On Saturday 15 August, hundreds of people marched through Nottingham on a Black Lives Matter march organised by Nottingham United Against Racism (NUAR). Passing through busy parts of the city, the march stopped first at Radford Road Police Station, where attention was drawn by speakers to the 3,013 stop and searches carried out by Nottinghamshire Police between April 2018 and March 2019, when black people were stopped over seven times and Asians two and a half times the rate of white people. The march then stopped at HMP Nottingham, where an RCG speaker drew attention to the cases of Shalane Blackwood and Anthony Solomon, two black men who have died in HMP Nottingham in recent years as a result of the dehumanising prison conditions. Many joined us as we passed through working class neighbourhoods. There was an open mic throughout, taken up by dozens of people.
NUAR, which Nottingham RCG was central to founding, has been operating weekly open mics in the city centre every Saturday for the past two months, and has four key demands which target the racism of the British state:
- End deportations
- End speculative stop and search
- End joint enterprise convictions
- Release all IPP prisoners
Indicating the broad appeal of NUAR’s demands, a wide range of organisations pledged support for the march, including: Cameroon Support Group, Communities Inc, Fearless Youth Association, Himmah, the Marcus Garvey Action Group, Mojatu Foundation, Next Gen Movement, Nottingham & Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum, NTU Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society, Nottingham Antifascists, Nottingham RCG, and Self Help UK.
Many other sections of the left in Nottingham, however, chose not to support the march despite being directly invited to do so. Some, like the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party and the Alliance for Workers Liberty, simply ignored the invitation. Nottingham Stand up to Racism (SUTR) outright refused to support the march, giving NUAR a feeble excuse that they might not have enough people available on the day – why this should have prevented them from supporting the march by promoting it in advance is a mystery. In the end members of SUTR turned up for the first half an hour, but they were not there to support the anti-racist march. Instead, they tried to pull attendees away from NUAR’s focus on state racism – a focus which threatens SUTR’s relationship with the Labour Party – and shift attention toward a narrow anti-fascist politics. On 22 August a counter-protest has been threatened against NUAR’s weekly open mic by the ‘British Street Commandoes’ and this has since gained support from other racist organisations. Rather than rallying to defend NUAR’s right to challenge state racism, SUTR has called a counter-protest focusing solely on the racists’ counter-protest, which they described as ‘a vile bunch of racist vermin are coming to our great city’. Their conduct contrasts markedly with the principled response of Nottingham Antifascists, who not only supported the march, including helping to build it and providing stewards, but who have also pledged to stand with the NUAR demo against the reactionary counter-mobilisation on 22 August.
Nottingham RCG calls on all anti-racists to stand with NUAR on Saturday 22 August, meeting in the Old Market Square from 12pm. We will of course work with all forces opposed to racism and stand together against any attacks, but we are clear about our priorities. The British state is the most significant promoter of racism in Britain today, it promotes the racist ideas that feed groups like the BSC, and so the fight against state racism must continue to be built, even and especially in the face of racist threats.
