A British Jesse Jackson?
12th June 2011
Natasha Sivanandan has spent 25 years pursuing tribunal cases and has now secured her biggest victory with a £425,000 payout.
Even her father, a distinguished campaigner against racism, has disowned her and accused her of bringing race relations into disrepute.
Sounds like that ‘disabled’ lawyer in California who makes his living suing small businesses over ADA access.
Miss Sivanandan, 57, who has no children and has never married, lives in a £450,000 housing association property in Wood Green, north London, which was allocated to her after she complained of racism at a previous property. She is understood to be claiming income support and disability benefit.
Identity politics can be very lucrative.
While most of the actions have been against employers or organisations that turned Miss Sivanandan down for jobs, others have been against a charity that rejected her application to become a foster parent, a housing association that failed to move her into a bigger home and even an employment tribunal judge.
The cases are said by experts to have cost public bodies more than £1 million in payouts, out-of-court settlements and court costs.
Al Sharpton, take note.
Her first recorded grievance procedure came in 1987. While working as a race relations adviser at Brent council, north London, she accused a Rastafarian colleague of being “macho and intimidating”.
A case against the BBC followed in 1992. In 1996 she brought a case against Islington council, north London, and Barnardo’s, the children’s charity, claiming that an all-white interview panel had objected to her view that Britain was a “profoundly racist society”.