Shaun Bailey: Conservative
He's a rare one, alright. The west London activist, Shaun Bailey, is a black Conservative and when David Cameron wants to know about real life in London — the crime, the drugs, the guns — he turns to Bailey. Well, that's what Hugh Muir wrote in the Guardian three year's ago. The profile is painfully frank and one has to admire Bailey's honesty:
"He was born in north Kensington to parents who split when he was very young. He lost contact with his father, a lorry driver, for several years, but says that his mother — aided by his uncle — made it her mission to shield him from the crime and disorder around them. He says, without hint of embarrassment, that she even kept him from much of his own community. 'She had seen how black people interact with black people — what they say to other black people — that means you can't go forward, that you get trapped in your own poor community...'"
And what does Bailey tell Cameron about the black communities in Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush? Again, he's uncompromisingly honest, especially about the "caring professions":
"When you do a job like mine and the community work I do, you start to see lots of people in pain and living badly," Bailey says. "You see well-meaning people around them trying to help, but what they do is that they support them so much that they take over their lives. They rob them of the will and the skill to look after their own. They make them dependent. We get all these people who are parachuted into poor communities who manage that community and then go home to their lovely lives. It's just horrible for that community because it means all of us continue to live in this horrible dark world that we can't navigate without someone leading us from it."
Shaun Bailey would make an excellent MP, but he's got a battle on his hands against Andy Slaughter of Labour, who was elected to Parliament for Ealing, Acton and Shepherds Bush with a majority of 5,500. Still, it's all in play now.
