'Don't vote black, vote the agenda,' Reverend Al tells teenagers

"Right here will be the first black prime minister," the Rev Al Sharpton rasped to teenagers at St George's Church, Peckham, on the day Harlem met south London.

"Hallelujah," came a voice from the back, "Ain't that the truth."

Reverend Al, firebrand New York civil rights leader turned presidential hopeful, was bringing Stateside rhetoric to a six-month campaign urging Britain's ethnic minorities to register for the vote.

"Everybody in America dresses hip-hop now; everybody in America has the same style," he said. "If we can change their dress style, imagine if we can change their voting style. If everyone likes our music, imagine if they like our candidates. We must transform our style into power. That's why we are here. We intend to stir it up. We intend to raise the volume."

Mr Sharpton's rabble-rousing campaigns led Tom Wolfe to lampoon him as the ruthless New York preacher, the Reverend Bacon, in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Now the bouffant hair has calmed, and grey under its faint ginger tint. Reverend Al has slimmed since he last visited Britain a decade ago. His silent walk to see the spot where the black teenager Damilola Taylor was killed seemed pure Wolfe, and the venue in which he spoke, a small church hall where the walls carried advertisements for guides and brownies as well as political leaders, was a touch incongruous.

But as he met people and the press, the preacher man was whipping up Londoners with his message that votes equal power. His appearance tonight at a lecture set up by the pressure group Operation Black Vote, is oversubscribed twice over.

"I grew up in New York in what they now call the 'hood, then it was the ghetto," he told members of the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, an organisation for young men excluded from school.

"We are not responsible for where we began, but we are responsible for where we are at the end. If I knocked you on the ground, that's on me. If I came back a month later and you were still on the ground, that's on you."

He went on: "Mr Bush and Mr Blair agree on Iraq. But they need to worry about whether we agree or disagree. If I'm no political threat to Bush and I'm no political threat to Blair they can decide to send us to the front line and we got nothing to say about it. Right now there are people preparing for the front line in Iraq but they have to go to the front line to vote for Members of Parliament."

He went on: "Should we vote racially? I think we should vote based on agenda, not on race. I don't think we should vote for a black who has the wrong agenda, and I don't think we should be against a white with the right agenda. Everybody who's my colour ain't my kind. All my kinfolk ain't my skinfolk."