Calvin Bailey: 'Stephen’s Murder Was Hatred – Now Knife Crime Is Almost Senseless'
Calvin Bailey (Credit: UK Parliament)
8 min read
Calvin Bailey, Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead, tells Sophie Church about his 25 years in the RAF, friendship with Stephen Lawrence’s brother and carrying a knife as a teenager
“When his brother was killed, we lost Stu for a period – the world swallowed him up and took him away from us.”
Calvin Bailey, the recently elected Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead, is telling The House about the time in 1993 when Stephen Lawrence, the brother of his friend, was stabbed to death. For Bailey and his group of friends, this was yet another case of police failure in the face of mounting racially motivated attacks.
“Our instant reaction was to try and arm ourselves to be able to do something about it,” he recalls. Aged 13, Bailey took to carrying a small penknife.
I believe that our missions will take us to sunnier uplands
“It was when we were older and we were talking, and I said to my friend James, ‘Did you [carry one]?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I did’. He used to have this little pocketknife that was on his desk. But we had never admitted to each other at the time because we were embarrassed by it.”
Is the knife crime we see today different from back then?
“Stephen’s murder was hatred. Hatred brought about that murder. Whereas look at some of the knife attacks now, like Ronan Kanda,” he replies, referring to the 16-year-old boy from Wolverhampton murdered in 2023 in a case of mistaken identity. “It’s almost senseless, and it’s just a complete lack of empathy.”
Bailey, now 48, grew up in Plumstead in southeast London. His father, an aspiring farmer, travelled to Zambia as part of his training, where he met his wife, a local farmer’s daughter. After Bailey was born, the family moved back to the UK.
“In the early 1980s, dad couldn’t get a farm. I think there was a reluctance to receive a Black woman in the West Country or wherever dad tried,” Bailey says.
The family then moved to Plumstead, where Bailey’s father began cab driving. He went on to set up a business renting motorbikes for cabbies learning the Knowledge. His mother – a “grafter” – worked several jobs, from supermarket cashier to typist in Belmarsh Prison.
“When dad used to come home from work at nine, you’d normally see mum transitioning between jobs at some point during the afternoon or the evening,” he says. “The four of us kids, or certainly the younger three, were always looking after each other.”
Bailey describes a “very happy” childhood, growing up in an area that had become a safe haven for those fleeing persecution abroad. “I had lots of friends who were Sikh and lots of friends who were from Iran. Later I realised that actually my Sikh friends were Ugandan [fleeing dictator] Idi Amin, and my Iranian friends had left Iran following the fall of the Shah.”
His family was also affected by discrimination, but Bailey says joining the cadets gave him comfort and direction.
Florida, on exchange with the US Air Force Special Operations Command
“With kids at boys’ schools, it was quite violent,” he says. “Whilst I had a really strong group of friends at school, cadets was a nice community, and I really loved it.”
At just 12 years old, Bailey set his sights on joining the RAF. “In a very Calvin way, I went to the careers information office at what used to be the back of Tottenham Court Road and said, ‘I want to join the Royal Air Force’,” he remembers with a smile. “You’re a bit young,” Bailey was told.
Bailey successfully enlisted into the RAF after university, however, and on 11 September 2001 finished his training.
“Literally that morning, a glorious day, I came into the crew room and watched the airplanes fly into the Twin Towers,” he says. “I don’t think I realised the world had changed, but certainly the consequences of that morning set the tone of my next 25 years.”
This period saw Bailey go back and forth to Afghanistan, seeing the country change with each visit.
“When I first went there in 2002, there were no lights. Everything was war-torn. It was an unbelievable mess.”
“Wealthier families would have guards stationed outside their properties with AK47s,” he says.
“There’d been about five or six years where I hadn’t had a reason to go to Afghanistan. I very vividly remember flying over these football pitches on the approach to Kabul that were just full of kids playing football and thinking: this is amazing.”
Stephen’s murder was hatred... Now it’s almost senseless
A month later, Bailey found himself evacuating these same people from Kabul airport as the Taliban regained power. “I was thinking, it’s almost like we’ve grown all this good and now we’re taking all these people out,” he says. “It really felt like a moral failure. I was very angry.”
“Part of the thing that caused angst and gives me an amount of PTSD was my worry that we were having to tell people deliberately to take risks in order to get our mission done.”
After a life of service, and a witness to what he saw as the Conservative government’s failure in Afghanistan, Bailey ran for Parliament: “It felt like a way of righting the things that in the past I had seen and felt were wrong.”
Bailey had spent 25 years in the forces, then overnight entered a very different kind of institution. Now a member of the Defence Select Committee, he notes the absurdity of questioning old colleagues.
“It takes some time to knock the reverence out of dealing with someone that’s uniformed in front of you, but I’m not sure I ever really had it there,” he says, smiling. “I do enjoy it, but it has taken some time to fully find my feet again.”
In a recent committee meeting, Bailey was able to show “full Calvin”, he says. What does that entail? “Just being comfortable with seeking the outcome and being very mission-focused. Like, I want this answer, and I’m going to extract it from you in any way.”
Is that his training from the forces on display? “No, it’s just being Calvin.”
While Bailey is flexing his authority on the Defence Committee, he remains fiercely loyal to the Prime Minister. It has been a hellish few weeks for Keir Starmer – a near-government defeat over welfare cuts, the Chancellor in tears on the frontbench, and the possibility of a Zarah Sultana-Jeremy Corbyn-led party emerging to take more votes from the party’s left. Labour MPs and even Cabinet ministers are questioning the PM’s future. But Calvin Bailey is firmly behind his commander.
“He’s got the humility to course-correct. Marching your people down the wrong road, then knowing it’s the wrong road, and then continuing is the greatest crime. There’s nothing wrong with getting halfway and saying, ‘No, fellas, we’ve gone the wrong way. We need to go back,’” he says. “The thing that pulls us all back in together very quickly, apart from our shared values, is Sir Keir.”
With childhood friend Dr Stuart Lawrence
“If we’ve learned anything from last week, it’s how important Keir Starmer is himself to the entire project,” he adds.
Is there a sense of resentment in the Parliamentary Labour Party towards more unruly MPs, whose rebellion against the government’s welfare cuts has weakened the leadership’s authority, and its ambition for reform?
“There is some upset,” he says. “Some people have managed to keep their heads up on the project, looking long and saying our only way of ensuring that we deliver good outcomes for people is by remaining in power.”
The Leyton and Wanstead MP counts himself in their number: “I believe that our missions will take us to sunnier uplands.”
Bailey is critical of the government’s strategy on defence procurement, however. Having pledged an increase in defence spending, the government is currently working up a list of equipment to order. But this MP thinks ministers need to be more ambitious in the scale of its purchasing.
“It’s like going to buy a box of screws from Screwfix, where it’s £10 for 100 or £2 for a box of 10, and deciding to buy 10 boxes at £2 rather than one box,” he explains. “If you’re going to do it, just do the big numbers, like go out, put them on the books, do it early, and then allow the Treasury and other departments to work out what that looks like.”
A Defence Committee member, MP for a London constituency and trade envoy to Southern Africa, Bailey says he is playing his part in parliamentary life in a “ridiculously Calvin way”: “I feast on all the bits that are me.”
While he remains tight-lipped over his own ambitions in Parliament, Bailey says he wants to see the UK return to a simulacrum of Tony Blair’s early days in government.
“The calculus I made in 2024 was that I want to feel in 10 years’ time as though I can turn to my children’s generation and say, ‘We did this’,” he says. “I just want it to be in the way that it was for us. I’d like them to feel how I felt about the NHS post-1997 when I was a kid. I’d like them to feel as though there were opportunities out there.”
