GROWING up in North London in the 1980s was scary if you were black or brown.
You only had to turn the wrong corner to find the National Front gangs.
Open racists, they liked nothing better than to harass frizzy-haired young men like me and wave the Union Jack.
One of my clearest memories is the sound of broken glass outside Camden Tube station.
A skinhead threw a bottle at me and my family.
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But I know that modern Britain is a story of progress.
Throughout my childhood thousands of anti-fascists mobilised to push those skinheads out of North London.
By the time I was a teenager that fear was fading.
No longer was a black boy like me most likely to see the Union Jack draped on the shoulders of fascists, but on the shoulders of black athletes like Daley Thompson, Linford Christie, Colin Jackson and Tessa Sanderson winning Olympic medals.
For a sports-addicted black family like mine, the flag was a symbol of integration and hope.
My parents were from the Windrush generation and for them growing up in the Caribbean, the Union Jack was the symbol of anti-fascist forces in World War Two.
It was the flag that went to battle against Hitler’s racism.
I’ve always felt abandoning it to racists was a betrayal of its anti-fascist heritage.
Which is why those uneasy about the Union Jack on our leaflets have it wrong.
The flag doesn’t belong to those who once tried to intimidate me.
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It’s everyone’s be they black or white.
That’s why my party proudly flies it — and we will never stand it down.
