Marc Wadsworth on Stephen Lawrence at LIAAF 2023

Marc Wadsworth shares his experience working with Stephen Lawrence’s family and campaigning against institutional racism in the UK. This speech was given on a panel marking Stephen Lawrence’s murder at the inaugural Leeds International African Arts Festival.

Veteran Black rights campaigner Marc Wadsworth shares his experience of helping the parents murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence set up their justice campaign 30 years ago and what’s happened since.

https://www.peepaltreepress.com/blog/news-authors/watch-marc-wadsworth-stephen-lawrence-liaaf-2023

Watch the video on YouTube https://youtu.be/O9JO-IBtQUE

Join our month of action standing up against the #RefugeeBanBill

This action against the government’s #RefugeeBanBill, proposed by Together with Refugees, is being supported by The Liberation Movement.

We hope you’ll do what is being requested:
Join our month of action standing up against the #RefugeeBanBill

As the government’s #RefugeeBanBill reaches a key stage in Parliament, Together With Refugees is taking a clear stand across the country to show this cruel bill does not represent us – and that instead we call for a fair, compassionate and effective approach towards people seeking sanctuary in the UK.

While we have raised a range of deep concerns with the bill, Together With Refugees is particularly pushing on two key aspects:
Ensuring the UK upholds its international commitment to the fundamental right for people fleeing persecution to seek protection in the UK
Stopping the government rolling back the law that bans child refugees being locked up.

Amendments on both these issues are now tabled in the House of Lords in collaboration with Together With Refugees members. Before the bill returns to the Commons for debate it’s vital that MPs hear loud and clear from as many people and groups as possible in their constituencies who stand together with refugees – both directly and via media and social media.
Together With Refugees is calling for a month of action during June, particularly the latter half coinciding with Refugee Week (19-25 June) and Scottish Refugee Festival (16-25 June).

Here are three ways you can take action to support the campaign in June:
Contact your MP to lay out your concerns – by email, letter, requesting a meeting at a local constituency level, or inviting the MP to an event in your community. If your organisation is a national coalition member, please ask your supporters and networks to do this. Please check out this Together With Refugees guide to engaging your MP on the Refugee Ban Bill (this will be kept updated with any new developments on the Bill as they happen).

Organise or join a Hospitality Not Hostility community meal or tea. Invite your local MP to a Hospitality Not Hostility event to demonstrate at this crucial time that people in their constituency care about the issue of refugees and want their MP to commit to a fairer, more compassionate approach. More details on Hospitality Not Hostility and toolkits to support you here.

Stand against the government’s attempt in the bill to legalise locking up child refugees. We are working with Citizens UK, children’s charities and many other Together With Refugees members to raise this shocking aspect of the bill in the media and social media over coming weeks. We’ll keep you posted with more details – it would be great if you could support and amplify these calls through your social media channels.

Do get in touch with your updates and any questions or suggestions. Thank you again for all your campaigning work – and please step up the pressure in the coming vital weeks if you can.

Rebecca and the Together With Refugees team

TLM condemns far-right thugs who attacked Knowsley refugee centre – and Tories fanning flames

TLM condemns divisive rhetoric from government ministers, including Home Secretary Suella Braverman, which is
responsible for stoking up hostility towards them by, among other things, describing their presence in the English
Channel as “an invasion”.

Read on Skwawkbox


We note that Jewish leaders have also criticised such hate speech, with the Liverpool violence at the Suites Hotel,
Knowsley, coming just two weeks after Holocaust Memorial Day, which TLM marked by providing a keynote speaker at
a commemorative event. The Jewish leaders noted that the same hate-filled lies from government politicians about
Jews, in the 1930s, led to the murderous Kristallnacht attacks on their community in Nazi Germany, which claimed
many lives.
TLM national co-ordinator Deborah Hobson said: “We applaud the brave actions of our sister organisation Care4Calais,
who were in Knowsley to stand by migrants at the hotel, despite being heavily outnumbered by the far-right thugs. TLM,
joining with other people among Britain’s justice-loving majority, give our solidarity to migrants, asylum seekers and
refugees and will defend them at every opportunity.”
We note the statement from Merseyside police that several people, aged between 13 and 54, have been arrested
during the violence and one of their vans was burnt out. Recently, fascists have mobilised on a national basis to attack
vulnerable people from abroad, most of whom have fled war and persecution in their own counties and been put in
hotels in England, Scotland and Wales. The fascists have used time-worn racist tropes about Britain being “swamped”
and alleged attack by migrants on local females, to incite residents against them.
Other cities and towns, as well as Liverpool, have seen local communities, trade unions and politicians commendably
come together to build resistance to far-right hatred. We praise the statement this year from Britain’s largest unions in
support of migrants. All communities should show solidarity, not waiting for bad-intentioned people, who wish to spread
hate, to turn up before the necessary actions are taken.
The Conservative government, and their cheerleaders in the news media, have deliberately whipped up anti-migrant
feelings in a cynical attempt to drawn attention away from the economic crisis they have unleashed on the country and
are using scapegoats to do that.
Britain, a wealthy Global North country, is not being overrun by Global Majority people of colour. In fact, Britain is
ranked just sixth in Europe regarding the number of asylum seekers and refugees to whom it has given protection.
What Britain needs is an asylum system that allows for faster and fairer treatment of those desperate people forced to
use it. That means, more not fewer safe and legal routes for them, as called for by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees.
We demand positive action from the British government. But have to say, its deplorable retreat from some of the
important recommendations made by the government’s Windrush report, in the 75th anniversary year of the iconic ship
bringing people from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain after the war, does not bode well. We join with the Jewish
community, and others, in saying: #NeverAgain.
End
Note to Editors: The Liberation Movement (TLM), is a cross-party, multi-faith Black Lives Matter-inspired anti-racist
alliance of African Asian Caribbean and other people of colour and their allies, strongly supported at the grassroots by
community and trade union activists. More than a dozen MPs back TLM, along with trade unions, with black-organised
members, at a national and local level.

December 2022 Newsletter

The Liberation Movement (TLM) has been active throughout the year attending anti-racist and trade union demonstrations, including on CWU, GMB, NUJ, PCS, RCN, RMT, UCU, Unison and Unite picket lines. Our co-chair Deborah Hobson spoke on the UCU Goldsmith’s University picket line in the summer. In September, I spoke at a rally for striking Liverpool dockers in the city. As a result of this, TLM got the support of Unite North West England Service Industries Branch, who also made a generous donation to TLM.

We got support and a donation from Unite’s South West London Community Branch, chaired by ex-CWU General Secretary Billy Hayes.

We’ve also been on the picket lines for nurses and teachers’. I supported a GMB march by cleaners and security workers – many of them people of colour – at my local Croydon hospital this month.

We’ve had a good presence on Chris Kaba protests in Brixton and central London (see the story about the campaign on this site). And we were privileged to be invited to be a speaker at the annual United Families and Friend Campaign (UFFC) Trafalgar Square to Downing Street rally and procession held by relatives of deaths in police, prison and state custody victims, where I was interviewed about it by Press TV and The Voice newspaper. Deborah’s cousin Roger Sylvester was murdered by the police and she also attended the demo.

She represented us as a speaker at The Monitoring Group’s House of Commons Ricky Reel 25th anniversary meeting, hosted by John McDonnell MP, who became a TLM supporter. TMG, where Deborah works, enthusiastically backs TLM.

As journalists, we covered the PCS union President, General Secretary and activists who took part on the rain-drenched but really inspiring People’s Assembly national TUC-backed demonstration against government’s austerity policy of cuts to public services.

For Black History Month (BHM), I attended the RMT Black Solidarity Committee’s event, where the guest speaker was Professor Lez Henry. It was a pleasure to meet their leading RMT Black activist who supports us.

I did a well-attended BHM talk to mark the centenary of Indian communist and Labour MP Shapurji Saklatvala first being elected to parliament and got a piece published in the Morning Star marking the occasion. The event was hosted by the London Borough of Wandsworth and generously supported financially by Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Council, TLM and my publisher Peepal Tree Press (https://www.peepaltreepress.com/books/comrade-sak).

I continue to work with Black activists in unions, including the NEU, particularly their Black members’ NEC representative, Denise Henry, who printed up 300 Black educators-targeted TLM flyers, at no cost to us. Denise got them put on the seats of every delegate at her union’s annual Black Educators’ Conference in Yorkshire in November, for which we owe her a huge thanks.

The IWGB union, which has had successes against employers like Uber, by joining up and representing their workers, had its 10th birthday party in Brixton, south London, which I attended.

As a guest at the TUC’s General Council dinner in September, I was on a table with PCS General Secretary Mark Serwotka, and spoke with him about TLM, which he was keen about. As I will with NAPO’s GS of colour comrade Ian Lawrence and NASUWT GS comrade Patrick Roach, with whom I also spoke. Patrick headed up the TUC’s Anti-Racism Taskforce in the aftermath of the momentous Black Lives Matter protests.

Leading TLM East Midlands supporter Shamsher Chohan ran a successful Stand By Me event in Nottingham, in October. It’s her innovative bystander intervention initiative, of which TLM was a supporter. Among those people she managed to get to attend were Alex Norris MP, a TLM supporter, and his assistant.

I’m pleased to have been able to boost our Digital Team, so ably led by Kevin White, and expertly advised by Professor Jawed Siddiqi, with the addition of Newark-based Navada Taylor. She’s an artificial intelligence and data scientist masters graduate, who passed her MSc with a distinction. Navada is a Black woman and, a youth – by our standards 🙂 Our aim for 2023 is to better connect with and keep up to date our supporters. And, to more efficiently collect subscriptions to aid our much-needed fundraising.

Among other projects, TLM are keen to roll our race and class-based Liberation School for community groups and the labour movement as soon as possible.

I continue to work with comrade Clive Lewis MP, who does parliamentary and Twitter stuff for TLM.

Finally, I’ve joined up TLM to the Together with Refugees national coalition, as recommended by our amazing youth and students officer comrade Irfan Chowdhury. They, like us, oppose the vicious Tory government’s racist and xenophobic policies that have cost the lives of migrants, exposed by its callous treatment of asylum seekers in the English Channel and at concentration camp-type detention centres, including after the firebombing of one of them by a white supremacist terrorist.

Nottingham supporters launched the first TLM branch outside London in the autumn and more will follow in the new year.

Please join The Liberation Movement or donate to the organisation here: https://www.liberationmovement.org.uk/join/

Marc Wadsworth
Communications Officer

How MPs turned up pressure to suspend Chris Kaba gun cop

MPs and campaigners putting pressure on London’s Met Police resulted in them eventually suspending the firearms officer who shot unarmed 24-year-old Black man Chris Kaba in September, sparking outrage in the community.

Dawn Butler, MP for Brent Central, added her voice to the calls for action following speeches by fellow Diane Abbott and Bell Riberio-Addy, Kaba’s Streatham MP, at a central London demonstration also attended by top British music artist Stormzy.

Read More…

https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2022/09/12/mps-demand-suspension-of-officer-who-shot-chris-kaba/

Chris Kaba’s grieving mother