Just occasionally, something wonderful happens - even in the doom-laden world of politics. The election of Barack Obama was indeed one such wonderful event, Martin Luther King's dream made reality. It was atonement, among other things, by the American people for slavery, segregation and the countless cruelties of the past. All Americans, black and white, can feel justly proud of what they have done. They have said finally that people are now judged by "the content of their character, not the colour of their skin".
For me too, it was a vindication of a lifetime defined by anti racism. As a child I was incensed by the injustice of racism. In my early teens, I heard and fell into a life long love of jazz, the only wholly original American art form, created by black African Americans a century ago. I became a jazz musician in my youth and saw playing live most of the great early jazz musicians before they passed on. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie and dozens more. Jazz was a music of protest and opposition to oppression, as well as a beautiful sound.
At university I helped to establish a student society - SPEAR, the Society for Peace and Equality Among Races, and from start to finish I and my family and friends supported the boycott of apartheid South African goods, until Nelson Mandela was free. In the 1960s I joined CARD, the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, which helped to bring about Britain's laws against racial discrimination.
In Luton in the 1970s I helped to found the Luton Anti Apartheid Group and was a founder member too of the Luton Campaign for Racial Harmony. And -. but that's enough about me.
Last week I knew that all those struggles by so many millions of people against the injustice of racism had finally been rewarded. The joy on the faces of black people across the world and millions of white people too told me that we are now one race - the human race.
And Barack Obama has brought other qualities long missing from the political world. He has calm, great intelligence and a striking dignity. He will need all this and more in dealing with unprecedented problems, coming into office facing dreadful wars, economic meltdown and the looming catastrophe of global warming. But let us be grateful, oh so grateful, that we now have Obama and not Bush in office.
And it is obvious that the world, America included, is having to move in a socialist direction. We are now seeing more government intervention and more regulation of economies to save us from the disastrous consequences of the free market capitalist economics of recent decades, the privatisation and globalisation which has led us to where we now are. In the presidential campaign, right-wing crackpots tried to frighten voters saying that Obama was a socialist, which apparently made young Americans even more enthusiastic to vote for him.
Obama will not actually be singing The Red Flag but we can expect at least a Roosevelt New Deal mark II. The New Deal drove America out of the Great Depression in the 1930s after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, with public works programmes and a highly regulated economy for the foreseeable future. And in Britain too, only a democratic, socialist strategy will rescue us from the chasm into which free market capitalism has driven us. It was democratic socialism that rebuilt Britain after the Second World War and now that Blair has gone I am cautiously optimistic that Gordon Brown is rediscovering his socialist roots.
Difficult times lie ahead, but last week America, and indeed the whole world, took a giant leap in the right direction with the election of Barack Obama.
Kelvin Hopkins MP
