Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 10 June 2020
Like everybody else, I share the horror of what we have seen over the past few days. Watching somebody being knelt on for the best part of nine minutes is galling—it highlights just how long nine minutes is. At George Floyd’s funeral, Al Sharpton asked everybody to be quiet for eight minutes and 47 seconds, which is an awfully long time. If a person does not know that they are doing something wrong for that period of time, there is something psychiatrically wrong with them. The gentlemen who had his knee on Mr Floyd’s neck deserves every possible punishment.
The unfortunate thing is that what happened did not come as surprise to any of us here. It did not come as a surprise to people my age, who can remember what happened in 1968. Possibly the only good thing—although there is nothing good about it—is that the reaction has not been what happened in 1968, and it could have been. In 1968, the whole of America was burning because people had had enough. That might be a glimmer of hope for how we move on.
However, just today, I saw that a policeman in New Mexico has been done for manslaughter for kneeling on somebody and saying, “I will choke you out.” And so he did—the poor man died, and the police officer has been charged with manslaughter. That goes to show just how prevalent such things are. I knew that it went on to some extent, but if I had not seen on television some of the things that we have seen in videos recently, I would have thought that people were exaggerating. We have seen people being beaten on the streets and, even though there were cameras on the people doing the beating, they expected to get away with it because they have got away with it for so long.
It is good that social media has played a part in the response, and I suspect that the fact that there is little on television—there is no American football or other things—has allowed the cameras to highlight what has been going on. We have seen Al Sharpton behaving in a really responsible manner. I watch CNN a lot—that may be why I am so tired when I come into Parliament in the morning—and I have seen some really powerful discussions on it during the night.
The protests have been a powerful start to try to regain what America lost a long time ago and has to get back. However, as everyone has said, we in the UK are not immune. We have seen similar things happen on numerous occasions. The Sheku Bayoh case has been going on for five years, which is far too long. There is no doubt about that.
When I knew that I would be speaking in this debate, I called my friend, a Pakistani man in his 50s from Birmingham who now stays up here. I said to him, “I can’t speak about this—I’m a white guy and I’ve never been through any of it.” I asked him, “What was it like growing up as a coloured boy in Birmingham?” He said, “It’s like living in a goldfish bowl, because everything you do is looked at differently from what anybody else does.” He said that the first time he was ever called a black B was when he was five years of age—and it was by a police officer. How does someone go from experiencing a police officer calling them that at five years of age to having respect for the authorities?
My friend said that it is not that different down there. He has been up here for 12 years and he said that his sons, who are now adults, have been through similar things, and his grandchildren maybe a bit less. He does not say that things are perfect up here, because they are not. We have our racists and people who just cannot get beyond what people thought centuries ago. However, he said that he thinks that, up here, there is at least a will and a desire to change, which to me is very encouraging. Not everything that he said to me last night was encouraging—he is a good friend of mine and it was pretty hard to hear some of the things that he said.
Just after we spoke, he sent me a video. Someone said earlier in the debate that it was common to see certain things in the 1970s, such as some of the names that people were called. The video that he sent me was an episode of “Love Thy Neighbour” called—seriously—“The One with the Paki”. I did not play it. He said, “That’s what we had to put up with all the time.” That is a second-hand account of someone’s experience and what it must be like to live with such things. I just do not know how I could compare my experiences with that.
Interestingly, when I asked my friend what he thought was the reason for his experience, he said that part of it is the whole empire thing. He said, “We were taught that we were lesser, and the ruling class still can’t see beyond that.”
Sorry—I got waylaid there. I stood up to talk about Glasgow, and I know that I am running out of time. As far as the statues, street names and so on are concerned, we have to be very careful. If I got my way, I would get rid of the statues—well, I would not get rid of them; I would put them in museums, because I am a history fan. The first thing that I do when I go to a foreign city is to go and see the history—the statues and museums. However, there has to be an explanation of what statues represent. I do not want to see statues of people who do not deserve to be there but are lording it over us, and a museum might be the best place for them.
In Glasgow, I think that we should have plaques, as opposed to removing signs showing street names, until such time as we look at whether we want to change street names in the city. If, for one reason or another, we are going to take away what has been there, we have to be very careful about what we replace it with. We do not want to replace it with something that is newsworthy just now but might not be in 10 years’ time or whenever, because the new name would just have to be replaced with something else. We should make sure that a lot of thought goes into that—a lot of thought already is going into it, and that is good.
There has been a lot of talk about a museum of slavery. After I got elected to the council, I tried to set up something like Ellis island—although not that many people signed up to it—to show who made Glasgow. A museum that showed the history of Glasgow and the people who came to the city might well be the sort of place where we could have a museum of slavery—something that gives us an indication of the past, in both its shining glory and its desperate shame, which is what the slave trade was.