"The best gift around the Christmas Tree is the presence of Family wrapped in love" Anon It literally feels as if I have blinked and we are back in December, we have nearly completed 365 days, 52 weeks or a whole year. I am sure this year has had both blessings and challenges for us all. I have decided to keep my December blog light hearted but hopefully meaningful and reflective at the same time. I don’t think the new millennial’s will ever experience Christmas the way most of us did growing up…. Yes, I am referring to those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and some 90s children. For me, Christmas was pure excitement in the house; I came from a large family and a very large extended family, friends and friends who became family. I remember from mid-November my mum, dad, siblings and I (as I was the ‘wash belly’, the Jamaican terminology for last child, I never had my elder sibling’s pressures) would start wiping down the house, cleaning the windows, changing t

"The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness" Marcus Garvey With Remembrance Day (or Poppy Day as it is commonly known) approaching on 11th November; this year it is celebrating 100 years of World War l. I thought it would be beneficial to establish the involvement BAME people from the Commonwealth (Africa, Caribbean and India) contributed during this "Great" war. As a black British woman growing up in the UK, I was led to believe that the heroes that made a pivotal difference during the war were predominately white American’s, British and Europeans. During the Remembrance Sunday ceremony I would watch these servicemen marching with pride as they take part in the national ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall annually. As a child I wore a poppy on my coat, for me I did not understand the significance and I also think that it was the same for my mum who would buy it for me without hesitation.  

"The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are" (Maya Angelou) Back in my childhood days (the late 1980s) I remember discovering black history at around the age of 11 years old when my mother, older sisters and I went to watch a play at our local theatre called ‘ Black Heroes in the Hall of Fame ’.  I wasn’t even sure what we were going to watch and at the time I had no clue what black history was.  The closest recognition of black history was when the family gathered around to watch the TV series ‘ Roots ’, where we were told the unforgettable story of a West African boy named Kunta Kinte who was stolen from his village during his tribal manhood initiation and sold into the transatlantic American slave trade.  I recall it being ‘great’ TV and my older siblings and their friends having discussions about ‘our history’ and their vexation about how black people were ill treated. Throughout my primary education (and secondary to some degree) I was ta

The Metropolitan Police announced that they had given Police Officers the powers to stop and search individuals under section 60 during the 2018  Notting Hill Carnival  they say that they based the enhanced powers on the recent spate of violence in the capital and intelligence that they had received.   Stop and search is extremely controversial, in particularly within various BAME communities because of the disproportionate number of black and Asian people stopped.  I attended the carnival and could not believe the number of black men and boys that were stopped and searched by the police.  It was frustrating and heart breaking to say the least because many of the young boys did not have anything illegal on them but felt humiliated because they were cornered, draped up by the police and treated like thugs. I was told by a reveller that it was probably because they were in groups however, they were not the only ethnicity in groups at the carnival and everyone else seemed to be able

One of the key priorities in the UK today is to tackle the inequalities within the workplace.  Organisations and individuals tend to focus more on gender inequality against women in areas such as leadership positions and pay.  This issue often hits the media headlines and has encouraged initiatives such as the FTSE 100 boardroom recruitment (now extended to the FTSE 350) to voluntarily employ 33% of women to boardroom CEO positions by 2020.  Thus far, this has not been successful and further work and discussions have been encouraged to ensure that the target and the issues have been met. We have also seen that the government have requested that large organisations including public sectors with over 250 employees must publish their gender and bonus gaps .  This resulted in the flogging of the BBC, who when publishing their figures in 2017 showed an extremely large disproportionate gender gap, with two thirds of male employees being paid over £150,000 compared with one third of women

Recently, there have been a number of articles and news bulletins about individuals from the Commonwealth who were brought to the UK from the late 1940s to 1970s as children with their parents who are now being told that they are illegal immigrants 40, 50 and even 60 years after they entered the country. The first set of immigrants who came to the UK were over 500 people from Jamaica who arrived on the Windrush in June 1948, they answered to a number of job adverts encouraging them to come to the UK to help restore the British infrastructure that was destroyed during World War 2.   The Conservative government at the time encouraged people from the West Indies to immigrate to the UK under the British Nationality Act 1948 , which gave all Commonwealth citizens’ free entry into Britain.   This resulted in mass immigration from a number of countries within the commonwealth such as Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago and Dominica. These immigrants took up a number o