The policy of dispersal and relocation of asylum seekers to places like Glasgow began under a Labour UK government over a decade ago, but the Tories have accelerated the scale and inhumanity of it.
We are united by our opposition to home secretary Priti Patel’s militarisation of a humanitarian crisis.
The demonstration was a great success in reasserting solidarity with Black Lives Matter and challenging the far-right backlash for control of Britain’s streets and squares. A strong, energetic and pluralistic anti-racist movement needs to be built in the days and weeks ahead.
The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers. But we are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
Protestors around the world have shouted and carried signs proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” alongside the names of people of color killed by police locally – Adama Traoré, in France in 2016 and several cases in Britain – in ways similar to George Floyd. Demands to remove symbols of racist and imperialist oppression such as statues of Belgian King Leopold II who murderously exploited the Congo as a private capitalist space, or statues of slave traders in Britain, center of the transatlantic slave trade, echo demands to remove Confederate statues and Southern (pro-slavery) flags.
