Cherry Short

Lone Black candidate's loss threatens Welsh "communities of coloured Folk"

Monmouth is well known as King Henry V's birthplace. But the town that commemorates the victor of the 1415 battle of Agincourt will have to find a place in history, albeit a minor one, for 46-year old Jamaican-born Cherry Short, the only black candidate in the Welsh National Assembly election campaign last May. Despite her defeat by 2000 votes in a white conservative rural constituency, Mrs. Short's candidacy highlighted issues of race and ethnic diversity that must be addressed by Welsh politicians and Labour Government leaders.

Diversity issues
"Wales has to recognise its diversity. As well as Black and Asian communities there are small but significant numbers of Italians and Poles who came to the valleys earlier this century when coal mining was at its peak." Immigrants included "refugees from Franco Spain, and the Irish who added their special quality to Holyhead, only a couple of hours from Dublin," she said in an interview with The Chronicle.

Diversity and race issues are most evident in major urban areas, says Mrs Short who has 11 years experience as city councillor in Cardiff. The Welsh seaport city is home to African, West Indian, Asian and mixed racial populations. It's 100-year old dockland "community of coloured folk" called Bute Town contains the "burning grievances of low wages and deplorable conditions, of labour and livelihood" of the seaman's trade, as the sociologist Kenneth Little said in 1947.

Today, Mrs. Short is well aware that the city's nonwhite residents remain under-valued and threatened by multi-million pound urban regeneration projects. To a weaker personality, resolving historic and post-colonial complexities of race and diversity would be a daunting, confidence-sapping task. Made more difficult because her own Labour party, in government and in Wales, has no declared policy to deal with institutionalised racism.

Important attributes
Nevertheless, the university-educated social worker and mother of two sons holds some trump cards. "My father comes from Anglesey Quaker stock...and I came to Wales at an early age and lived with friends and went to school here," she says. Trained in social administration and women's studies, Mrs. Short has worked to integrate black and ethnic minority people into the county and regional workforce. She is on the Government's task force for the "Welfare to Work" and "New Deal" programmes, serves on the Commission for Racial Equality, and has chaired the Welsh section of the Standing Conference on Face in Europe.

With this track record, Welsh Labour party officials are confident Mrs. Short has a secure political future ahead of her in Wales. Announcement by the Prime Minister of a task force to target women candidates for the elections four years from now should help her political prospects.

Problem issues to be faced
Critics are sure to emphasise that Mrs Short must add racial justice and human rights issues to her policy agenda once she hits the campaign trail.

Action to protect vulnerable communities is essential. Racist attacks in South Wales have reportedly increased by 100 per cent, from 367 to 733. "Doctors and shop owners from ethnic minorities are being driven out of their homes in the Welsh valleys by neo-Nazi supporters who have made them the target of increasingly violent racist attacks," according to The Independent on Sunday, 18 April 1999. Yet, the paper says the local Race Equality Council, the South Wales police authorities and Government seem powerless to act against the culprits.

Furthermore, Mrs. Short's urban agenda must call for city renewal actions that benefit historically disadvantaged people like the denizens of Bute Town. If not, the "community of coloured folk" will certainly enter the millennium with the same afflictions it inherited from the past: "segregated with some considerable rigidity from the rest of the city in the geographical, social and psychological senses......(faced with) strong patterns of colour prejudice among residents of the town," as Kenneth Little wrote.