Richard Stone, who has died aged 86, played a major role in combating racism in Britain, in breaking down the barriers between the Jewish and Muslim communities and in highlighting the issue of homelessness. He was a key figure in the inquiry into the murder in 1993 of Stephen Lawrence and in exposing the violence often suffered by black men after being arrested or detained.
As a doctor working in west London from the 1970s onwards, he was disconcerted to be regularly confronted with young black men with serious injuries following their arrests by the police. His involvement led to a lasting friendship with Frank Crichlow, whose Mangrove restaurant acted as a community centre in Notting Hill and constantly attracted police attention.
Crichlow would often call him in the early hours to ask for an independent medical opinion about men who had been beaten up in police vans. After one such call, Stone asked Crichlow if he could possibly call someone else on the rota, to which Crichlow replied: “Richard, you are the rota.”
When Crichlow was falsely accused in 1988 of selling hard drugs at the Mangrove, Stone and others stood bail for him. Crichlow was acquitted and awarded damages for false imprisonment and wrongful arrest.
During his time as a GP, Stone was puzzled by the number of council houses in the area being boarded up when he knew many of his patients were homeless, and in 1986 he duly called in the district auditor to investigate the Conservative council’s housing policy. This led directly to the exposure of the attempted gerrymandering of local elections being orchestrated by the then leader of Westminster council, Dame Shirley Porter. Her aim had been to sell council homes to potential Conservative voters.
One of the biggest local government scandals of the era, it became known as the “homes for votes” affair and Porter eventually agreed to pay £12m to the authority for her role in it.
His work drew him to the attention of Labour politicians and he became an adviser on race to senior members of the Labour government that came to power in 1997. Following the racist murder of Lawrence in 1993 and the subsequent bungled investigation, he was invited by the home secretary, Jack Straw, to sit as one of three advisers to Sir William Macpherson on the ensuing inquiry. Stone was a key player in the compilation of the inquiry’s 1999 report that concluded that the Metropolitan police suffered from “institutional racism”.
An independent review he carried out 10 years later indicated that black men were even more likely to be stopped under the stop and search policy than they had been a decade earlier. His reflective book, Hidden Stories of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, published in 2013, questioned how far Britain had come in tackling racial discrimination since the murder and concluded that it was not nearly far enough.
He also served on the panel of the David “Rocky” Bennett inquiry, which investigated the death during restraint of a black patient at a secure psychiatric unit in Norwich in 1998. Bennett, who had schizophrenia, died after being held face down on the floor for 25 minutes. The chair of the inquiry, Sir John Blofeld, concluded on behalf of the panel that “it is more than time that the nettle of race relations in the mental health side of the NHS was firmly grasped”.
Stone was born in London. His father, Joseph Stone, one of the first doctors to enter Belsen after its liberation in 1945, became Harold Wilson’s personal physician and was made a life peer in 1976. His mother, Beryl, was the sister of Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television.
When the second world war broke out Richard’s mother took him and his sister, Adrianne, by ship to Canada and then to the US. They flew back to Lisbon in 1943 and then, on the floor of a British bomber, to Bristol to spend the rest of the war in Britain.
Growing up in Hampstead, north London, Richard attended the local University College school in Frognal. He did his national service in the Royal Navy, serving as a sub-lieutenant in the Arctic and learning Russian. After studying jurisprudence at Wadham College, Oxford, he initially embarked on a career in the Granada family business, briefly as the manager of the Century cinema in Clapham, south London, and the Granada in Walthamstow, in the north-east of the city, and later as head of engineering in the Manchester office. However, after five years, he decided to return to Oxford to study medicine.
After qualifying as a doctor, in 1972 he joined a medical practice covering Notting Hill and Paddington, an area that was to have a profound effect on him. In 1976, as a member of the Socialist Health Association, he wrote what was at that time a radical booklet, Prevention of Illness and Promotion of Health, aimed at both lay and professional readers. He implemented many of his own recommendations, including making short-term psychotherapy available on the NHS.
Stone was a member and later chair of the Runnymede Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia. Its 1997 report was credited with introducing the term “Islamophobia” into discussion of the issue and promoting understanding of Muslims in the UK. He had the role with the Board of Deputies of British Jews of establishing relationships with other faiths and was the president of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. Using those links, in 2003 he founded Alif-Aleph – the first letters of the alphabet in Hebrew and Arabic – the manifesto of which proclaimed that “we have a common experience of having to address hostilities that derive from mistaken stereotypes of our religions and our cultures”.
Its key document, A Mapping Report of Positive Contacts between British Muslims and British Jews, became a template in 2007 for a similar project in the European Union.
He became an honorary fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations, which was set up in 2007 as a partner to the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations.
In a prescient interview there in 2010, he said that such cooperation was “really, really urgent with the rise of fascism in Europe”. On the way that the Israel-Palestine conflict had affected both communities he saw the issue as “the tool they use to divide us … If we attack each other, as unfortunately is happening all too often these days, our enemies – for example the British fascists and the European fascists – can sit at home and laugh because we’ve done their dirty work for them.”
As a philanthropist he was involved in distributing charitable donations of more than £20m from trusts set up by his family, including the Stone Ashdown Trust and Lord Ashdown Trust. Organisations that benefited included many involved in challenging discrimination and racism. Involved in homelessness projects in west London, he was a founder of the Bayswater Hotel Homeless Families Project. In 2010 he was appointed OBE.
Known for his great charm, a fierce commitment to the causes he espoused and the articulate and patient way in which he explained the issues, he attracted many awards and appreciation from across the political spectrum.
At the launch of his archive in the Bishopsgate Institute in London in 2018, the Labour mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, described him as “an outspoken advocate for the disadvantaged, a passionate anti-racist campaigner and a voice of authority and reason on matters of religious difference and Islamophobia”. At the same event, the former Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley spoke admiringly of his “stalwart” nature.
In 1970 he married Ruth Perry, a musician and piano teacher; he was a talented cellist, and they played in string quartets together. In 2018 they moved to Witney, Oxfordshire.
Ruth survives him, as do their children, Toby, Rebecca and Hannah, four grandchildren and Adrianne.
• Richard Malcolm Ellis Stone, doctor and campaigner, born 9 March 1937; died 5 March 2024
