NEWS THAT Black South Labour councillor Maurice Mcleod has been blocked by Keir Starmer’s national party machine from being a contender to become MP for the largely African Caribbean and Asian Camberwell and Peckham constituency brought back bad memories for me.

In 1989, two years after four members of the Labour Party Black Section movement, of which I was chair at the time, made history by being elected to the House of Commons, I was similarly stopped from being the Labour candidate for a parliamentary seat that covered Brixton.

The then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, like Starmer, once left-wing himself, was in the midst of his infamous purge of lefties like me from the party.

That included shamefully preventing black Haringey council deputy leader Martha Osamor, who had been democratically selected by the local Vauxhall party and was my vice-chair, from being their candidate. Instead, he imposed Kate Hoey, a white candidate, who went on to become the MP after a by-election.

When it comes to African Caribbean male MPs, the Conservatives have five to Labour’s paltry three and now, of course, Britain’s first Prime Minister of colour, Rishi Sunak.

Grassroots Black Left, successor to the Black Sections and a four-year-old Labour pressure group I co-founded, has, along with other similar groups, called out the appalling shortage of African Caribbean men on parliament’s Labour benches.

Like Mcleod, a fellow left-winger, who was nominated by Unite, Labour’s largest trade union affiliate, and train drivers’ union ASLEF, I too was put forward by a union. The McLeod-backing unions should use their muscle to insist on his inclusion on the nationally-imposed “long list”, from which a parliamentary candidate will be chosen by the local party

There are a couple of African Caribbean men on the current Camberwell and Peckham all-African Caribbean and Asian long list. But they are Southwark councillors on the Starmerite right-wing of the party.

Leading black Labour member, the recently knighted Sir Trevor Phillips, a Sky News political show host, once told me Barack Obama, who, after being chosen as a candidate by the Democrats, went on to become American President, would never have made it through Labour’s selection process.

Why? Because, despite having David Lammy as its Shadow Foreign Secretary, Labour is much more conservative, some would say institutionally racist, than the Democrats, and even the Tories, when it comes to council and parliamentary candidate selections. There is just one African Caribbean man on Labour’s 39-strong ruling national executive. Before this year’s elections to it there was none.

There needs to be a huge fuss made about this glaring Labour racial inequality. Labour’s delayed Forde report, which uncovered shocking anti-black racism in the party, and Al Jazeera’s bombshell The Labour Files documentary series have provided powerful ammunition.

• Marc Wadsworth is author of the book Comrade Sak, Shapurji Saklatvala, a political biography (https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/comrade-sak)