Marc Wadsworth is a British black rights campaigner, broadcast and print journalist and BBC filmmaker and radio producer.
He founded the Anti-Racist Alliance in 1991 and two years later, also helped set up the justice campaign for murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
Wadsworth's father, George "Busha" Rowe, travelled to Britain from Jamaica in 1944 to serve as ground crew in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in World War II,[3] first at RAF Hunmanby Moor training base,[citation needed] at Filey, North Yorkshire, as part of a contingent of 2,000 volunteers from the Caribbean.
[4][5] A hairdresser in Finland, at the age of 20, she immigrated to England to first work as an au pair for a Jewish dentist in the West Midlands city of Birmingham.
[7][8] Wadsworth helped to secure Black Sections (caucuses) within the Labour Party, first tabled in 1983, to further the cause of greater African, Caribbean and Asian political representation.
[19] As a journalist, Wadsworth has written for a range of publications, including national newspapers, and has also been involved with community journalism training courses.
[11] His book, Comrade Sak, a political biography of British Indian Labour and Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936), was published in 1998 by Peepal Tree Press.
[21] Wadsworth has been a reporter and presenter for BBC radio and television and for ITV's Thames News (London),[11] 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.
[29] The BBC remade the film, with Wadsworth as a producer, and, in May 2015, Fighting for King and Empire: Britain’s Caribbean Heroes was broadcast.
[32] Wadsworth wrote Guardian newspaper obituaries for two veterans, Sam King in 2016, and Allan Wilmot (2021), both of whom featured in his films.
In May 2022, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a docudrama made by Wadsworth's independent production company entitled The Amazing Life of Olaudah Equiano,[33] 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.
[37] McCann asked a public question to Corbyn about a "Momentum member" handing out a "leaflet" calling for the deselection of anti-Corbyn MPs, accusing him of taking down the name of one Labour MP.
[39] 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.
[37][better source needed] A review by the Media Reform Coalition noted that such political concerns were widespread and Wadsworth's comments seemed to be of that type, though often misreported.
On 27 April 2018, the National Constitutional Committee found that two charges of a breach of s.2.1.8 (prejudical and detrimental conduct) of the Labour Party Rule Book by Wadsworth were proven.
[57] Two days later, Jewish Voice for Labour, calling Wadsworth a "leading Black antiracist activist", welcomed him to their Annual General Meeting and passed a resolution that he should be reinstated.
[61] In a BBC Question Time "leaders special" shortly before the 2019 general election, an audience member, later identified as a South African "Tory activist" in Hull called Ryan Jacobs, singled out the footage of Wadsworth while accusing Corbyn of a disgraceful and terrifying lack of support for Jewish women, claiming it showed Smeeth leaving in tears.
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.