TWO MPs and most of Nottingham’s African, Asian and Caribbean councillors attended the launch of a new chapter of the Liberation Movement (TLM) in the city.

Meeting organiser Cllr Hassan Ahmed, co-founder of TLM, said at the Indian Community Centre event, “This is a broad-based, grassroots anti-racist organisation that’s unashamedly led by people of colour. Of course, we welcome white allies as supporters, especially as trade unions are at the core of this movement.”  

He added: “TLM knows there are other already existing anti-racist groups and we are complementary to them, not in competition.”

Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome said: “The Liberation Movement is a really important initiative to not just fight for diversity and representation, or even equal rights, but the liberation of all groups and, in doing so, build a better world for everyone in our communities.”

Alex Norris, MP for Nottingham North, said: “Racism has no place in society and I have always done all I can to help root out discrimination and inequality, especially in this city. That is why I welcome giving my support to the Liberation Movement.”  

Cllr Audrey Dinnal commented: “I’ve come to today’s excellent The Liberation Movement event because we need to stamp out racism once and for all and this is the way to do it.”

Deborah Hobson, a leading trade unionist, Labour Party activist and joint leader with Cllr Ahmed of Grassroots Black Left, who co-chaired the meeting, said at the July 24 launch: “We are a new organisation and we welcome everyone who genuinely wants to engage with us in the fight for civil liberties.”

Cllr Angela Kandola helped organise the TLM launch, making the Indian Community Centre, on whose management board she sits, available to host it.

Cllr Sajid Mohammed pointed out that “80 per cent of recorded hate crime in Britain is either race or religious-based and only 20 per cent of it gets reported.”

He added: “Racism isn’t a people of colour problem. It is a sickness and disease in the white community that white people must address. United together we can defeat it. The Liberation Movement must continue the momentum started by Black Lives Matter.”  

The government’s widely condemned policy to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for their applications to be processed was heavily criticised by many of the speakers. There was a prominent “Stop Rwanda” poster on the wall behind them.  

It was pointed out that although youth held massive BLM demonstrations around the world, including in Britain, after the public racist lynching of George Floyd in June 2020, a strong resistance to police brutality and other forms of racism needed to be kept going.

Sixty per cent of NHS front-line workers who died at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic were people of colour.  

The government’s racist “hostile environment” immigration policy was behind the Windrush scandal. At least 72 people were massacred in the Grenfell tower block inferno, most of them poor, asylum-seekers, refugees or Muslims of colour.  

Black people, particularly men, continue to be killed in custody by police and prison staff at a disproportionately higher rate than white men.  

Samsher Chohan, East Midlands regional organiser of Grassroots Black Left, said: “I am here to give solidarity to this great new movement, which I’m delighted to be involved in.

“My Communities Inc organisation, which is based in Nottingham, is currently running a Stand by Her bystander intervention training programme that tackles men’s violence against women and girls. We invite anybody in the Liberation Movement to get training for free from us.”  

I talked about black people in Nottingham, including my WWII RAF veteran father, fighting back against racist attacks in the St Ann’s suburb uprising of 1958, which predated the more famous uprising in London’s Notting Hill that same August, and the struggles of mainly Asian workers at the nearby Loughborough-based Mansfield Hosiery Mills in 1972 and Imperial Typewriters factories two years later in which South African Indian Bennie Bunsee, who went on to become my Labour Party Black Sections political adviser, played a key role.

The trade unions to which the workers belonged weren’t always as supportive as they should have been. But things have got better, with the emergence of self-organised black sections in the unions.   

To join the Liberation Movement visit www.liberationmovement.org.uk/join.