GUCU Motion to Donate to Black Lives
Matter UK 2024 Festival

Goldsmiths ucu log

This motion was passed at a GUCU Branch meeting on 26/04/2024

This branch notes that:

  1. Black Lives Matter UK has organised over the last seven years with a developed
    anti-racist politics that holds internationalism and abolitionism at its heart.
  2. The Metropolitan Police Service alongside many other police forces across
    Britain has been identified as “institutionally racist” by their own Black officers
    who have started a boycott over recruitment but also by numerous official and
    commissioned reports.
  3. The UK has given over £400 million to the Rwandan government to receive
    deported refugees. Even though Rwanda is directly involved in the ongoing
    genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
  4. Far-right policies have become mainstream and are carried out by the
    Conservative government who share platforms with the fascist Italian Prime
    Minister.

This branch believes:

  1. The violence of these far-right policies must be stopped through principled
    anti-racist organising which is internationalist in scope.
  2. Sunak’s Rwanda policy is an attack on everyone’s human rights – linking this
    struggle with Britain’s complicity with atrocities in the region is critical.
  3. From the discredited Sewell report denying the existence of institutional racism
    to malicious and confected media stories about “woke-ism“, there is a concerted
    effort to suppress support for radical anti-racist organisations such as Black Lives
    Matter UK
  4. It is important to resist the far-right mainstream by supporting a festival that
    brings together Black, people of colonised descent and allies together to end
    racist structural violence in our communities.

This branch resolves:

  1. To support Black Lives Matter festival of anti-colonial and abolitionist resistance
    on Saturday 13th July 2024 by promoting it to our members, in our region and
    across our equalities structures.
  2. Make a solidarity donation of £500 to assist in making this festival a sustainable
    event which can happen yearly.
  3. Send at least one delegate from our branch to the festival to report back
  4. Support regional and national motions to ask for national union affiliation to Black Lives Matter UK.