WHATEVER happened to the Labour that was once known as the party of equality, anti-racism and justice and could count among its most loyal supporters Africans, Caribbeans and Asians?

Today, they are the very people who are disproportionately represented among the most deprived sections of the population and face increasing racism in all its ugly manifestations, including Islamophobia — and are abandoning the party in droves.

You only need to see how thousands of Muslims voted for George Galloway in Batley and Spen rather than the official Labour candidate, who scraped in as the MP by a wafer-thin majority. As people of colour, we are fed up with being humiliated, ignored and exploited as mere door-knocking and voting fodder at election time.

Boris Johnson, the lying, cheating Conservative Prime Minister doing a huge hatchet job on the working class, has ensured his dog-whistle bigotry against black people, Muslims and migrants has become mainstream. Just imagine, after crying crocodile tears about poor Afghans, after the military abandonment of them, his Border Force are ruthlessly turning back refugees from the war-torn country in the English Channel.

It is the public outside Parliament, rather than MPs, who have mobilised against such injustices. Black activists working collaboratively with like-minded white people, as seen in the mass Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year and latterly the #KilltheBill and Extinction Rebellion protests, are leading the fightback — in much the way historically the suffragettes, civil rights, trade union and anti-poll tax movements did to achieve success.