Marc Wadsworth is a British black rights campaigner, broadcast and print journalist and BBC filmmaker and radio producer.
33 Facts About Marc Wadsworth
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Marc Wadsworth founded the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991 and helped set up the justice campaign for murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence two years later.
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In 2018 Marc Wadsworth was expelled from the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute.
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Marc Wadsworth recalls being the only black student at Ottershaw School, a boys' boarding school in Surrey.
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Marc Wadsworth helped to secure Black Sections within the Labour Party, first tabled in 1983, to further the cause of greater African, Caribbean and Asian political representation.
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Marc Wadsworth then founded the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991, to campaign for justice after the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, introducing Lawrence's parents to South African Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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Marc Wadsworth lost his position as ARA leader in 1994, following disputes with Socialist Action and Ken Livingstone.
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Marc Wadsworth resigned from the Labour Party in 2003 in protest against the Iraq War.
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Marc Wadsworth said he had he had given McGrath a month to privately clarify his comments prior to publishing the interview.
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Marc Wadsworth twice served on the National Executive Council of the National Union of Journalists.
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Marc Wadsworth has been a reporter and presenter for BBC radio and television and for ITV's Thames News, at one point interviewing Margaret Thatcher, whom he recalls walked out when he asked about the vote by her colleagues to effectively oust her from power.
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From 2001 to 2012, Marc Wadsworth was a lecturer in journalism at City University London.
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Marc Wadsworth made a documentary film, Divided by Race, United in War and Peace, about his late father's fellow Caribbean World War II veterans and their struggles against colour prejudice and racism.
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Marc Wadsworth wrote Guardian newspaper obituaries for two veterans, Sam King in 2016, and Allan Wilmot, both of whom featured in his films.
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In May 2022, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a docudrama made by Marc Wadsworth's independent production company entitled The Amazing Life of Olaudah Equiano, about a freed African slave of that name in Britain who was a prominent 18th-century abolitionist at the same time as the better known white politician William Wilberforce.
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Marc Wadsworth's programme was repeated in July 2022, remaining available on BBC Sounds.
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On 30 June 2016, Marc Wadsworth attended the launch of the report of the Chakrabarti Inquiry into allegations of antisemitism and racism in the Labour Party.
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Marc Wadsworth was handing out their press release to journalists, about under-representation of Black people in the party and about challenging Labour MPs hostile to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
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Marc Wadsworth gave one of the leaflets to Kate McCann, a journalist from The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
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Marc Wadsworth says he felt her tone was hostile, and that there was "a bit of a commotion", and that as someone with experience of feeling "surrounded by hostile white people", he retreated to the back of the hall.
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Later Marc Wadsworth, while making a point about the under-representation of non-white racial groups at the launch and in the party, responded to McCann by saying he saw The Telegraph journalist handing a copy of his press release to Labour MP Ruth Smeeth and thus claimed to have seen who was "working hand in hand".
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Marc Wadsworth says he had felt suspicious of Smeeth politically because of "right-wing journalist McCann" passing her his press release, in what he perceived as a friendly way.
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Later that day Smeeth published an accusation that Marc Wadsworth had verbally attacked her by using a traditional antisemitic slur to accuse her of a media conspiracy, though did not specify the slur or the conspiracy.
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Marc Wadsworth responded on the radio that he did not know Smeeth was Jewish.
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Marc Wadsworth said he regretted that Smeeth felt offended but that he had been expelled from the Labour Party based solely on media reports.
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Marc Wadsworth says she never told him she thought he was being antisemitic.
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At the first day's hearing by the National Constitutional Committee into Marc Wadsworth's future in the Labour Party on 25 April 2018, around 40 Labour MPs and peers accompanied Smeeth, while there was a group of protestors with pro-Marc Wadsworth placards.
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Marc Wadsworth's expulsion was welcomed by the Jewish Labour Movement and the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
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Two days later, Jewish Voice for Labour, calling Marc Wadsworth a "leading Black antiracist activist", welcomed him to their Annual General Meeting and passed a resolution that he should be reinstated.
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In February 2019, after party officials refused to speak to him further, Marc Wadsworth began legal action against the Labour Party for race discrimination against him under the Equality Act 2010 and for breach of contract.
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Marc Wadsworth had been taking action against news publishers for claiming he had heckled or abused Smeeth, including The Jewish Chronicle, which added caveats to several stories after intervention by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.
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In March 2021, The Jewish Chronicle falsely stated that Wadsworth was part of a group allegedly planning to locate and intimidate Jewish Labour members, printing a prominent picture of Wadsworth.
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Marc Wadsworth sued for defamation in the article, which The Jewish Chronicle accepted was wholly untrue.