The Bond

"This is a deeply personal book that paints a picture of growing up in Newark in New Jersey, America. It speaks to me deeply, as I think it would to most young men who have grown up without a father. The writers of The Bond discuss why you might join a gang or peer-group to discover your masculinity, and why you might feel inadequate in relation to it. They talk a lot about mentoring. They themselves mentored each other, and signal the individuals who helped them along the path. All of them make it to university in the end. The latest figures suggest that 59% of young Afro-Caribbean boys in Britain are growing up without a father. I have continued to come back to this in my political career, and absolutely not because I want to demonise single-mothers – I was raised by one and I experienced some of that. It is rather to challenge communities, public services and the country to support their families and their responsibilities. Because both financially and emotionally being abandoned by a father is deeply problematic. In my own book I also talk about mentoring. For me, it’s not a black-white thing. I want corporations with the chief executives really engaged in communities. I talk about tax rebates, or whatever, to encourage that and make it happen in a deep and real way. And I talk about the fundamental assumptions you’ve got to have about mothers. At the moment you don’t have to put a father on a birth certificate, and that is a real problem. Yes, I put some lyrics into the book that I think many readers will be startled by. This is the latest grime – as it’s called these days, not just gangsta rap – that young people are listening to, and it’s really disturbing. I talk from my own experience of living on a diet of purely that. It’s very easy to forget that while there are kids up and down the country who listen to this music, if you’re middle class then you can interrupt that singular, narrow experience with other culture ­– books in your home, [BBC] Radio 4, museums and all the rest of it – and it’s fine because you genuinely have a choice. But in my constituency many young people have only that music as their whole diet, alongside absent fathers and a ramped-up, turbo-boosted materialism. So what we see with some of these young people is a toxic mix that comes together."