“People should not allow their Asian, Afro-Caribbean, or any other status to stop them running for everything available so they might effectively serve,” he said.

“When opportunity does come, you must be able to seize that moment.”

Mr Jackson said it was also up to the white population to determine whether the UK would ever have its first black Prime Minister.

“They need to be mature and secure enough to move beyond the burden of race, gender or religion.

“In America, what happened was that the whites changed. Our leadership didn’t change.

“Martin Luther King was qualified to be head of state, but the culture in the US at that time was not ready.”

Mr Jackson is on a whistle-stop tour of the UK to promote his message of “equanomics”, the aim of which is to achieve racial justice through economic equality.

The civil rights leader said he always urged his fellow compatriots to visit Liverpool: “I always say you’ve never been to England if you’ve not been to Liverpool.

“The reason The Beatles came out of Liverpool is the same reason Elvis came out of Memphis, because of the culture of the blues. Elvis spoke of his black blues origins, while with The Beatles it was their R&B origins.”

Watch the lecture here

alanweston