The 4Front Project

Who pays to defund the police? You do. Taxpayer activists behind BLM protests.

Welcome to the SW1 Forum, a newsletter about British politics and everything wrong with it. If you think someone else would enjoy this post then please share it with the button below.

Introduction

A little over a week ago Colindale police station was “blockaded” by a crowd of urban youths, who faced off against police in riot gear at the car park entrance. They were there to demand the release of a 14 year old boy, arrested for possession of 13 bags of cannabis, and two youth workers who obstructed police during the arrest. The arrest spurred inaccurate claims from BLM UK that the police had raided the offices of the youth workers, leading to activists from Liberty turning up to act as observers.

The youth workers came from the 4Front Project - the same group which helped to organise the blockade - a non-profit company which says it specialises in providing “culturally specific services” to people caught up in the criminal justice system who “identify as Black”. Their work is funded by the Mayor of London, the National Lottery’s Community Fund, and the Evening Standard’s The Dispossessed Fund. They’ve been praised for their work by the likes of Nina Champion, director of the influential Criminal Justice Alliance.

However, a quick look at their website reveals they have some radical ideas. For example, amongst the books recommended by 4Front are ones by Angela Davis, the communist academic who bought the shotgun used to kill a judge during a breakout; Assata Shakur, who as a member of the Black Liberation Army was an accomplice in the murder of a law enforcement officer; and Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther leader who was regularly in and out of jail for stabbing, manslaughter, and pistol-whipping. These are curious - and very American - choices for a London-based youth outreach group whose stated aim is “reducing violence” and “building peace”.

What do they think?

What the 4Front Project think can be garnered from the numerous articles written for their website, mostly by Head of Development and Policy Sara Chitseko. They include calls to “defund the police until they no longer exist”; label the Met as “institutionally racist” whilst calling on Cressida Dick to resign; suggest a new system of restorative justice in which criminals are renamed as “the person responsible”, with “peace-making circles” used to get the criminal to promise not to reoffend, with no punishment even for cases of murder or sexual violence; demands that all prisons be abolished, as well as “coercive” drug or alcohol programmes, mandatory psychiatric treatment, and gang interventions, because they all disproportionately target black people; and claims that police stop-and-search may constitute “hate crimes”.

This radical abolitionist agenda - of defunding the police and abolishing prisons - is shared in common with the UK Black Lives Matter movement and unsurprisingly the 4Front Project was heavily involved in the BLM protests earlier this year. They were interviewed by Sky News during the protest, calling the police “unaccountable”; whilst for CBS News they proclaimed the need to defund the police. An Instagram post from the protest march shows one of their members doing the Black Power salute alongside a caption quoting Assata Shakur, declaring that “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win”. During the protest march they got together to chant, “who are the murderers? The police are the murderers”. Another protest post highlights the plight of Jessie Mawutu, a young black women trampled by a bolting police horse during the BLM protest. 4Front demand the police be held accountable, without mentioning that the horse went rogue after being attacked by BLM protestors or that the policewoman riding it suffered a punctured lung and broken collarbone.

This lack of impartiality isn’t confined to criminal justice, as their own website records their record of interaction with and support for the far left. This has included appearances at the Momentum-run The World Transformed festival, where they helped launch a course on prison abolition alongside Becka Hudson of Grime4Corbyn; citing the Corbynista website Novara Media; and calling racism “intrinsic to our capitalist system”.

Motivating much of their political worldview is what can only be described as ethno-narcissism: the conviction that society is ordered to oppress black people, using the criminal justice system to persecute them. This includes ludicrous assertions, such as claiming that cannabis was criminalised in order to “oppress the Black community”; declaring that comedies featuring the police, like Hot Fuzz and the Simpsons, are “insidious” and “copaganda”; calling on white people who move into “Black and Brown” areas to refuse to call the police if they witness domestic violence unless they’ve spoken with local members of the community first; and featuring testimony from a “4Front member” who complains that not being allowed to speak in court whenever he wanted to shows that the system is “rigged”. More dangerously, they declare the 2011 riots were an “uprising”.

Who are they?

The 4Front Project was founded by Temi Mwale as a teenager, after the violent death of a friend; he was murdered after a petty dispute and the police successfully caught the killers. She has continued as the Executive Director and remains the face of the organisation. Her activism over the years has given her a prominent platform: she’s been interviewed by Channel 4, BBC3, Sky News, and BBC1’s Sunday Politics. She’s been featured in Elle magazine, for which she got to meet Stormzy, was invited to the 10th UNESCO Youth Forum, was on a panel for the MOBO awards, received an award from the charity Variety, spoke at an Amnesty International event, was invited to the Houses of Parliament, was a panelist at London South Bank University, was awarded charity of the year by the Black British City Group of financiers, was made a Winston Churchill fellow and a Million Realities fellow, was on the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and even got to meet Barack Obama.

Life as a professional activist clearly isn’t that bad, with her posting pictures from the beach in Rio (where she spent a month with 4Front, talking to local community groups about police violence) and bragging in 2017 she’d taken 27 flights to 16 cities in 8 countries.

None of these prominent groups or individuals seem to be aware or bothered that she also mixes things up with quotes from Huey Newton or claims that the killing of Mark Duggan proves that the police can murder “your children”, even if they’re unarmed, and get away with it. The police might also be surprised to discover from her that gangs are only “groups of young people attempting to gain control over their lives”. Naturally she also supported Corbyn and uses the #FuckBoris hashtag. Quite how dedicated she is to anti-violence has to be queried considering some of her social media activity, for instance re-tweeting praise for rapper Digga D producing a grime hit despite being under police probation. The reason why he’s under probation is because he was part of a gang plot to ambush rivals with machetes.

Mwale is supported by Shanea Oldham, the Youth Activism Co-ordinator, who also has a prestigious record, including being the 2020 Princess Diana award winner, being interviewed by the Independent , being featured on ITV News, and speaking at The World Transformed alongside rapper Drillminister. Like Mwale, she calls for the abolition of the criminal justice system. She is also part of another group, called Your Life More Life, which has received funding at City Hall. She backs the Justice for Titch campaign, which is seeking to overturn the conviction of Carl “Crazy Titch” Dobson, an early grime rapper who is serving a 30-year minimum term after being involved in the murder of the friend of a 16-year old rapper who wrote a song with “disrespectful” lyrics.

Other team members include Head of Community Support Kusai “Patchy” Rahal, who won the Mayor of London Special Achievement Award and posed with Sadiq Khan but who also thinks that Sir Keir Starmer is a “Fed” who as DPP gave the police a “license to kill and a mandate for murder”. He too wants to defund the police.

Andre Wallace, Head of Campaigns and Advocacy, is even more outspoken on social media. He has stated that “you can’t trust any white man in a uniform”, has written extensively on why he is “anti-police”, described gentrifiers as “white walkers” after the undead villains of Game of Thrones, called black people who don’t believe in white privilege “shiny suite coons” (despite having asked people not to use the word “coon” because it is offensive to black people), suggested using force to “throw” Theresa May out of Parliament during her time as Prime Minister, called for being a Tory to be made “illegal”, and asked “Tory scum” to “play in traffic” for his birthday. Even more disturbingly, he seemed to intimate that he was “ashamed” of a group of kids who beat up police officers because they failed to film it. During the BLM protests he filmed young men wearing the t-shirts worn by other 4Front members singing “piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy you’ve got blood on your hands” at police officers.

Comment

The 4Front website reveals that they have two main income streams: funding and clients. The funding comes from a range of foundations and charities, including taxpayer funding from the Mayor of London (despite one team member describing him as a “wolf in sheeps clothing”). Meanwhile, the clients are split across three groups: the boroughs of Greenwich and Barnet, the Community Rehabilitation Companies of Essex and Bedfordshire, and the Manchester United Foundation. Two of these are taxpayer funded, although the Community Rehabilitation Companies are private providers of services to the public sector. The sums involved are not small: £100,000 over two years from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, nearly £50,000 from the Mayor of London, and £50,000 from the National Lottery. In 2018 they had £150,000 funding in total - which is only likely to have gone up.

All of these funders, supporters, and clients should be rethinking their relationship with the 4Front Project on the evidence above of anti-police bigotry, racism, and support for violence. Far from defunding the police, they should be defunding 4Front. Whatever the intentions when it was started, it has become a vehicle for radical politics, given an extensive uncritical platform by the media and academia, and using taxpayer money to push for the police to be defunded. These far-left third sector groups, often taxpayer funded, who provide a simulacra of civil society whilst operating as unaccountable activists are what Dominic Cummings labelled “The Blob”; it’s time for political reform to get rid of them.

If you enjoyed this newsletter then please subscribe below - there will be a new one every week.