powerful moral force in British politics, has been wrestling with—including in a startling credo, “Out of the Ashes”.
Mixing autobiography with public policy, the book was intended as a reflection on three consecutive Labour governments. Yet it emerged as an early, and still unparalleled, commentary on Britain’s 2011 riots, an eruption that started in Tottenham after police shot dead a local criminal, Mark Duggan. Mr Lammy identifies two broad failings, common to Labour policymakers and the rioters, and still evident in Britain.
The first is a tendency, wrought by 1960s hedonism, to view the individual in isolation from society. The second is the habit—a legacy of Thatcherism—of judging progress in purely financial terms. For the looters in 2011, life’s possibilities could be boiled down to a pair of coveted sneakers. The same could almost be said of Gordon Brown and tax credits, a subsidy for the poorly paid that the last Labour prime minister sometimes presented as a panacea for social problems. Many on the left went on to attribute the riots to poverty. Mr Lammy vigorously disagrees with that: the rioters were motivated by greed and boredom, he says.
Mr Lammy’s big observations are not original. Yet the deftness he showed over the riots—calling for peace and reason while Tottenham burned—and then in print, has been impressive. A moderate man speaking up for the troubled community that produced him, Mr Lammy looks like the paragon of an inner-city MP. After an inquiry into the Duggan killing ruled it lawful last month, he carefully condemned the mendacious handling of the case by the police, while offering no encouragement to the dead man’s belligerent supporters. Rarely, in recent times, has a British politician so conspicuously kept the peace. This was timely. Because Mr Lammy’s credo is also a manifesto.
He is expected to seek his party’s nomination for the 2016 London mayoral election, which, after two terms of Tory rule under Boris Johnson, Labour should win. He may not get it: most bookies favour Tessa Jowell, a former culture secretary, who is likeable, wealthy and widely praised for her involvement in the London Olympics. Mr Lammy, by contrast, underwhelmed as a junior minister; an inept performance at the dispatch box as constitutional affairs minister was considered at the time to have dashed his career. Yet, rebuilding from Tottenham, he has done much to remedy this. Ms Jowell never won such plaudits in government as he has done over the riots.
In a contest that rewards distinctiveness, he is a free thinker; and in the many communitarian prescriptions that fill his book, including a new civic service, restorative justice for young offenders and American-style community housing trusts, he has a platform to hand. In an age of bland, middle-class politicians, his personal story would tell well on the campaign trail. Mr Lammy would also be the first black Briton to hold prominent office.
He would accept that mantle warily, there being little demand for a “British Obama”—the phrase tried out, at some time or other, on most black MPs. The black population is too small. Moreover, Britain, and London especially, is fast becoming colour-blind. This was the silver lining to the 2011 storm: the rioters were black, white and mixed-race, as diverse as they were unruly. Mr Lammy, whose wife is white, calls race “the dog that didn’t bark” in the tumult. “Integration is something we’re actually pretty good at in this country,” he reflects.
They appreciate this in Tottenham. On a walkabout with Bagehot, Mr Lammy is stopped repeatedly, by poor people with problems, by star-struck police officers and by those simply wanting to say hello. A bus driver veered wildly across the road as he lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a two-fisted salute. “Hey brother!” Mr Lammy called back, seemingly unfazed. You can’t take Tottenham out of the man; the question is whether he can get himself out of Tottenham.
A hard line separates Mr Lammy’s childhood in Tottenham, as the son of hard-up immigrants from Guyana, from that of many other youths in London’s poorest and most unsettled constituency. His upbringing was marred by race riots in 1985—including the murder of a policeman on the tough Broadwater Farm housing estate where Mr Lammy spent much of his childhood—and an absent father. Yet his mother grafted and scraped. Mr Lammy went to a boarding school on a choral scholarship, then to the University of London and Harvard law school. “It was a typical immigrant story,” he says. It was also a better time to be poor, he suggests, supported by institutions, like the church, youth clubs and trade unions, which are all now weakened or gone. Recreating them is one of the ideas Mr Lammy, who is emerging as a powerful moral force in British politics, has been wrestling with—including in a startling credo, “Out of the Ashes”.
Mixing autobiography with public policy, the book was intended as a reflection on three consecutive Labour governments. Yet it emerged as an early, and still unparalleled, commentary on Britain’s 2011 riots, an eruption that started in Tottenham after police shot dead a local criminal, Mark Duggan. Mr Lammy identifies two broad failings, common to Labour policymakers and the rioters, and still evident in Britain.
The first is a tendency, wrought by 1960s hedonism, to view the individual in isolation from society. The second is the habit—a legacy of Thatcherism—of judging progress in purely financial terms. For the looters in 2011, life’s possibilities could be boiled down to a pair of coveted sneakers. The same could almost be said of Gordon Brown and tax credits, a subsidy for the poorly paid that the last Labour prime minister sometimes presented as a panacea for social problems. Many on the left went on to attribute the riots to poverty. Mr Lammy vigorously disagrees with that: the rioters were motivated by greed and boredom, he says.
Mr Lammy’s big observations are not original. Yet the deftness he showed over the riots—calling for peace and reason while Tottenham burned—and then in print, has been impressive. A moderate man speaking up for the troubled community that produced him, Mr Lammy looks like the paragon of an inner-city MP. After an inquiry into the Duggan killing ruled it lawful last month, he carefully condemned the mendacious handling of the case by the police, while offering no encouragement to the dead man’s belligerent supporters. Rarely, in recent times, has a British politician so conspicuously kept the peace. This was timely. Because Mr Lammy’s credo is also a manifesto.
He is expected to seek his party’s nomination for the 2016 London mayoral election, which, after two terms of Tory rule under Boris Johnson, Labour should win. He may not get it: most bookies favour Tessa Jowell, a former culture secretary, who is likeable, wealthy and widely praised for her involvement in the London Olympics. Mr Lammy, by contrast, underwhelmed as a junior minister; an inept performance at the dispatch box as constitutional affairs minister was considered at the time to have dashed his career. Yet, rebuilding from Tottenham, he has done much to remedy this. Ms Jowell never won such plaudits in government as he has done over the riots.
In a contest that rewards distinctiveness, he is a free thinker; and in the many communitarian prescriptions that fill his book, including a new civic service, restorative justice for young offenders and American-style community housing trusts, he has a platform to hand. In an age of bland, middle-class politicians, his personal story would tell well on the campaign trail. Mr Lammy would also be the first black Briton to hold prominent office.
He would accept that mantle warily, there being little demand for a “British Obama”—the phrase tried out, at some time or other, on most black MPs. The black population is too small. Moreover, Britain, and London especially, is fast becoming colour-blind. This was the silver lining to the 2011 storm: the rioters were black, white and mixed-race, as diverse as they were unruly. Mr Lammy, whose wife is white, calls race “the dog that didn’t bark” in the tumult. “Integration is something we’re actually pretty good at in this country,” he reflects.
Can he do it?
Mr Lammy could make it to City Hall. More pressingly, however, he
offers a useful lesson to a generation of politicians who seem stricken
by their poor standing with the public yet powerless to improve on it.
It is to describe the world as it is—even where that runs contrary to
policy fads or party diktat. It is this that has given Mr Lammy his new
strength, a brand of authenticity that owes nothing to outspokenness or
lack of polish. Where his Westminster colleagues are prone to cut and
dice society, distinguishing native from foreign, givers from takers, Mr
Lammy understands that it is diverse and fluid. Most young people in
his constituency spent the nights of riot, he often recalls, shut up
fearfully at home—as he himself once did.They appreciate this in Tottenham. On a walkabout with Bagehot, Mr Lammy is stopped repeatedly, by poor people with problems, by star-struck police officers and by those simply wanting to say hello. A bus driver veered wildly across the road as he lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a two-fisted salute. “Hey brother!” Mr Lammy called back, seemingly unfazed. You can’t take Tottenham out of the man; the question is whether he can get himself out of Tottenham.
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