Peter Griffiths

Peter Harry Steve Griffiths (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2013) was a British Conservative politician best known for gaining the Smethwick seat by defeating the Shadow Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker in the 1964 general election, against the national trend, by using anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric.

Early life Griffiths was born in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, and attended West Bromwich Grammar School. He was educated at Leeds Teacher Training College and, after his National Service, studied for an external London University economics degree and a master's degree in education at Birmingham University, while teaching in West Bromwich. From 1962, he was the head of Hall Green Road primary school, West Bromwich. At the 1959 election, he stood against Smethwick's sitting Member of Parliament (MP) Patrick Gordon Walker for the first time, and succeeded in reducing Gordon Walker's majority from 6,495 to 3,544. Griffiths became leader of the council's Conservative group in 1960, Instead, Griffiths gained the seat for the Conservatives on a 7% swing, in a county borough that had the highest percentage of recent immigrants to England. Racial discrimination was common in the constituency and nationally; the local Labour club operated a colour bar.

In what Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson later described as an "utterly squalid" campaign, Colin Jordan, a British Neo-Nazi and leader of the British Movement, said that members of his group had produced the initial slogan as well as spread the poster and sticker campaign; Jordan's group in the past had also campaigned on other slogans, such as: "Don't vote – a vote for Tory, Labour or Liberal is a vote for more Blacks!". Although Griffiths himself did not coin the phrase or approve its use, he declined to disown it. He denied that there was any "resentment in Smethwick on the grounds of race or colour". Conservatives urged the Speaker, Harry Hylton-Foster, to force Wilson to withdraw the comment. While the Speaker objected to such language, he refused to censure the Prime Minister, and order in the Commons chamber was not restored for ten minutes. Griffiths remained an alderman in Smethwick until 1966. He both supported and arranged for Smethwick council to purchase a row of houses with the intention of letting them exclusively to white families. The government's Housing minister, Richard Crossman, was able to block this proposal by refusing the council permission to borrow the money required.

Griffiths was defeated by the actor and Labour candidate Andrew Faulds in the 1966 general election. Griffiths wrote his own account of his election in 1964. In A Question of Colour (1966), he said that he had "no colour prejudice". In the book he considered South Africa to be "a model of Parliamentary democracy" and that "Apartheid, if it could be separated from racialism, could well be an alternative to integration". Griffiths also blamed immigration from the Caribbean for the spread of disease.

Later life and career In 1967, he became a lecturer in economics at Portsmouth College of Technology. After a year as an exchange professor in California, he returned to what became Portsmouth Polytechnic, until he returned to Parliament.

Griffiths unsuccessfully stood for the Portsmouth North constituency at the February 1974 general election, but was elected for the seat at the 1979 general election. He held the constituency until the Labour landslide at the 1997 election, when he was defeated.

Personal life Griffiths was married to Jeannette (née Rubery); the couple had a son and daughter.

Griffiths died on 20 November 2013, aged 85.