Bernie Grant
| Bernie Grant | |
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Grant's funeral programme
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Member of Parliament for Tottenham |
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In office 11 June 1987 – 8 April 2000 |
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| Preceded by | Norman Atkinson |
| Succeeded by | David Lammy |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
17 February 1944 Georgetown, Guyana |
| Died | 8 April 2000 (aged 56) |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Labour |
| Profession | politician |
| Religion | Christian |
Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant (17 February 1944 – 8 April 2000), known simply as Bernie Grant, was a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament for Tottenham from 1987 to his death in 2000.
Bernie Grant was born in Georgetown, Guyana, to schoolteacher parents, who in 1963 took up the British government's offer to people from the colonies to settle in the UK. Grant attended Tottenham technical college, and went on to take a degree course in mining engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
In the mid-1960s, he was for a period a member of the Socialist Labour League, led by Gerry Healy; this later became known as the Workers Revolutionary Party. He quickly became a trade union official, and moved into politics, becoming a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Haringey in 1978.
When the Conservative government introduced "rate capping", Grant led the fight against it in the borough. This split the local Labour Party, but through this split Grant became the Borough of Haringey leader in 1985.
He took control of the rebuilding project of Alexandra Palace, which had been partially destroyed in a fire. The project had £15 million in cash, but the lack of financial control saw this surplus turn into deficit and interest payments eventually took the debt to a total of £80 million.
As Council leader during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, in which a policeman, PC Blakelock, was murdered, Grant was brought to national attention when he was widely quoted as saying: "What the police got was a bloody good hiding." Grant claimed his words had been taken out of context, but offered an apology to the family of PC Blakelock. A fuller version of the quotation is: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding." His comments brought swift denunciation from the Labour Party leadership and the then Conservative Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, called him "the high priest of conflict" and several British newspapers dubbed him "Barmy Bernie". He claimed that he was merely explaining to a wider audience what the feeling on the estate was like. There is conflicting information whether Grant condemned the violence of the rioters the following day.
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