BERNIE GRANT

'Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant' (17 February 1944 – 8 April, 2000), known simply as 'Bernie Grant', was a politician in the United Kingdom, and was Labour member of Parliament for Tottenham at the time of his death.
He was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and took up the British government's offer to let people from colonies move to the UK to do blue-collar work, in 1963. In the mid-1960s he was for a period a member of the Socialist Labour League. He quickly became a trade union official, and moved into politics, becoming a Labour councillor in the London Borough of Haringey in 1978. He became its leader in 1985, but provided the borough with inspirational leadership and aroused controversy in the right wing media for his anti-racist views. Following the Broadwater Farm riot of 1985, during which a policeman was hacked to death, he was famously quoted as saying that the police had been given "a bloody good hiding" - an allegation which Grant strenuously denied. His vilification in the right wing media however did not prevent his becoming MP for Tottenham in the 1987 election, one of only three black MPs at the time.
He was associated with the Socialist Campaign Group, and spoke out against police racism. Following his death from a heart attack, his widow, Sharon Grant, was on the shortlist to succeed him as Labour candidate for Tottenham, but was beaten by the then-27-year-old David Lammy, who won the by-election. In the African British community, Grant remains one of the most admired and mythologised parliamentarian to emerge in British political history.