Raising issues of concern

Keith Vaz is one of four black MPs on the Labour benches.
KEITH Vaz seized the marginal seat of Leicester East from rightwing Conservative Peter Bruinvels with a majority of almost 2,000. Mr Vaz is 30 and is one of the four black MPs elected to parliament. Born in Aden, he came to this country in 1965 with his parents.
The campaign in Leicester East was hard-fought and an official complaint has been filed against Mr Bruinvels for making a personal attack on Keith Vaz because of his Asian origins. Mr Bruinvels, who is a member of the General Synod of the Church of England, the Church of England parliament, is alleged to have asked a constituent not to vote for Mr Vaz because he was Asian.
Mr Bruinvels achieved shortlived fame during the last parliament when he offered to act as state executioner during the debate on capital punishment.
Mr Vaz is currently chair of the Socialist Legal Services campaign, and hopes to carry the campaign for the extension of legal services into parliament. He has worked in a law centre in Leicester and outlined his hopes for reform to the Catholic Herald.
"Law centres should be able to take work from private solicitors, work which they very often reject because it isn't profitable enough," he said.
The ideal of penal reform is also one which interests Mr Vaz,, who described the suggestion of privatising prisons as "riddled with difficulties." He continued: "Crime is committed against the state and therefore the state should control the prisons. If they were privatised and the prison officers went on strike, there would be chaos and ultimately the state would have to deal with the situation."
Mr Vaz had previously fought for Labour at Richmond and Barnes in the 1983 general election and at Surrey West in the 1984 Euro-elections, constituencies which he described as "unwinnable", whereas he knew he had a good chance in Leicester, where he lives.
"Leicester is a very moderate city," he said. "I found that what concerned people most was the problems of housing, nuclear disarmament and poverty. On these issues much of Labour policy coincides with Catholic policy," he noted.
"The most pressing issues facing the new government will be providing a new stock of adequate housing and to regenerate the national health. If the attacks on the NHS continue it will collapse," he said.
He believed that his main task in the Commons will be to raise issues of concern, although he confessed that he was "not madly excited" at the prospect of all the hard work which that entailed.
He hoped to continue to fight for those areas which he felt were most deprived, areas which were not confined to the north or to the inner-cities, he suggested.
"Inner city is just a polite way of saying an area where there are a lot of black people, but deprivation exists in the outer cities too, on many council estates. There are pockets of deprivation in Leicester East and areas of affluence, and all these areas warrant attention," he concluded.
Mr Vaz said that he was the only Catholic Asian MP, and did not know of any elected official in any other country who was both Asian and a Catholic. "It's very unusual," he commented, "but now that I've been elected, I believe in miracles."