Long before Hackney North first elected Diane Abbott as its MP, my mother was a teacher in one of its primary schools. As a small boy I sometimes went with her, on long journeys by bus and train and across the wooden bridge over Clapton Pond, chanting about the billy goats gruff. Trip trap, trip trap.
Visiting her staffroom was almost a whistle-stop tour of the British empire, with teachers from Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, Pakistan, Cyprus and Ireland. All, I think, first-generation immigrants to the UK and all women – and all aware that those two things meant they wouldn’t get the money or the promotions they deserved. So they organised. My mother was in her trade union’s black caucus, which spoke for “all teachers who face racism”. This was London in the early 1980s, where the streets still echoed to the Anti-Nazi League’s chant of “We are Black, We are White, together we are Dynamite”.
