Introduction
On May 26th 2020 George Floyd was killed by a police officer who knelt on his neck for nine minutes. Horrifying video footage led to local protests, then national ones, then to international outrage. The first “Black Lives Matter” protest in Britain took place on May 28th, outside the US embassy. Despite covid rules, more protests soon followed across Britain. In London these became semi-regular, with the vandalism of statues like the one of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. These only fizzled out after the protest scheduled for the 13th of June was cancelled when the Democratic Football Lads Alliance announced a counter-protest on the same day to protect the statues. Following the DFLA protest there were no more major BLM protests.
During that summer politicians struggled to react. Although revulsion at the killing was widespread, there was a split over the response. A minority of Labour MPs joined the BLM protest marches, while some Conservative MPs impotently tweeted their fury at the vandalism as if they were powerless, rather than being in government. It was unclear who, if anyone, was behind the protests. One sign was a GoFundMe page set up in the name of BLM UK, which raised £1.2 million that summer. But who was behind the fundraiser?
Who are Black Lives Matter UK?
The answer came in late 2020, when the people behind BLM UK tried to collect the money. In order to access it, they were compelled to create a formal structure. They rebranded as the Black Liberation Movement, registering as a community benefit society, with the aim of distributing the money to various black causes. The people who registered the company were academic Adam Elliot Cooper, student Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert, and director of a Nottingham social enterprise Lisa Robinson.
Tracing those names back to 2015 reveals the genesis of BLM UK, which emerged out of a Black Lives Matter conference hosted at the Nottingham Contemporary gallery, which is taxpayer funded. It was a project between Nottingham University’s Centre for Research in Race, the anti-racist charity The Monitoring Group, the Nottingham Contemporary, and Bright Ideas Nottingham (the social enterprise of which Lisa Robinson is the director). The first day consisted of four panels, culminating in a musical performance by rappers including Akala. The second day consisted of a workshop for activists. Around 200 people attended the conference. It was funded by the British Academy, which itself is overwhelmingly funded by government grants.
The conference was filmed and posted on YouTube. Session one can be seen here and sessions two to five can be seen here. BBC Radio Nottingham covered the event and their interview with Lisa Robinson about it can be heard here. The workshop wasn’t filmed but a University of Nottingham press release confirms that it was at that event that the first British chapter of Black Lives Matter was formed, which would come to be known as BLM UK. The conference was also live-tweeted and those tweets can be found on this hashtag.
What happened at the 2015 conference?
The conference included several inflammatory speeches. Kehinde Andrews called on black people to “forget Britain”, saying that “we’re African. We’re black people. We shouldn’t be embracing the flag, and the Britain, and the nation. We shouldn’t do that at all. We should be pulling that down” and asking the audience “why would you want to integrate with this wicked race of devils” (although he later clarified that not all white people are “devils”).
A speaker called Brian (his surname is hard to hear in the audio and the conference website listing speakers is now defunct) called for BLM in the USA to link up with “anti-imperialist, Pan-Afrikan and Black movements for Black Lives internationally”, including the Economic Freedom Fighters. Even by 2016 it was obvious that the EFF were racist, with their leader censured for singing “Kill the Boer” in 2012 (when he was still with the ANC) and one of their councillors disqualified from election only months before in 2016 after calling for whites to be “hacked and killed”.
Adam Elliot-Cooper spoke about how when he was doing youth work he found that the black people he spoke to weren’t interested in class or race but did hate the police. He also says that he was present at a “die-in” protest at Westfield shopping centre and that in sympathy with strikes in the Third World “we can shut down shopping centres basically”. This was likely a major inspiration for BLM UK’s first protests, which had a similar model. Also relevant is a video speech by Natalie Jeffers from Matters of the Earth and a speech by Wail Qasim, both of whom would be involved in BLM UK’s first protests. Qasim is shown in an image posing alongside Malia Bouattia, then the NUS Student President who had already become embroiled in controversy when she opposed a motion condemning the terrorists of ISIS, claiming it was “Islamophobic”.
During the question and answer session Elliot Cooper says that “urban unrest” is a form of “self-defence”, claiming that deaths in police custody go down after rioting and that “I’m not saying it’s 100% fantastic, when we burn cities down but you can see that, if the police feel like Britain will burn if they kill more people then they’re less likely to kill people”. Brian claims during the same question and answer session that the South African government is working in the interests of “white monopoly capital”, which we now know was a racist anti-white conspiracy theory invented by British PR firm Bell Pottinger in an attempt to deflect attention away from the state capture of South Africa under Jacob Zuma by the Gupta family.
At the end of this question and answer session a woman introduced by the American activist Justin Hansford says “it is our duty to fight for our people”. That is a quote by the Black Panther Assata Shakur, who was convicted of the murder of a State Trooper and currently lives in the Cuban communist dictatorship. The entire crowd then joins in with chanting this.
Stafford Scott, of The Monitoring Group, joked that if Americans hadn’t heard of the Broadwater Farm Riot then “we’ll have to do them again” and threatens that “we can kick up a stink when we’re ready”. He concluded this violent language by repeatedly imitating punching a police officer while saying “yo copper [punches hand] black lives matter. Remember [punches hand] black lives matter. Remember that”.
The rapper Kriss Riss is introduced as an employee of Bright Ideas Nottingham; she performed her song “I Can’t Breathe”, which includes the lyrics “feds want to target the black race / get gunned down for your black face”. She’s followed by Akala, who quotes Mos Def saying “some tall Israeli is running this rap shit”, before suggesting this is also true of the film industry. He concludes that there will always be a problem with black lives until there are “black societies capable of militarily, politically, and economically defending the black population”.
In an interview with the University of Sussex podcast The Glass Bead Game in 2016, Natalie Jeffers revealed that after the conference she travelled to the USA to meet up with Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter and connect the UK and US wings. She also says that while there she met up with “activist” Sekou Odinga, a Black Panther who was sent to prison for the attempted murder of six police officers and his role in an armoured car robbery in which two police officers and a security guard were killed.
What did BLM UK do?
The first BLM UK protest was in Nottingham, when four members lay down in the road to block traffic. Lisa Robinson was among them. Although convicted, they were only fined £155 each and given a three year conditional discharge. Natalie Jeffers as spokeswoman for the group claimed that, although their protest was largely about America, “there is a war going on against black people” in Britain too.
This was followed by the #Shutdown campaign, which targeted British airports in protest over black people having worse outcomes in the criminal justice system, illegal migrants dying in the Mediterranean, the use of deportation and immigration detention, the claimed “state-sanctioned Islamophobia” of the Prevent programme, and Brexit supposedly leading to more racist hate crimes (which has been debunked).
For the campaign they organised protests in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, of which the most important targeted London City and Heathrow Airports, in protest at the impact of climate change on the so-called Global South (which was debunked by Channel 4’s FactCheck). However these protests led to them being mocked in the press, as the vast majority of activists involved were white. BLM UK defended itself by saying the protests were an example of “white allyship under black leadership” and that the group itself had “0 white membership”. That didn’t stop Stafford Scott, who’d appeared at their conference, from mocking the group online during a fight with Ash Sarkar (although in 2020 he was happy to work with them and The 4Front Group on a campaign calling for Cressida Dick to go).
The London City Airport operation involved activists chaining themselves together on the runway. Despite this, they all received conditional discharges, meaning that they saw no jail time. One of the activists reportedly said, “go white privilege!” when the sentences were announced.
The nine activists involved were: Natalie Geraldine Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the film producer cousin of Ralph Fiennes, who lived in a £2 million mansion and claimed she supported herself by babysitting; Esme Waldron, a film student from Brighton who was previously a member of the group Plane Stupid, with whom she blocked a tunnel at Heathrow using a van, receiving only a fine of £200; Ben Tippet, who lived with Ms. Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes at the time and is now an academic at Kings College London studying inequality; Sama Baka, a Spanish climber who was living in Essex on a houseboat at the time; Richard Collet-White, who is an associate editor at DeSmog, a blog which tries to expose PR interference in public discussion of climate change, despite itself being funded by unknown grant-givers; Sam Lund-Harket, who works at the activist group Global Justice Now, as well as having been involved with the group Reclaim the Power, who use direct action tactics to oppose fracking and coal; Alex Etchart, an Anglo-Uruguayan artist involved with the Sex Workers Opera, whose short film is used in teacher training to “engage young people around non-binary hxstory”; William Pettifor, an organic farmer; and Deborah Francis-Grayson, an environmental activist from Slough.
They were supposed to be joined by Natalie Jeffers, director of Matters of the Earth, which was funded with £50,000 of taxpayer money at the time, but she jetted off to Brazil instead to attend a feminist conference at a resort. In an interview with The Guardian she said that she didn’t want BLM UK being taken over by “middle-class white people”, asking them to “listen” but also warning them against “white silence”.
The Heathrow Airport operation involved a different group of activists, who blocked a spur road off the M4. While half of them unfurled a banner reading “this is a crisis”, the other half chained themselves together and chanted “black lives matter”, which was all filmed by Novara Media. The BLM UK member Wail Qasim was interviewed about the protest at the scene, although he didn’t get involved. Qasim had previously contributed to Novara himself.
The activists involved were: Joshua Virasami, who was arrested for punching someone at Occupy London and later worked at Campaign Bootcamp; Ewa Jasiewicz, a friend of Jeremy Corbyn, who made anti-Israel graffiti at the Warsaw Ghetto; Mark Weaver; Alison Playford; Sita Balani, an academic at Queen Mary University of London; Liam Barrington-Bush, an anarchist; Aditi Jaganathan, an “Educator” at Goldsmiths; Naomi Mabita; and Aadam Muuse, the NUS Black Students Officer, who led an “Apartheid Off Campus” campaign to prevent the Israeli ambassador appearing at SOAS.
Whether due to the negative reaction or other reasons, BLM UK never managed such ambitious protests again, although they continued to operate. Some events included a bus-stop poster campaign in 2016 about deaths in police custody with United Friends and Family, a fundraiser at Hodge, Jones & Allen solicitors in 2017, a psychedelic video for Black Futures Month which depicted African migrants in the Mediterranean morphing into spacemen, a protest over the death of a Sudanese illegal immigrant alongside SOAS Detainee Support in 2018, and appearing at Momentum’s The World Transformed event to host a workshop on direct action with various other hard left groups.
In 2018 the British Library, which is of course taxpayer funded, hosted BLM UK for a “scholar-activism” conference. It was organised in collaboration with the University of Sussex, the British Association for American Studies, and the US Embassy. Most of the speakers were academics, although speakers from the Runnymede Trust, law firm Garden Court Chambers, and the Trotskyist Movement for Justice were also present. Talks ranged from “The radical breast cancer movement in the United States” to “Supporting scholar activism and activist scholarship from a Mad Studies perspective”.
The BLM UK Nottingham chapter tweeted from the event. Among their highlights were Toyin Agbetu saying “we are at war”, Kehinde Andrews claiming that "I work for and get paid by a racist institution", and Omar Khan of the Runnymede Trust saying that “groups like Runneymede are restricted by charitable status” from supporting scholar-activism.
Although the 2020 BLM protests in Britain were the biggest of their kind, BLM UK had no real role in them. On the contrary, they decided to avoid the protests because of the threat of covid. So while they managed to raise a large sum of money from the public, it was largely on the strength of their name, rather than because they were involved with organising or leading the protests.
What does BLM UK believe?
In 2020 Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert, one of the three directors of the Black Liberation Movement, wrote an article on her vision of “Black liberation”, which would involve both abolition and climate justice. In it she claims that “climate destruction is a form of colonial violence” and that “in a climate just world there can be no police, just as there can be no border control”.
The BLM UK Twitter account has also been regularly active, giving an insight into what they think. Highlights include:
Claiming that the Prevent programme and the Daily Mirror’s headlines “tell white nationalists and white supremacists…they are doing the right thing”.
Said, when five mosques in Birmingham were vandalised, that “what we have on our hands is an emboldened transnational movement of white-nationalist fanatics” (a Shia Muslim man of Iranian extraction was jailed for the crime).
Claiming “the NHS would not be possible without colonial empire”.
The BLM UK chapter in Nottingham has also been very active on Twitter. It shows that they’re close to the main Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. In 2016 Alicia Garza, the co-founder of BLM, visited them in Nottingham. In 2018 Patrice Cullors, also a co-founder of BLM, visited them. In 2016 BLM sent a statement of solidarity to BLM UK. The Nottingham chapter of BLM UK launched in 2016 at the Nottingham Contemporary. Among those present were Patrick Vernon OBE, non-profit group Embrace in Community, and local BBC DJ KC DA ROOKEE.
The 2020 GoFundMe page said BLM UK are “guided by a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain and around the world”.
Comment
The Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 were a watershed moment in British politics. For a few weeks there was a revolutionary fervour in which it felt like almost anything could happen. Many on the right sought for an explanation as to who was behind the protests. The truth is simpler: the protests were a genuine grassroots movement. Of course that doesn’t mean the majority agreed with everything done - the vandalism of statues in particular divided the nation - and it proved to be fairly brittle, fading away before a few football hooligans (who, ironically considering their reputation, achieved more than the police or Conservative party in restoring law and order).
Black Lives Matter UK itself was a beneficiary of the protests but had no involvement beyond tweeting. In contrast to the protests, the group is made up of a handful of left-wing activists whose views on subjects like prison abolition or ending border controls are distinctly unpopular. They shouldn’t be dismissed as harmless cranks however. In their intellectual heroes and who they have chosen to meet, they are clearly happy to associate with ideas and people associated with revolutionary violence in the 1970s.
Although BLM UK has engaged in direct action protest, it has had little success. The group itself would likely not exist if it wasn’t for the cultural institutions which gave them a space to organise or the academic and third sector roles which provided their activists with a living - all of which are heavily funded by the taxpayer. If there is any conspiracy then it is this one: the continued taxpayer funding of institutions and roles which provide a base of support for people on the hard left to organise.