Jovan Owusu-Nepaul on the battle of Clacton

By Lester Holloway 3min read

CAMBRIDGE ALUM Jovan Owusu-Nepaul opened up about the “hurt” of being ordered to quit campaigning against his opponent, Reform party leader Nigel Farage, during last year’s general election.

Speaking at Homerton College’s Tuesday Conversations last evening, Owusu-Nepaul – who ran as a Labour candidate in the Essex seaside town of Clacton – said his party’s decision to take him out of the constituency in the middle of the campaign had left him feeling torn.

Owusu-Nepaul, who was working for Labour’s headquarters then, said he felt divided between loyalty to the party and being “quite upset” that he was being denied the chance to offer “an alternative worldview” to Farage in Clacton.

While acknowledging the hard-nosed strategy of only campaigning in target seats, Owusu-Nepaul said his party missed an opportunity to directly challenge a brand of politics which encouraged “poisonous views of our neighbours that come from different parts of the world.”

Speaking at a packed event organised by Homerton Changemakers and the Homerton Politics Society, Owusu-Nepaul was interviewed by recent Homerton alum and politics graduate Sam Eastoe and responded to audience questions.

A news report at the time quoted a local campaign source as saying that Owusu-Nepaul had been left “in tears” after being ordered out of Clacton, and suggested that Labour figures were jealous that their candidate was getting more social media coverage than their leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

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Jovan Osuwu-Nepaul (l) and Sam Eastoe

The contest between the stylish 27-year-old Black man and veteran Brexiteer Farage attracted a wave of media coverage, including men’s fashion magazine, GQ, naming Owusu-Nepaul “the best-dressed man in British politics.”

The danger of ignoring constituencies deemed safe or unwinnable is that it risks sending a message to marginalised communities – whether they are minoritised or poor white areas – that their votes do not matter. This leads to a “sense of antagonism towards politicians”, he added.

Reflecting on the election, he said he was just being himself, adding: “I think politics is so sterile because people feel as if they have to conform; they have to wear a certain thing or they have to speak a certain way, or they have to come from a certain background.”

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Homerton College Principal Lord Simon Woolley and Jovan Owusu-Nepaul

Responding to an audience question about Labour’s support from Black voters, Owusu-Nepaul said the party risked losing support to the Conservatives because they failed to understand the aspirational desire of those communities.

“What is missing is an understanding of aspiration and the fact that people like my grandparents, who came here from the Caribbean and Africa, didn’t travel all of this way if they weren’t aspirational. They wouldn’t be doing all of these difficult jobs if they didn’t want their lives to get better, and for their children and grandchildren.”

He added: “The Labour Party, I think, doesn’t really understand why many communities are here in the first place. The idea [that we] just give people things [ignores the need] to recognise that there’s agency among communities.”

Owusu-Nepaul said he was most passionate about tackling child poverty and called for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted.

He revealed his proudest moment in politics was working on the Bernie Grant leadership scheme, which capacity-builds party members from minoritised backgrounds to stand for office.