Uhuru! I’m going to be doing a report on Tony Blair’s time in power over the last 10 years. The Labour Party was first brought into power in 1997. At the time, there was a growing frustration with the previous rulers, the Conservative Party, because they were starving the people dry with taxation.
African people were the ones getting hit the worst by Tory policy. So when the Labour Party came onto the scene promising to solve our problems African people supported it.
Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister, led the Conservative Party to two landslide election victories in 1983 and ’87. However, she was becoming seriously unpopular in certain sections of the white population in the UK partly due to the high unemployment rate caused by her economic reforms and also due to the community charge known as the Poll Tax.
Her increasing unpopularity and unwillingness to compromise on policies allowed internal party tensions over European policy to lead to her standing down from the premiership in 1990.
Under the leadership of John Major, who followed Thatcher, the Conservatives also won an unexpected election victory in 1992. Major’s government experienced only a brief time in office however. Interests rates were spurring out of control, which caused many African people to have their homes repossessed as well as a dramatic rise in unemployment.
At that time, an effective opposition campaign led by the Labour Party saw them gain victory in 1997. It was Labour’s largest parliamentary majority ever.
When Labour got into power, it was in part because they had a monopoly on the black vote. We understood that the Labour Party was the lesser of two evils.
Under the leadership of Tony Blair, the level of poverty is 50 percent below the poverty line for 50 percent of African people in the UK.
Blair has endorsed over 70,000 new police officers to fill up the streets of the African community to brutalize and terrorize the African population. The police are randomly doing sweeps of our neighborhoods passing through with sirens blazing.
Prisons are being stuffed full of innocent Africans — so much so that the British government at the moment is in crisis because they don’t have the space they need to detain all the prisoners. Twenty percent of the prison population is African, yet we make up only two percent of the population in the UK.
A process known as racial profiling is part of the lives of the African people in the UK. This is a policy that was brought to media attention towards the end of the 20th century in the United States and is now being mimicked in the UK.
An African youth wearing a hood on his head is seen as an offense to the British State, yet the people who sell these clothes aren’t criminals.
As we are aware, the enemy is in crisis. A fundamental expression of this crisis was on July 7, 2005 — the London bomb attacks, known as “7/7” or Britain’s “9/11.”
After the London bombings on July 7 occurred, you may have heard the story of John Charles de Menzes, who was shot in his head three times in Stockholm Underground on July 22.
What you may not have heard is that a 24-year-old African named Zel Rodney was shot seven times in the head after an operation initiated by the Metropolitan Police. Yet no one questioned his death.
This horrific event occurred on April 13, 2005, before any so-called “terrorism” came to be on the UK. Yet instead of receiving justice under these colonialist conditions, the officers responsible for his murder are getting more extended access to their weapons of mass murder.
Their violent policies continue in the brutal public policy of police containment as opposed to a public policy of economic development. Since 1969, there have been reports of over 1,000 Africans murdered by the police with not one officer since 1969 facing prosecution.
Just last week, a 43-year-old African from Nigeria died after being restrained by several police officers. His name was Frank Ogboru. He was only here on holiday to see his friends, but was held in police custody.
This bears a striking resemblance to a case InPDUM was pushing on Paul Koka, who had an argument with his European girlfriend. Over 15 police officers appeared on the scene taking him by his arms and legs to a police station where police murdered him in custody.
Ogboru was reported to be in Woolworth, Southeast London where he supposedly became involved in a dispute with his friend’s girlfriend. According to a report in the Evening Standard Newspaper, several officers restrained Ogboru as they tried to arrest him, but he lost consciousness.
An eyewitness account confirms that up to four officers had their knees and feet on Ogboru whilst he was crying out in pain. One officer had his foot on Mr. Ogboru’s neck.
These are some of the conditions our people are forced to endure in this country due to our lack of State power.
The September 11 incident in the U.S. and the July 7 incident in the UK have given these governments the political space they needed to wage a bloody counterinsurgency war on oppressed peoples’ ability to resist oppression.
Operation Clean Sweep and Operation Trident were initiated as ways the police swamped drugs into the African community as an excuse to enter and criminalize and murder us. Brothers Ricky Bishop, Derek Bennett and Mikey Powell are tragedies of these programs.
In summary, the Labour government has meant more hell for Africans, bringing immigration problems, anti-black education, police in schools and 70 percent failure in getting the basic five GCSE grades for our African youths.
There has been continuing and expanding anti-African foreign policy. More than one-third of African university graduates are unemployed, and even more are underemployed, building new prisons to give jobs to white people.
All the democratic rights that we fought for they want to erode. InPDUM is the organization that campaigns to expose this and push for more democratic space, bringing our community back into political life in the process. Uhuru!
