the election, Labour was working hard to distance itself from the "Loony Left" perception. At the time of Brent Council's initiative to appoint race-relations advisers to schools, the party's deputy leader Roy Hattersley said, "I do not deny the existence of unacceptable behaviour in some local education authorities. I want to eliminate it." Similarly, a question-and-answer pamphlet for voters prepared by staff at Labour headquarters had the question: "But if I vote Labour won't I get a loony left council like those in London?", to which the answer given was: "Left councils are exceptions, Neil Kinnock has told them to mend their ways and he is in full charge of the Labour Party." On several occasions, the Labour Party leadership and others attempted to take a hard line on the "Loony Left" to gain a more favourable impression in the media. On 3 April 1987, for example, five Labour MPs with constituencies in Birmingham — Roy Hattersley, Denis Howell, Jeff Rooker, Terry Davis and Robin Corbett — wrote to Sharon Atkin, Bernie Grant and Linda Bellos in letters that they themselves leaked to the newspapers, demanding that they not attend a meeting in Birmingham, scheduled for 7 April, of activists campaigning for Black Sections within the Labour Party. Similarly, after the Greenwich by-election defeat five London Labour Party members — Brian Nicholson, Roger Godsiff, John Spellar, Roy Shaw and Dianne Hayter — formed the "Londoners for Labour" association, according to their press releases aimed at reclaiming the London Labour Party from "the loonies". The 1980s UK press campaign against the "Loony Left" was echoed in the 1990s in the United States where sections of the press campaigned against political correctness, using much the same rhetoric. The same accusations made by the British press in the 1980s were levelled by U.S. newspapers such as The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, Time, Newsweek and New York. Exemplification As Jenkins noted, the truth of the stories mattered less than their resonance with voter fears. Three of the most famously recorded instances of "Loony Left" activities—the renaming of the nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," of "manhole covers" and of "black bin-liner bags"—were myths, outright fabrications by the press. Other stories, such as reports that London councils had insisted that homosexuals be placed at the heads of the waiting lists for council housing and that London councils had spent £500,000 on "24 super-loos for