More than 30 years on, the horrific killing of Stephen Lawrence still haunts one of Keir Starmer’s new candidates with former military experience.
Calvin Bailey was 15 years old at the time of Lawrence’s murder. Bailey had developed a close friendship with Stephen’s brother, Stuart, after his family moved from Zambia to south London when he was a young child.
One would expect Bailey’s own experiences of racism to have dominated his politics, but it is clear from the candidate’s sadness that it is his struggle in processing grief over Stephen’s murder that continues to weigh heaviest on his shoulders.
“When people look at me they often say, ‘Where is his background? Why haven’t you been campaigning for years?’ I’ve been in the military for 24 years, but that’s not all the story,” he says.
Bailey is on course to win the safe Labour seat of Leyton and Wanstead, in east London, which was formerly held by the chair of Labour’s parliamentary party, John Cryer.
In the aftermath of Lawrence’s murder, Bailey took to the streets and joined a number of anti-fascist marches as a means of expressing his frustration with injustice and racism.
“I wasn’t emotionally intelligent enough to deal with it,” he says of Lawrence’s murder. “I went to a lot of the anti-fascist marches at the time … and they confused me every time, as everything was coming out with anger. I didn’t know what that meant.
“They were identifying the cause between the five or six murders that happened at the time to young black men … and it’s making me quite sad, actually. I think part of it was … I just didn’t know what to do with any of it. I knew I didn’t like it and that pushed me away from politics.”
Looking back, Bailey believes he was able to “vent a whole load of anger” while protesting, but “unfortunately, those marches didn’t change anything”.
“The approach taken [during the marches] wasn’t allowing us to address the issues,” he says. “I don’t want to detract from the story, but fundamentally, it was about racist police force … and those things you have to get through. But we had to get through the raw emotions.”
While Bailey, a graduate of Labour’s young leaders programme, praises the work Starmer has done for Labour, he says he owes his “political reawakening” to the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting.
Bailey recalls listening to a radio interview centred on Streeting’s life and thinking, “wow that’s really like mine”, before he had the opportunity to meet the MP, then a backbencher. “I thought, why am I not doing stuff with you?”
The candidate accepts the differing opinions that pervade Labour, but he believes Starmer doesn’t make different political opinions a problem. “He knows a couple of people have had different views about things, but his language is that ‘I’m in charge. This is what we’re going to do.’ It’s really compelling, especially from [the perspective of] a military person.”
Bailey says Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the party at the time resembled “student politics”, with Labour “really good at talking to itself, and it was never talking to the electorate”.
He adds: “My dad used to say it’s pointless having morals, standing on the margins and watching. If you believe in something, and unfortunately I’m compelled by service, then you’ve got to go and put yourself forward.”
Reflecting on his military honours, Bailey says he is most proud of his MBE, which he got for supporting humanitarian efforts in Haiti and the Philippines, and his US airforce medal for resupplying a team that had been hit by an IED in Afghanistan.
While Lawrence shaped his politics, it was Bailey’s mum that shaped his character. “When I was a kid walking with mum from Plumstead to Woolwich, anyone we walked past who had any colour in their skin became my auntie, and their kids, cousins.
“And it was this kind of approach to people, the fundamental humanity she saw in them, is what I’ve learned from her.”
He vows to fight for people from working-class roots, as “poor people’s problems remain poor people’s problems”.
