Labour's targetting of Ray Lewis smacks of racism

Boris Johnson (left) has reappointed Ray Lewis (right)

Yesterday I noted that Mayor of London Boris Johnson had reappointed Ray Lewis as his ‘Senior Adviser for Mentoring’. As many of you will know, the history of the mentoring scheme announced in Nov 2008 with the objective of recruiting 1000 black mentors for black boys, has been fraught with calamitous failure. Five years on and only 100 mentors have been recruited.

This lamentable effort was a direct result of the personal political intervention of Boris himself and his Chief of Staff Edward Lister in an officer led Greater London Authority procurement process.

You can read all about this monumental grand litany of failure here, here and here.

No sooner was the ink dried on Lewis’s one day a week £20,000 per year contract than some Labour supporters led by the Greater London Authority (GLA) Labour Group and the Labour List blog were fulminating about his appointment with their GLA Police & Crime Spokesperson AM Joanne McCartney claiming Lewis is not up to the job and condemning Lewis’s appointment.

Now I’m no fan of Boris but for Labour to target Ray Lewis for the failure of the mentoring scheme is ludicrous and smacks of racism. Lewis is one of the most effective people I know for working with young people and I say that although I don’t agree with some of his ‘boot camp’ methods employed to keep wayward young people on the proverbial straight and narrow. But fair’s fair: he is successful at what he does and it would be churlish to fail to acknowledge that fact.

Labour seem to be copying the Lynton Crosby school of politics in targeting Lewis for the failure of Johnsons mentoring scheme. This is despite the fact they have interviewed Lewis extensively at a couple of GLA Scrutiny Panels where the evidence of Lewis and the GLA Officer responsible for the mentoring scheme Ron Belgrave, both made it absolutely clear that their preferred choice of a contractor to deliver the scheme was summarily dismissed.

Boris himself intervened, dispatching Lister to knobble the GLA procurement process in order to ensure that the contract was given to their preferred provider and overruling both Lewis and Belgrave.

To now attack Lewis for this failure is deeply cynical politics and stinks of racism. The fact is GLA Labour has been so spine chillingly ineffective in holding Boris to account on anything at all that they are now reduced to relying on racist sentiment in the press and public by labeling Lewis as a ‘failure’ and a waste of public money.

This is so desperately disingenuous as to be unbelievable, particularly in the light of their failure to expose the race discrimination effects of Boris’s policies throughout the last five years.

GLA Labour has barely raised the issues of racism and disproportionality as a consequence of the Mayors policies or its effects on black Londoners and that is in the context of London being a majority black and ethnic minority city.

Over the last few years they have been made to look quite feeble in their attempt to hold the Mayor to account as Boris plays with them at Mayors Question time, much like a bored cat plays with a half dead mouse.

I believe their relative impotence in the face of Boris has led them to grasp at straws as a means of hiding their quite obvious failures in this regard. They have, instead targeted the only black man appointed by the Mayor as a cheap and easy target in bid to mask their own lack of effective political strategy.

Meanwhile the problem that mentoring was supposed to solve: youth violence, continues to get worse, (though actual deaths are down thanks to the brilliant work of our hospital surgeons), far too many young people are cowering in fear imprisoned in their local neighborhoods, trapped by local gangs on the one hand and an increasingly racist police service that can’t tell the difference between gun toting gang members and bible carrying church goers.

It’s a cheap shot by Labour who should be more effectively attacking Johnson not his employees. It’s a growing trend within Labour generally to attempt to capture racist public sentiment on issues of immigration for example. It’s a nasty trend and they should stop masking their own inadequacies, get some testicular fortitude and go after a Mayor who is the epitome of incompetence.

Ray Lewis to be grilled over mentoring scheme - by Lester Holloway

I’m looking forward to Ray Lewis‘s appearance before a London Assembly committee to answer questions about the London mayor’s controversial mentoring scheme, which Lewis is credited with developing.

I’d be particularly interested to see if questions are asked about former Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris, who is both chairman of Lewis’s Eastside Young Leaders Academy and the London Action Trust, which was part of the consortium that won the £1.3m mentoring bid.
BBC London’s Kurt Barling reports:

“And now Mr Lewis’s letter of appointment as the mayor’s mentoring champion, seen by BBC London, reveals that he was told more than a year ago he would have “no decision-making or budgetary responsibility”.
The London Assembly is now asking if it was appropriate for him to be on the decision-panel responsible for choosing the best bid in the first place.
They are proposing to refer the matter to the district auditor.”

In 2008 Boris Johnson promised to match 1,000 black mentors with 1,000 black youth, but the latest figures show the winning bidders have only managed to link 21 mentors, well behind schedule.
London Action Trust papers lodged at the Charity Commission show the mayor’s budget adviser Nick Griffin joined LAT’s board just months after Boris won the 2008 London elections.
LAT has since gone into Administration, having managed to avoid due diligence during the bidding process, which was led by the mayor’s chief-of-staff, Sir Edward Lister.
The black consortium that came top of the bidding process was not chosen after failing due diligence.
It should be a very interesting session down at City Hall at the next Time for Action panel meeting…

Lester Holloway

Originally posted at: http://cllrlesterholloway.wordpress.com/

“I don’t give a monkey’s”, Boris tells black conference - by Lester Holloway

“I don’t give a monkey’s about the name of the conference”, Boris Johnson told his education conference today, following controversy over the dropping of the word ‘black’ from the title. Attendance was massively down on previous years, with large blocks of empty seats.


The London mayor said he just wanted the conference to go ahead after Labour MP Diane Abbott had left the project she began nine years ago in disgust at City Hall’s desire to fill the platform with Right-wing speakers. Friends of the MP said she wanted nothing to do with the event.

Using the word ‘monkey’ was at best thoughtless on the part of a mayor who has previously referred to Africans having “watermelon smiles”. Some audience members took offence at the monkey remark.
Campaigner Lee Jasper accused Johnson of “hijacking” what used to be the London Schools and the Black Child conference, which the mayor renamed London Schools and Our Children.

Speaking this morning to an audience of barely over 200 people – well down on the high of 3,500 that used to attend Abbott’s black child conferences – Johnson appeared unconcerned by accusations that he was “culturally cleansing” the capital of race-specific initiatives.

But one attendee said black Londoners had “voted with their feet” by staying away in droves. Bizarrely, education secretary Michael Gove opened his speech by proclaiming “The fact that so many have come here is an inspiration.” Audience members glanced around at the empty seats around them.

Eleven protesters, including myself, held placards outside the conference centre as attendees arrived.
Speaking into a megaphone Jasper joked about ‘tumble-weed’ as there were so few people going into the central London venue.

As the conference got underway Ray Lewis, Johnson’s controversial former deputy mayor made a hash of a joke, calling Gove “a black man”, adding: “Maybe not, just honorary.”
Lewis was attempting to lavish praise on the cabinet minister for his education policies, but the joke fell flat in the audience. One audience member, Patricia Lamour, said she was gob-smacked at the comment. “I can’t believe there was praise for Free Schools in the conference when all eight black-led organisations who applied to set up Free Schools have been turned down.”

Gove delivered a highly patronising speech, appearing to lecture the majority-black audience on how to raise their children. “You should wear a school uniform properly”, he said. “And when the bell goes… you should get learning now!” A woman sitting behind me groaned.
Gove appeared to take his cue on school discipline from his greatest fan, Katherine Birbalsingh, who has been granted permission to start a Free School.

“It’s cool to be smart”, the education secretary intoned earnestly. “What would he know about being cool?”, my neighbour quipped to me.

Boris Johnson  talked up the value of cubs and scouts, and boasted that he backed an education scheme in Feltham Young Offenders prison. Muttering in the audience, and a heckler who shouted “why wait ’til they get in jail?”, forced the mayor to respond and defend his plan as worthwhile.

Audience applause for the keynote speakers was lukewarm at best, a stark contrast to rapturous standing ovations in previous years when Abbott ran the event.
The mayor’s youth adviser announced that ime-constraints meant there was no time for audience questions, the first time this has happened since the MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington began the conference in 2002.

Other highlights included educationalist Tony Sewell sharing the mayor’s enthusiasm for cubs and scouts. Sewell did get a round of support from one segment of the auditorium when he claimed that Nigerian discipline was superior to that administered by Jamaica families.
One peeved audience member grumbled: “If you look at the youth who are killing each other, many have African surnames.” Sewell’s remarks were ill-judged and had the effect of diving the audience.

I had had enough – it was time to head to the death in custody march in memory of Demetre Fraser. “Oi!”, I heard as I left the venue. It was Ray Lewis. “Take that shit off your website”, he told me, referring to an earlier blog post about the mayor’s mentoring scheme.
“I’m not a board member of London Action Trust”, he said forcefully. “That’s libellous.”
I’ll have to check that out tomorrow, but given that BBC reporter Kurt Barling reported that he was associated with LAT – which was awarded the £1.3m mentoring grant before going into Administration – and the fact that members of the London Assembly had suggested that Lewis was indeed linked to LAT, this point will need further investigation.
More of this later…

By Lester Holloway
(First published at: http://cllrlesterholloway.wordpress.com/)