Protest over Real McCoy reunion

Anti-fascist activists have called on London’s Hackney Empire to ban Leo Muhammad from the shows this weekend because he is a mouthpiece for the Nation of Islam.

The group’s American leader Louis Farrakhan has been banned from Britain since 1986 because the government considers his views as racist, inflammatory and anti-Semitic.

Muhammad was known as Leo Chester when he starred in the BBC Two comedy in the Nineties. The groundbreaking show was the first comedy programme to feature an all black and Asian cast.

But the comic has gone on to become a leading spokesman for the separatist Nation of Islam, and preaches the group’s controversial message at Hyde Park Corner. In 1997, he was ordered to leave the Lilian Bayliss School in Lambeth, where he had been invited to speak as part of Black History Month, because he turned up accompanied by an uninvited group of members of the Nation of Islam.

Opponents say his views are offensive and racist and have written to Hackney Empire’s director Simon Thomsett, local MP Diane Abbott and all Hackney councillors calling for him to be banned.

Veteran campaigner Terry Fitzpatrick told the London Evening Standard: ‘I am concerned that [it] will be used by Muhammad for the kind of racial rhetoric that he has come out with in the past.’

However, a spokeswoman for the production said: ‘The show is not inflammatory or offensive in any way to any other group or race.’

Published: 16 Oct 2008