A new breed of leaders can tackle knife culture

Lewis's tough approach says much about the public mood on crime. But more than that, Lewis is part of an unexpected dividend of Johnson's election - the arrival of a new breed of black and Asian social conservatives in positions of power.

Those who accused the new Mayor of tokenism over Lewis's appointment have already been proved wrong: he has chosen Muslim academic Munira Mirza and the Sikh Kulveer Ranger as, respectively, his culture director and transport adviser. So much for the hue and cry during his campaign over the "watermelon smiles" and " piccaninnies" comments.

What Johnson is helping most here, though, is the emergence into the public arena of a new breed of socially conservative black men with "old-school" values and thinking. Lewis and the west London youth worker Shaun Bailey (Conservative parliamentary candidate for Hammersmith) are the highest-profile examples; others include Uanu Sheshmi, director of the London Boyhood to Manhood education programme. It could mean a new and exciting politics, especially in a city such as London, in which the tedious old polarities (black = Left, white = Right) are finally replaced by more nuanced and fundamentally more honest positions.

With their strong emphasis on the nuclear family, traditional notions of masculinity and respect, and the importance of higher education, such black men have decided their future lies with social conservatives as opposed to Leftleaning progressives. After years of publicly funded programmes and progressive failure, Lewis and Bailey have had the temerity to ask what the best social policy for sections of the black community really is - regardless of whether that means they end up supporting the Tories.

Part of that shift is the emergence of a black British middle class, for a long time beleaguered and cowering in the shadow of its more vociferous, workingclass big brother. And it is finally beginning to assert its own intrinsically conservative voice. Inspired by the US black middle-class centres of Atlanta, New York and Washington, black Britain is slowly catching up.

In the same way that Bill Cosby was for decades the voice of middle-class black America, hopefully Lewis, Bailey and others will now articulate the mindset of the nascent black British middle class, itself weaned on old-fashioned African and Caribbean values of discipline, religion and, most importantly of all, education.

In my work as a volunteer mentor on the Southwark Black Mentor Scheme's Leaders of Tomorrow programme, we employ similar "old-school" beliefs, aimed at helping our young people to confound stereotypes, not conform to them. We are trying to enable our young people to fulfil their potential intellectually, not just physically.

We want to nurture the next generation of lawyers, doctors, academics and politicians, not rappers, DJs or athletes - we have enough of those already. Working with young people in Peckham has convinced me that the liberal "softly, softly" approach achieves little, save disappointment and disillusionment, and actually engenders the opposite of respect.

That is why the days when black men who stood for public office felt the need to align themselves automatically with Left-wing causes are now gone. Be it the "boot camp" methods of draconian discipline as employed by Lewis in his Eastside Academy or the mantra of personal responsibility as articulated by Bailey, conservative values are key to their successes.

Yet Lewis, just like Bailey, has impeccable "black" credentials. Unlike figures such as former Big Brother contestant Derek Laud or Lord Taylor (who stood as Tory parliamentary candidate for Cheltenham in 1992), they are not being labelled as "coconuts" - the old accusation thrown at black people who dared to speak out against the liberal mainstream, that they were black on the outside but white inside.

For Lewis, Bailey and the new breed are not just black - they are ¸ber black, in the sense that their backgrounds and lifestyles cannot be besmirched so easily by black detractors. Both are firmly rooted in the community; both are engaged in mentoring projects with inner-city black youth; both have dedicated their professional lives to improving the lot of black British people.

If further proof were needed, Lee Jasper himself, that old firebrand of the Left and Ken Livingstone's former race adviser, welcomed Lewis's appointment.

Both Lewis's and Bailey's conservative stance on the underlying causes of knife crime - the glaring lack of positive black male role models, the abrogation of parental responsibility and working-class over-reliance on the "benefits culture" - embodies views that, more than ever, we should heed.

The MTV Base generation, with their pimp-roll swaggers and their perverted notions of masculinity and faux respect, urgently need taking to task. Men such as Lewis and Bailey can do it in a way no white politicians can: they are not afraid to speak in a hideously un-PC language that is anathema to white liberals when it comes to issues such as black parenting.

That marks an important shift for black conservatives but it says something almost more surprising about white Britain. After decades of prejudice, it seems Britain is finally ready to accept them. It no longer sees black conservatives as the ultimate oxymoron, the jester-pariah figures living the white man's dream, to be scoffed at behind their wannabe-white backs.

But myself, I am just relieved that Britain is finally ready to allow these courageous old-school black men to step up to the plate and make their contribution. At a time when black and white boys alike are being cut down in the streets, God knows we need it. Here's hoping that the only coconuts we see in the future will be in the fairground or in the Bounty commercials, not on the political stage.

Lindsay Johns is a social commentator and cultural critic on Colourful Radio.