Nigerian-British Labour MP and former leadership candidate for the Labour Party, Chuka Umunna, 38, has been speaking about the party’s future as Britain gets ready to vote in the General election on June 8.

In an essay for the New Statesman magazine, he wrote, “We need a new direction. There is an alternative to Labour’s growing political irrelevance and a deviation from our current path does not mean a return to New Labour or to neo-liberal market capitalism.” The Streatham MP said Labour had sometimes neglected its aims to “represent working people and to redress the imbalance of power between capital and labour” when last in office though it had made “many socialist achievements”.

Umunna has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Streatham since 2010 and was Shadow Business Secretary from 2011 to 2015. In 2015, he announced he was running for the Labour leadership but suddenly withdrew.

Umunna, was a leading player in Labour’s campaign to persuade Britain to stay in the EU. He felt growing up, there may have been more overt racism, but communities were not so isolated. “Labour finds this issue hard to deal with because it worries about racism. I don’t think the answer is to pander to a Ukip agenda and say, well, let’s just chuck all these people out of your area. But equally, you’re ignoring how these people feel if you try and pretend they don’t feel their area is changing. Unless we reconnect and have a Labour answer to these fundamental issues, which all emerge from globalisation, we ain’t ever going to get back into power again,” he said.

Umunna lost his dad in a road accident in Nigeria in 1992 and his mother, Patricia Milmo, a solicitor, is of English-Irish.

Speaking to The Guardian, he describes his upbringing.

He has been thinking more about identity and integration. As a boy, Umunna was always aware that his family stood out. His mother, Patricia, a lawyer, is white and half-Irish; his father, Bennett, was Nigerian. But that was not the main reason people would stare: she was 6ft 1in and her husband barely 5ft. “You can imagine us walking down the road, the four of us. We were unusual.” Bennett Umunna was penniless when he moved from Nigeria to London in 1964, but determined to make his way. Patricia was upper-middle class; her father, Sir Helenus Milmo QC, had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. The couple met at a party in the early 1970s, by which time Umunna’s father had built up a successful import-export business (largely mobile clinics and other portable buildings). The family enjoyed a good standard of living. Chuka went to private school, and Bennett drove a sports car. Back in the 1980s, the police were suspicious of black men who drove sports cars. One day they followed him home, accused him of being a drug dealer and beat him to a pulp. “They got him out of the car, beat the living hell out of him, then took him to the police station. Every time he opened his mouth, he got another hook. We took the police to court and not one officer was disciplined.”

Rachel Ogbu

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