Jason Grant talks to former City Hall advisor Lee Jasper about community, culture and those financial irregularities
The last year’s Mayoral elections created huge publicity and generated many headlines. Voter turnout was the highest in recent times, with both sides of the political spectrum campaigning hard. One scandal seemed to disgust the London electorate, the allegation that members of Ken Livingstone’s team were using public money to fund organisations linked to them.
The Evening Standard reported that grants worth £2.5 million of public money were being used to fund organisations without proper checks and scrutiny. Most of the allegations centre on organisations receiving funding without financial recording systems and rental money for companies already based at the London Development Agency premises.
The problem with all of this was that some of the grants were paid directly by the Mayor’s office. Members of the Mayor’s team who hold high office should declare any interests they have with organisations that intend to apply for funding. Most of the organisations that were involved could be linked to one man. Jasper came under fire and was suspended from office whilst an investigation took place to confirm if the allegations were true. Whilst the investigation was underway, the Evening Standard published a sexually charged email exchange between Jasper and Karen Chouhan who is company secretary of one of the groups who received public money from the LDA. This resulted in Jasper resigning from his position as senior policy advisor to the Mayor of London.
A noisy and chaotic Brixton tube station is our meeting place; busy with road works, bustling crowds of people and a constant flow of traffic. The station plays classical music for the commuter’s that creates a calming effect to the chaos. All around there are people with desperate looks on their faces, well worn clothing and trainers. Dressed in black with a baseball cap pulled far down over his head, Jasper almost looks menacing but his appearance helps him to blend into the Brixton streets. Jasper leads ahead walking through Electric Avenue, the busy street market then through Granville Arcade indoor market and onto Cold Harbour Lane, one of the most notorious roads in Brixton which used to be known for huge drugs and violence problems. Our interview takes place inside Blacker Dread record shop, black political books are packed into cabinets and compact disks and vinyl are displayed on shelves around the place.
Jasper was born in Manchester into a mixed heritage family with a genetic combination of Irish, African, Jamaican and Cuban. He then moved to Oldham, where he spent his youth. He left school without any qualifications and drifted aimlessly. Not much has been written about his early years and I am keen to understand the influences that affected this man’s life. In his 20’s, he returned to education as an adult learner and gained a degree in Social Sciences at Manchester Polytechnic before moving to London in 1985.
“See all my friends, where I come from; a third of them are in mental institutions, a third of them are permanently long time unemployed, consigned to the scrap heap and the other third are in jail, says Jasper. “There is one or two who have made it good and were like the rare breed and that is from a generation that was in the 70s. I have seen that replicated generation after generation in the United Kingdom.
Throughout our discussion Jasper keeps his shades on which makes it difficult to see into his eyes.
“I just think that the crime which enrages me most is the absolute waste of talent that I see taking place particularly within our own community but not exclusively. So all of that means that I’m a product of my generation really and I became inspired and enraptured with the thought of trying to make a difference”.
The recent official figures on the education of young Black boys are dismal. Only 31.9% of black boys achieved five A to C passes last year, against the national average of 51.9%, and there are twice as many black men in prison as there are in university. This problem has been the driving force behind his campaigning on race relation issues. Over the past 30 years Jasper has enabled ethnic minorities to feel a part of the decision making processes. Even with such an impressive track record in campaigning, unfortunately the biggest threat to young black men in particular, is other young black men.
Some London youth-gangs are currently at war with their neighbouring boroughs and areas. An altercation can occur from a simple glance in the wrong direction. In the past two years 54 young men have lost their lives on the streets of London. It’s a sobering statistic. Parts of this problem have been ignored by politicians and left for the black community to sort out for themselves. Jasper acknowledges that more could be done but questions the responsibility of black men who leave their children, and do not support a family. This concept of family is interesting as within the black community, especially in Africa, there is a saying that states ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. So why is it that there are areas which are populated with black people but they cannot pull together to raise their children? Is there even such thing as a black community or is it some fantasy relived by old identity politicians?
Jasper is adamant saying “I think there is such thing as a black community, I think it is increasingly fragmented in the UK because we have got migrations of different sorts of African descendants from this diasporas worldwide. There is not a single, homogenous community but there is a single political community who share aspirations about wanting to reduce racism, wanting to push forward economic growth, and wanting decent housing”.
The allegations against Jasper were damning and the media campaign certainly had the whole of London against him. Jasper is wary on the subject of the investigations stating that: “I’ve been investigated by the audit commission, investigated by the London Development Agency, investigated by a forensic audit panel that was set up by Boris himself with Patience Wheatcroft, the business editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
“Everybody has been over every email, the police are investigating and as of today, not a single person has been charged. And in fact three of the organisations Deshbangla TV, The Federation of Black Women’s Organisations and Diversity International, three of the key ones have been dismissed by the police with no further investigation. There are three left which are Brixton Base, Green Badge Taxi School and Ethnic Mutual Fund which I don’t expect any charges to come in relation to those organisations either to be honest.
“I welcome the many investigations taking place as this will give me the ability to eventually clear my name. Strangely enough no one has asked me a single question or sought any clarification on any matter some seven months on”.
In the last 30 years Jasper has been quoted as the most effective and outspoken black male of his generation. This is partly due to the numerous boards and charities that he has managed to set up and become chair of. He founded the National Black Caucus, The 1990 Trust and Operation Black Vote. He was also a founding member of Jubilee 2000 and Operation Trident Independent advisory group. His experience includes being Senior Policy advisor to the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA); Director of Development for the Mangrove Trust; Chair of Mangrove Community Association; Secretary of Notting Hill Carnival; Press and Publicity Officer for Rainer Foundation. He is president of the National Black Students Alliance and was Senior Policy Advisor on equalities for the Mayor of London for eight years.
“It was an enormously fantastic learning curve, at one point I was banging on people’s doors to try and get change then all of a sudden, I am in the driving seat to bring change,” says Jasper
“To me it demonstrated what can be done, if you have real political power. Over eight years we spent £715,000,000 on black community infrastructure projects, employed 14,000 black people in full time jobs, 4,500 in part time jobs. We promoted black history month, we established the Africa day on Trafalgar Square, we established the anti-racist festival Rise, and it shows what level of change that can be achieved if you get into politics”.
At the time of his resignation, he was serving a suspension for the investigation of using public money to fund and support organisations. The main concern was that either he was directly involved in most of the organisations, or his friends and business associates. The last straw came when an email exchange was intercepted by the Evening Standard and exposed his conduct of flirting with a woman who had received money from his department in City Hall. These allegations were used as part of the campaign by various media outlets to expose the gross misconduct of the office that Ken Livingstone was running. Jasper was a central figure in all of this mess, which could be argued, resulted in the London electorate voting for Boris Johnson.
Jasper does not accept this view and gets defensive saying, “It was clearly motivated by race and their tactic was to frighten the white outer suburbs about what was really going on in the centre, to such an extent that there would be an overwhelming turnout against Livingstone and to that extent they succeeded.
“When you analyse the election results for the mayor, the black vote in the inner city, went up from 37 to 45 percent, which is a fantastic increase consequence of the work that we were doing in communities but never the less the outer London boroughs went from 49 to 69 percent, so they were even greater mobilised”.
After his fall from public office, Jasper took some time out with his family, hit the gym hard and has developed a more considered approach in the political struggles that still face the black community.
“Now I think we are dealing with the symptoms of a community that is immersed in poverty and the finally phase of our struggle here in the United Kingdom is about economic justice. Whilst we have fought to put out the fires of the symptomatic causes of poverty and the manifestations of racism, we have not been so good at identifying and handing down to the next generations, a clear legacy and a clear analytical framework that focuses on the root problem. The root problem is poverty. So in these latter stages of my career, I’m focussing on economic justice and poverty rather than trying to put out every single fire”.
Jasper has been helping to create a network of black individuals and businesses who will come together to further their own interests and build a stronger black community. He is part of the Equanomics network which has been set up to develop an economical network for black people to fund and support black opportunities.
Lee describes his other area of focus: “I’m a passionate advocate of education and I have called for the establishment of the African Academy. The thing that is really important is to develop a secondary school, a six form and a university that can be a centre for the development of black leadership and also demonstrate that these kids that have sort of being written off in youth offender institutions, in pupil referral units, in jails contain people like me. I am an ex-offender who has been to jail, and there is thousands of Lee Jasper’s wallowing in jail for want of an opportunity to do something. I think that a school, such as the one that I have described will hopefully act as a sort of exemplar, a beacon in excellence of education and prove once and for all that these kids are salvageable”.