The 1980s uprisings saw inner city areas like Handsworth, Brixton, Moss Side & Toxteth – communities facing mass unemployment & racist policing – explode in spontaneous uprisings. These embryonic forms of class consciousness terrified the ruling class.
Today, with the likes of Operation Fearless on our doorstep, record levels of deportations, violent immigration controls, detention, and the resultant street racism more emboldened than ever, we ask: what has changed since the uprisings? And, importantly, how does this inform our urgent task of fighting racism and the imperialist British state today?
At our public meeting on 15 July, we’ll hear a contribution on the prisoners’ struggle from Satpal Ram, who faced decades of state violence as punishment for defending himself against a racist attack in Handsworth in 1986. We’ll hear from RCG comrades who set up the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC), which 40 years ago marched from Manchester, through Birmingham, and on to the Home Office in defence of Viraj, a Sri Lankan migrant and RCG comrade facing deportation.

We’ll also be releasing our brand new pamphlet, Fighting Racism: the State & the Streets! Author, comrade Destinie Sánchez will introduce her chapter on ‘community leaders’, a petit bourgeousie coalition of MPs, councillors, reformist activists fostered by the state following the 1980s uprisings to demobilise black working class revolt.

In Handsworth, it is this layer which has ushered in stop & search, immigration enforcement and homeless arrests, the same forces which sought to weaken the anti-racist fightback following the Oldbury sexual assault, and the same which safely channel police brutality campaigns into ‘consultation’ with the police – ultimately safeguarding capitalist stability.

The pamphlet compiles 50 years of RCG analysis forged through struggles against detention, deportation, the fight against police brutality and South African Apartheid, and is a must read for anti-racists!