Ministry of African Propaganda interview the Malcolm X Movement

On South Asian Divisions in Leicester and Agendas of the Far-Right State and Orgs

For decades, Leicester built communal walls. Waves of immigrants made it more toxic

East Ham and Waltham Forest are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi. Each walled off their neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

The first petrol bomb was lobbed through the windows of the Shri Pragati Mandir in Birmingham’s inner-city area Sparkbrook. Fire burned through the carpet at the Krishna Temple in Coventry, and the doors of the Veda Temple run by the Vishva Hindu Parishad were damaged in a blaze. The Shri Krishna Temple in West Bromwich, among the largest in the UK, was gutted in a similar attack. A Hindu priest in Derby had a narrow escape when his temple was firebombed.

Earlier that week in December 1993, the Babri Masjid had been demolished by Hindu karsevaks.  Iqbal Sacranie—among the key figures in the anti-Salman Rushdie movement that exploded across England in 1988—alleged some Hindus in Bradford had distributed sweets. The wave of fire-bombings across the Midlands and North of England—the first attacks on religious institutions in England since Luftwaffe bombs tore apart historic churches in 1942—was meant as revenge.

The still-simmering Hindu-Muslim violence in Leicester, mainly pitting young ethnic-Gujarati Hindus against young Gujarati Muslims, judging by details so far released by the police, should provoke introspection on why homeland hatred casts such a dark shadow overseas. Toxic competition between Islamism and Hindutva has sharpened communal battle lines in England, but the tensions aren’t new. Thirty years ago, Hindus and Muslims exchanged petrol bombs in Blackburn after a cricket match—exactly as they have now done in Leicester.

Allah-o-Akbar, Jai Shri Ram: The aggressive displays of religious identity by young men in Leicester is the product of the self-segregation of England’s South Asian diaspora into ethnic-religious ghettos. The ghettoisation has ended up reproducing the dysfunctional Hindu-Muslim relationship in the homeland.

Leicester’s communal walls

Fifty years ago, following what he claimed were instructions from God given to him in a dream, dictator Idi Amin Dada ordered the mass expulsion of Uganda’s mainly Gujarati Indians. Within three months, some 50,000 people were forced to leave their homeland for the UK and Canada. Even the 8,000 or so Indians Amin’s laws theoretically allowed to remain were threatened by being dispatched to dig shambas, or vegetable gardens, or with mass deportation to the waste-lands of Karamoj.

Ever since the completion of the colonial trans-Uganda railway in 1902, the Gujaratis had come to occupy a critical position in the economy, selling consumer goods in the country and shipping out cotton and coffee to ports. The Indians earned great wealth, historian Vali Jamal has written, but their fortunes earned them the hatred of Ugandan Africans.

Leicester, which had grown a small East African Gujarati population through the 1960s, seemed an attractive destination. But the Labour-led city council, conscious of the sentiments of its White working-class constituency, proved less than welcoming. “In your own interests and those of your family,” an advertisement by the council bluntly proclaimed, “[do] not come to Leicester.”

The arrival of the Ugandan Gujaratis had been preceded by a deepening of racial fractures across the United Kingdom.  Enoch Powell, a prominent Conservative politician, prophesied in an inflammatory 1968 speech of the coming race war. Edward Heath, who became prime minister in 1970, promised to control immigration, but the far-Right grew steadily through the decade, culminating in pitched battles with police in 1977.

South Asian self-segregation

Even though Leicester now celebrates itself as the UK’s most diverse city, the self-image is deeply problematic. Educated, relatively-affluent Hindus immigrants from East Asia soon began to move out of the Highfields neighbourhood into the White working-class Belgrave. Belgrave Road—site of the so-called Golden Mile, where the recent clashes took place—rapidly grew into a thriving business hub. Working-class Highfields remained mired in poverty, as industrial Leicester imploded in the 1980s.

Three decades ago, scholars Deborah Phillips and Valerie Karn observed “the spatial polarisation of Hindus and Muslims in Leicester.” Each urban ward had evolved clusters around markers of religious identity, like temples and mosques.  The new enclaves, research on Gujarati immigrants by anthropologist Kenneth Hahlo showed, sometimes mirrored homeland divisions right down to the level of village and caste.

East African Hindu estate agents and solicitors grouped together to block other immigrants from buying into their new enclaves, Phillips and Karn wrote. The discrimination wasn’t one-way. “Muslims,” they recorded, “have been have been known to refuse council house offers because of the proximity of Hindu tenants.”

The same segregation process, scholar Apurba Kundu has observed, was evident elsewhere in the UK. East Ham and Waltham Forest in London are Pakistani Punjabi, Luton is Kashmiri Muslim, Southall is Punjabi Sikh, and Tower Hamlet is Bangladeshi.  Each community grouped together as protection against White racism, but also walled-off its neighbourhoods to other immigrants.

Following 9/11, new conflicts emerged. Muslims registered consistently lower attainment in education and employment than other groups, official data showed. They blamed it on religious discrimination. Hindus and Sikhs complained that counter-terrorism programmes provided disproportionate funding for Muslim groups.

A toxic competition

Leicester’s complex demographics helped fuel communal competition. In 2001, some 15 per cent of the population was Hindu, and 11 per cent Muslim. In the 2011 census, the percentage of Hindus remained similar, and still does today. But the Muslim population share went up to 18.6 per cent, driven by the arrival of Somali and Kurdish immigrants. Immigrants of Indian origin remained the largest single block—28.3 per cent —and Gujarati the most-spoken language after English.  Islam and Hinduism, though, became competing categories for State patronage.

The competition, the work of scholar Sean McLoughlin shows, expressed itself in a surge in applications for the construction of religious sites in Leicester. Funding from the Leicester city council also ended up reinforcing particular constructions of identity—for example, Garba events—over trans-community projects, like youth football.

For the children of the diaspora, lacking the wider cultural context and linguistic affiliations of their parents, religious identity had become the principal marker of identity.

Large-scale proselytising activity by homeland fundamentalists tore through the diaspora in the coming decade. The now-internationally proscribed terrorist, Masood Azhar Alvi, visited the United Kingdom in 1993, lecturing at mosques on “jihad, its need, training and other related issues.” Large numbers young people from the UK travelled for training at jihad camps in Pakistan, up to the 7/7 bombings of London’s transport system.

The Hindu-nationalist movement also grew dramatically in the United Kingdom through this period, political scientist Chetan Bhatt has recorded.  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) units—first founded overseas  by Jagdish Chandra Sharda in 1947, on a Kenya-bound ship—slowly grew across the United Kingdom. Long struggles to build Hindu temples, notably the Swaminarayan Mission in north London and Bhaktivedanta Manor at Letchmore Heath, helped mobilise a new generation of Hindu immigrants around faith.

Few of the leaders of South Asian communities understood the dangers of these divisions in the 1980s. Faced with race tensions in the 1970s, the British State had turned to multiculturalism—outsourcing its engagement with issues of identity to political contractors who gained their status from their communal constituency, not advocacy of the wider community. Instead of the political and social equality they were seeking, ethnic and religious minorities ended up getting institutional patronage to maintain their differences.

The violence in Leicester will empower no-one except White supremacists, who’ve long argued immigrants import their homeland conflicts. For decades, Leicester’s Gujarati immigrant families struggled to overcome their traumatic exodus from Uganda. Their children, blinded by hatreds they barely understand, seem determined to walk into the trap they’ve laid for themselves.

[source]

MXM Public event: STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

STRIKE! Challenges of Trade Unionism in Brexit Britain

Eventbrite event page

Facebook event page

*Fri 28th Oct 2022

630-830pm (Starting sharp at 630pm)

London Irish Centre, 

50-52 Camden Square, 

London NW1 9XB

£5 suggested entry

This event brings some of the most experienced speakers directly involved at the forefront of the class struggle exploring challenges of defending working class people under increasing attacks by the Tory state in the contexts of a growing far-right state, racism in the colonial capitalist global crises in general.

Speakers: 

Steve Hedley (former Assistant Gen Sec RMT Union)

Suresh Grover (The Monitoring Group, former Stephen Lawrence family campaign coordinator)

Glenroy Watson (Chair of RMT's 2023 Black & Ethnic Conference)

Arnie Hill (London Black Revs)

Chair: Malcolm X Movement

*This event will be audio-visually recorded for upload onto social media, please let the chair know if you do not wish to be recorded  

*We apologise that there are steps leading into the room

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

Leicester South Asian divisions: Old British colonial divide & rule and new far-right Brexit Tory State divide & rule proving successful

- Politics of Brit colonial partition of India alive and kicking in Leicester

- Brit state with people like Tommy Robinson/Yaxley Lennon see strategic successes in Leicester clashes

- Brit state employed and directed TR/Yaxley-Lennon/EDL etc to exactly achieve manipulation of far-right in Hindu community against all Muslims

- Brit state cultivated right-wing/far-right forces in ALL religious/national communities 

- Brit state has nurtured the divisions which we now see in the open in Leicester

- Divisions hide growing South Asian exploitative and parasitic landlords and employers

- Ideal optics for the racist & colonial Brit state to see brown youth fighting while Brit govt/NF/EDL etc all laugh at them/us

- Historic failure of secular-oriented radical grassroots communities to develop leadership amongst South Asian youth

[Pictured: Malcolm X talking to Bengalis in England / EDL racist provocations / Leicester police line and South Asian youth]

What a sorry state of affairs that some in the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in Leicester are playing-out in September 2022 the old British colonial policy of encouraging their colonial victims to divide themselves around right-wing/even far-right frameworks of abusing religon to, not fight their common oppressor in the British colonial state, but against the 'other' who lives in the same conditions of poverty and racism. As we see the actual reach of the UK monarchy across the planet this is an that divisive forces in the Hindu and Muslim community are not acting independently of themselves as there is a much bigger and global power at play in all of this which are the ruling classes of the British state. 

The collapse into pathetic colonial divisions in the South Asian community is linked to the global balance of forces as manifest in the region with far-right religious movements developing in India with the BJP government and RSS, in Pakistan and other places in South Asia with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban, return of the Afghan Taliban and similar movements, in Sri Lanka and Myanmar of right-wing nationalist manipulation of Buddhism, and in the Sikh community of the supremacist right-wing movement of 'Khalistan'. 

The forces of unity and socialism have dwindled decade by decade in South Asia and also in their diasporic communities in the 'west' including in England. The need for secular and atheistic movements that respect all religious cultures and faiths and correctly interpret them as a force for unity and solidarity are desperately needed, and we must remind people that only a secular and united movement of all peoples based primarily as working class racialised human beings is the only framework to push-back on these colonially-imposed divisions. In South Asia it is only the secular socialist, anti-caste, pro-tribal peoples, communist and other similar forces who have provided unity in struggle in previous generations and continues to do so. Although including many political forces, the recent victory of Indian Punjabi farmers show the continued ability of communist and socialist forces leading successful social struggles that benefit ALL communities of peasants from all religious backgrounds.  

The British state has in recent decades achieved the cultivation of right-wing forces in all these religious communities. The connections between the right-wing sectarians who use and abuse Hinduism in the BJP have high-level relations with the Tories and the Labour Party. The Tories especially see an affinity with the BJP as both are part of a global fascist revolution that facilitates their exploitation of the working classes so as to achieve their pursuit of fascsit power and capitalist exploitation of the masses. Vicious racist and former Tory Home Office minister Priti Patel calls BJP leader Modi "our dear friend" and praises his "dynamic leadership", indicating a joint enterprise and relationship between the senior Brit tories and their junior helpers in the BJP to achieve their common goals of scapegoating oppressed communities in order to pursue power, money and sexual exploitation. October 2017 saw RSS-supporting Tapan Ghosh of the National Council of Hindu Temples (NCHT) UK and Tory MP Bob Blackman meet Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon and a former BNP leader. Ghosh argued excitedly at the global fascist revolution at an event at the time in Parliament that  Modi, Trump and Putin had been "raising hopes amongst people against Islamic aggression".

British authorities have through a long policy of 'collusion' developed a caricature of Islam and Muslims in its open support for Al-Qaeda and Daesh and other similar factions in its policy of recrtuiting and grooming thousands of Muslims to join its foreign policy agendas in fighting in death squads in Libya, Syria, Iraq etc openly exposed in the Arab Sting years. Majid Freeman who is interfering in Leicester at the moment was a well-known recruiter for British interests in encouraging Muslims to join death squads in Syria and today he continues his divide and rule role for the state by inciting religious hatred against "Hindu mobs" similarly to the other oppurtunist - Mohammed Hijab who has advocated along explicitly bigoted lines in Leicester recently: "If they (Hindus) believe in reincarnation, what a humiliation of them to be reincarnated into some pathetic, weak, cowardly people like that." Of course Roshan Salih Muhammad, a long-standing promoter of violent sectarian divisions within the Muslim community, decides to positively platform people like Freeman on his sectarian grifting racket which is the  '5 pillars' platform, with the Brit intel services no-doubt nodding in satisfaction at these antics. One might have wondered how the British intelligence services were going to again deploy their actors in their collusion racket after the Arab Sting horror, and here we can see the useful role these fools are playing for the British state.

The British state has facilitated and directed the work of Tommy Robinson/Yaxley-Lennon since June 2007 in the forming of the English Defence League (EDL)  to attempt to manipulate Black and Hindu communities against the Muslim community playing upon many colonially-imposed divisions and tensions between the respective communities. Britain First, UKIP, and many other factions of the far-right play a similar role. The events in Leicester recently with masked-up youth from South Asia allowing themselves to be divided and fighting not the white racists, richest employers, landlords, monarchy and ruling classes that oppress them all, but to engage in fighting each other. When we are going deeper into a cost of living crisis and inflation amongst other capitalist crises the British ruling classes love to see some of us diverting from the real problems and real culprits of our conditions and attacking our neighbours that we have lived amongst for centuries in the homeland. Now in recent years and decades we leave the homeland to come here because the Brit white man stole everything from us and made us poor so we have left our ancestral homes and live in deprived areas on a grey, cold, depressing and unfriendly island. Fighting your neighbour for the benefit of the richest white man is not what our ancestors and our faiths inform us to do, rather they inform us to protect the oppressed and exploited and unite together to fight common oppressors. The racist state and its minions like the EDL are exactly designed to keep us divided and easy pickings for further poverty. 

The real terror and oppression impacting BOTH Hindu, Muslim and Sikh working class communities is institutional racist poverty. In a population of 357,394 some 40,000 children in Leicester live in poverty. When you get into areas of high concentrations of Black and Brown people like in the area of Spinney Hill Park where the recent divisive tensions have flared-up child poverty rockets to around 50%. This is in a city which has the highest population of non-white people in the country with self-defined white people being just over half of the population. In a survey a few years ago of hundreds of children and young people in the city one in five said they worried about having enough to eat every single day. Leicester, like so many migrant working class areas, has massive potential in terms of what people could be doing if they were to unite and pool their creativity into grassroots socialist action for the community. 

The reason why the grassroots in our community don't get together and deliver unity and happiness to each other is exactly because of the agendas of the British state that through its racist overt and covert actions keep us divided and depressed. Sikh, Muslim and Hindu working classes are all terribly exploited in factories and warehouses in the city, a scandal that made headline news for the manner in which people were terrorised by the employers at work through the covid pandemic. Look to the deprived neglected streets where unemployed young people struggling with mental health and lack of cultural, sports, social facilities take to the streets to numb the pain and hang-out socially, there is nothing but superficial differences between working class youths nominally from different heritages and faith communities. 

A massive issue that very few people are talking about is how these abusers of faith and religion to cause division and conflict are a cover for the growing class conflicts within the South Asian community. While we have to keep very clear that the 'greater enemy' who has power in and guide these divisive trends are the British authorities, at the same time there is a growing parasitic exploitative class (of South Asian heritage) who are running slum housing, oppressive employment practices and other forms of exploitation that prey on the poor. There are millions of people in this country who are new migrants and who are 'illegal' being paid down to £1 an hour and who go home to live in squalid overcrowded conditions. Due to their relatively extreme precarious situation they have no political voice and no-one to advocate for them in terms of a joint class struggle to resist these oppressions. The rise of tensions in Leicester are in the interests of the bigger white ruling classes of this country but also the more localised parasitic capitalist class of landlords and employers. These parasites can deflect from their own oppressive role and unjustly and manipulatively point fingers at poor, often young working class members of another faith group.   

Look at this historic context of these tensions going back generations to the anti-colonial struggle in undivided India. These communities came from traumatised ones from a land that was recently partitioned in 1947 whose architects also designed and delivered how Punjabis killed, raped and abudcuted 1 million of each other for the agenda of the British, as well as people of Kashmir being partitioned both peoples partitions continue to play into the colonalists aims of divide and rule. Another horrific war conducted by major nato-ally Islamabad/ (west) Pakistan conducting a supremacist genocidal war against those who won the independence of Bangladesh (formerly 'east Pakistan'') in December 1971. 

These communities then came over here to England and many of their first and second generation children united with each other and other Black people to fight-back police brutality and poverty from the 1960s until the early 1990s. The Pakistani Workers Association, Kala Tara and Asian Youth Movements, Indian Workers Associations of many factions (especially important was the leadership of Jagmohan Joshi in the IWA), Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) in Brixton and many other grassroots political formations saw South Asian communities unite with other Black people against racism. The challenge remains to develop this unity again on the basis of socialism and secularism that remains supportive of religious faith stripped of the manipulation, use and abuse by right-wing oppressive misogynists who use their corrupted religious opportunism for their own petty pursuit of power, money and often sexual abuse of women, girls and boys. 

United grassroots working class self-organisation is desperately needed in poor neglected Black and Brown communities like in Leicester and across the country in the Lancs, Birmingham, Hayes and Southall, Luton, Ilford, Peckham, East Ham, Tower Hamlets, St Pauls & Easton and many other communities. There are always tensions between nefarious operators manipulating religion backed by the Brit government, media, intelligence services and the far-right movements under their direction. Although Pakistan was a major colonial victory of division nonetheless the people of South Asia only became independent by means of relative unity and struggle, of mobilising the masses of poor on the basis of solidarity and collective action and organising which remain the challenges today. 

We need to see groups bringing ALL the flags of South Asian nations to fraternise together and celebrate unity, also when there is a big cricket match, or street celebrations for Eid/Vaisakhi/Diwali and independence days of the respective South Asian countries. The amplification of those that conduct racist divide and rule should not mean that we forget that there are many if not more people in our communities who want to see a unifying movement of all working class people to address our common issues. We should remember that there are a lot of young and older grassroots-oriented people who want to see a working class community unity and not this ugly nonsense whereby we become a laughing-stock for the NF/EDL and Tory state.

We encourage young people from South Asia to reject the politics of colonial racist divide and rule, to instead take a socialist interpretation and inspiration from all faiths revolutionary movements and ideologies that unite the oppressed and serve the oppressed towards united resistance against colonial-capitalism and for unity and socialism. We know there are a lot of young people in all oppressed communities who want this. We encourage you to form your own grassroots organisations. We also apologise that the socialist forces able to do this are so small and so many elder activists have failed their historic duties in creating effective projects and initiatives on the ground. 

We in the Malcolm X Movement and our friends have tried since 2014/2015 and continue to contribute to fulfilling these urgent challenges and tasks. Probably there are young South Asians on both sides of the clashes in Leicester who might be involved in the trade union 'strike wave' which would show the direct interest in unity-in-struggle that we all have as working class youth. Back in the homeland we have increasingly have everything to unite around and especially on the issues of overcoming right-wing movements of all kinds, the devastating impact of climate change which is increasingly migrant flows internally and to the 'west' (and the pro-migrant challenges that these flows bring), unliveable hot temperatures, floods all in the context of capitalist crises that brings further poverty around the 'cost of living crisis'. Unite and fight our common challenges and oppression, reject those who are using and abusing religion for their own and the British state' narrow and manipulative agendas. Reject TR/Yaxley Lennon's agenda becoming successful in our communities!

 

Further reading/listening:

Malcolm X - Message to the Grassroots - http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/grassroots.html

Black Panther Party Serve the People programs - https://youtu.be/Yspaulg-tSM + https://caringlabor.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/hilliard-ed-the-black-panther-party-service-to-the-people-programs.pdf

Shaheed Bhagat Singh - https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/index.htm

British state collusion with death squads in the Muslim world - https://danglazebrook.com/2017/05/26/british-collusion-with-sectarian-violence-part-one-with-sukant-chandan-2/

Southall Asian Youth Movement - https://youtu.be/OGWX233kHPg

Bradford 12: https://youtu.be/iLZ6Lbz6C04

Injustice (police killing of Black people) - https://vimeo.com/34633260 

MXM public event: Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Carnival and Black & Brown Resistance

Facebook event page

630pm Fri 25 Aug
Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
N1 9DY
£5 suggested entry

Speakers confirmed so far:

Sister Juni - East Oxford Carnival organiser
Arnie Hill - London Black Revs

As Black and Brown and migrant working class communities continue to feel the increasing squeeze of British colonial state oppression and exploitation, in the aftermath of the Grenfell state massacre, as Notting Hill Carnival itself sees pushes to basically annull it by removal out of the historic community of Ladbroke Grove: the Malcolm X Movement brings together this event and conversation exploring the histories of Carnival, its role as resistant cultural expressions of our experiences, and what is the outlook for the Carnival weekend in the and generally.

[French translation] Immigrant-Oppressing Company Infected with Swarms of Cockroaches

Les « London Blacks Révolutionnaires » et le « Malcolm X Mouvement » ont fait fermer deux restaurants de la chaine Byron à l’aide d’une invasion d’insectes




Les London Black Révolutionnaires et le Malcolm X Mouvement ont mené une action commune contre la chaine de Restaurants Byron en réaction à leurs agissements méprisants ces dernières semaines. Cette chaine de restauration a en effet piégé certains de ses employés, dont des serveurs et chefs cuisiniers avec la participation des Services d’immigration. Trente-cinq employés dont plusieurs se sont fait arrêtés et menottés, ont été déportés hors du pays, tandis qu’une centaine d’autres se cachent par crainte de subir le même sort.

Des milliers de cafards, sauterelles et criquets ont été déversésdans ces restaurants.
Nous nous excusons auprès des clients et employés pour tout désagrément. Cependant nous nous devions d’agir car de telles déportations sont inacceptables.

Nous devons défendre ces personnes et leurs familles d’un tel traitement deshumanisant.

Dans le contexte d’un nouveau gouvernement conservateur non-élu, qui de mémoire est le plus vicieux et le plus à droite que nous ayons eu, dans ce contexte de politique à tendance fasciste et de racisme grandissant, encourageant et promouvant un ressentiment, un racisme et une xénophobie de masse à l’encontre des communautés ethniques et immigrantes. Le Malcolm X Mouvement et les London Black Révolutionnaires ont décidé que des actions claires devaient être menées pour rappeler à nos communautés que sous cette répression et exploitation grandissante, nous possédons la capacité de nous défendre de manière stratégique face à l’adversité.

Le ministre britannique David Davis dans sa campagne de déportation de masses des migrants, se bat pour faire appliquer des mesures fascistes que même l’extrême droite et les organisations fascistes ont abandonnées il y a des décennies.  Un ministre allemand du gouvernement bavarois, défend également les déportations de masses des migrants. La victoire du Brexit a été un encouragement massif à la haine anti-migrants et au racisme. Trump gagne du terrain aux USA, les partis fascistes sont sur le point de gagner les électionsnationales en France et en Autriche.

Nous en tant que communautés d’immigrés Noirs, Africains, Asiatiques et Latinos devons tous nous unir et vaincre cette menace grandissante, sans quoi notre futur en tant que communautés (minorités) en « occident » est en danger direct.

L’expansion de ces mesures, de ces discussions politiques et atmosphères racistes et fascistes, sont en train de mener tout droit ce système colonialiste et capitaliste dans de profondes crises où les guerres à l’étranger et la répression à domicile ne cesseront de s’étendre, à moins que les communautés alliées ne stoppent cette marche oppressive.

C’est un grand défi qui nous fait face, mais les enjeux sont de taille pour nos familles et communautés ici, ainsi qu’en Afrique, Asie, Amérique Latine et Europe de l’Est.

Les actions trompeuses de Byron, sont en adéquation avec cette répression d’extrême-droite grandissante.

Cette main d’œuvre d’immigrants, qui depuis l’époque médiévale représente une part nécessaire au fonctionnement de nos sociétés. Cette main d’œuvre qui a le plus cuisiné et servi nos repas, qui a le plus nettoyer la nation et bien d’autres encore, mais qui est également la plus ciblée.
Les London Black Révolutionnaires et le Malcolm X Mouvement, soutiennent et considèrent que nos communautés d’immigrés doivent être parmi les premières communautés à défendre et doivent se tenir à la tête d’une classe ouvrière et de peuples opprimés contre le colonialisme et le capitalisme.

Nos intentions à travers cette action sont :

- Faire payer Byron pour leur atroce exploitation et malversation à l’encontre de ces employés.

- D’inspirer d’autres personnes afin de s’assurer que Byron restera fermé jusqu’à leur liquidation. Qu’ils s’excusent auprès de leurs employés et plus particulièrement auprès de ceux qui ont été déportés. Qu’ils les dédommagent ainsi que leurs familles, en accord avec les montants réclamés par les victimes, en plus des salaires et congés dus restants à payer.

- Servir d’avertissement aux autres entreprises dans le domaine de la restauration et de l’hôtellerie. Vous pouvez devenir  les cibles de ceux solidaires des migrants si vous piégez vos employés.

- Nous avertissons toutes les communautés d’immigrés et leurs familles, qu’il est temps de se lever, de s’unir et de s’organiser pour faire reculer et vaincre ce regain d’oppression et de racisme anti-immigrants.


Nous nous excusons auprès des clients et employés pour toute perturbation. Cependant, avec ce climat de xénophobie et de racisme grandissant, une limite doit être établie et nous devons dire : trop c’est trop ! Personne n’est « illégal ».

Nous avons agi aujourd’hui en solidarité avec nos frères et sœurs déportés quotidiennement.
Si vous êtes contre cette prise au piège sournoise que Byron a mené contre ses employés, vous devez supporter les actions de défense d’employés refugiés et immigrés.

Two Byron Restaurants Shut Down with a Swarm of Insects

London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement Shut Down Two Byron Restaurants with a Swarm of Insects 





London Black Revs and the Malcolm X Movement have taken affirmative action against Byron restaurants chain in response to the Byron restaurants chains despicable actions in the past weeks having entrapped waiters, back of house staff and chefs in collaboration with UK Border Agency. Some 35 staff members who, many of whom were led off in handcuffs and have been deported out of the country while hundreds more are hiding in fear.

Many thousands of live cockroaches, locusts and crickets into these restaurants. We apologise to customers and staff for any irritation, however, we had to act as forced deportations such as this and others are unacceptable, we must defend these people and their families from such dehumanised treatment.

In a context of a unelected new Tory government that is the most vicious and right wing government in living memory, and in the context of growing racist and even fascist oriented policies encouraging and fostering mass resentment, racism and xenophobia towards ethnic and migrant communities, the MXM and LBRs decided we had to take some clear action to remind our communities we have the ability to strategically defend ourselves under this growing repression and exploitation in the face of adversity.

UK government minister David Davis is arguing for fascist policies that even far-right and fascist organisations stopped campaigning for decades ago in his advocacy of forced mass deportation of migrants, and a minister in the German Bavarian government is also advocating forced
mass deportation of migrants. The Brexit victory was a massive boost to anti-immigrant hate and racism, Trump is ascendant in the USA, fascist parties are about to win national elections in France and in Austria.

We as immigrant communities, Black, African, Asian, Latin American communities must all unite and defeat this growing menace that is before us, otherwise our very future as communities inside the 'West' is in direct jeopardy.

This growing racist and fascist policies, political discussion and atmosphere is taking this colonial and capitalist system into deeper crises where wars abroad and further repression at home will be increasing unless immigrant and allied communities halt this march of oppression. It's a great challenge before us, but the stakes are increasingly high for our communities and our families and communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America and East Europe.

The deceptive actions of Byron is in line with this growing far-right repression of the state. The very immigrant labour that has since the medieval times been a necessary part of our societies to function, the very ones who cook, serve our food, clean up after the nation and much much more and the ones
being targeted the most. LBRs and MXM stand in solidarity with them, and consider our immigrant communities one of the first communities we should be defending and they should be in the lead of a working class and oppressed peoples struggle against colonialism and capitalism.

Our intentions of this action were to:

1. Make Byron pay for their horrifically exploitative misdeeds.

2. To inspire others to ensure Byron is shut down until they either go out of business and, they apologise to those staff impacted especially the deportees, and compensate them and their families according to sums the victims decide including any remaining wages, overtime or holiday pay due.

3. Serve as a warning to other businesses in the hospitality and catering industry that you will be targeted by those who stand in solidarity with immigrants if you entrap migrant workers.

4. We warn all immigrant communities and families that now is the time to stand up, unite, organise and push back and defeat this upsurge of anti-immigrant racism and oppression.

We apologise to customers and staff for any disruption, however, with the growing climate of racism and xenophobia, a line must be drawn and we say: enough is enough. No one is 'illegal'. We’ve acted today in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are being deported daily. If you stand in solidarity against the underhand entrapment of its workers that Byron has carried out. You should support the actions in defence of migrant workers and refugees.

London Black Revs & Malcolm X Movement
Friday 29 July 2016

On the Current Civil War in France

What is going on in that “Douce France”?

Dr Moustafa Traore

Malcolm X Movement coordinator Dr Moustafa Traore who is of Malian heritage having grown up in in Paris, France where he got his doctorate at the Sorbonne, gives his comments as to the current upsurge of rebellions in France.

I have been back from France for a week now, and it is time for me to reflect and write about what is going on, on the other side of the Channel. Seven days in the French capital was enough for me to take the temperature of the different social movements that paralyse the country at the moment.

Overloaded bins with rubbish spilled on the pavements, including all the bad smells that are involved, have become quite common these days in many parts of the French capital. To some extent, Paris looks like a third world country when compared to some cities in the UK. But what surprises me is that, living in the UK, I hear very little about all this.

These last few months, France has witnessed episodes of social unrest that have been commented on in the foreign press very little; as if some kind of censorship from the French authorities has decided not to inform the rest of the world as to what is actually happening in the Hexagon. Less than six months after the aforesaid Jihadist shooting spree that caused the death of hundreds of people in the French capital, and fostered the solidarity and a love movement for the police, it clearly seems as though France has today entered a new chapter of her own history.

The unity and solidarity of last November have given way to tensions, and ideological as well as physical oppositions, between the French government and more than three fourth of the French population. The new bill aimed at changing the French labour code is largely rejected by the French population; especially amongst the youth who have been suffering unprecedented levels of high unemployment for more than a decade now.  The use of 49/3 -which according to the French constitution is the article that enables the government to pass a Law without it being introduced into Parliament- is without question the spark which has outraged a vast majority of the French population. This very method applied by the government on such a serious decision was clearly felt as a form of dictatorship.

France is not far from a historical revolution that could cause chaos and complete destruction of the current French system and order. Many are the analysts who have already described the Hexagon as being in a state of Civil War, with two camps fighting one another. The police, symbol of order and justice, have become in these last few weeks, a target, and the enemy number one of an unsatisfied mob of hipsters determined enough to even burn alive any man clad in blue uniform, if the new Labour Law is not pulled back. The ‘untelevised’ revolution that is about to take place in the country of Moliere, has at least the merit of having made the non-coloured people living in France understand what police errors mean.

Just as the horror of the Second World War had the merit to be the opportunity for other peoples to experience the horror inflicted upon Black people for more than 400 years, it is possible to say that police brutality towards the protestors against the Labour Code today, somehow, teaches the more well-off social classes, about the techniques used by their police to protect the interests of the privileged.

On the internet, footage of the police’s attitude towards the demonstrators has indeed shocked the country. The same violence that was once used against ethnic minorities in the French inner cities, now put into execution in order to contain hipster demonstrators has gone viral on the internet, provoking the outrage, desperation and revolt of millions of French citizens.

Brother Moustafa in discussion with Public Enemy's Chuck D

Also, I cannot stop telling myself: “had this situation happened in some non-Western society, it would have been long ago since calls for support for the demonstrators and rioters had been heard”. Lethal weapons would probably have been provided to those fighting against the President of that country. In international meetings organised and sponsored with the money of the Qataris and Saudis, as usual, the recognition of a transitory government would also have been probably pronounced by countries like France, the UK, or the United States and their allies.

And now to finish this article with a bit of humour, I will ask the  following question, which -you must understand- is not a suggestion, nor a call:  What if Russia, China, and those who are known as being part of the “Global South Countries” recognised Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala as the new leader of the Hexagon?

By Dr Moustafa TRAORE

Solidarity with the Hillsborough Families

Malcolm X Movement: The unity and determination of the families of those 96 killed Liverpool in 1989 has been inspiring, they have been single minded in defying and resisting all UK state and media attempts to shut them down, and instead their patience and perseverance has paid off and the police have been found to have have held primary and overwhelmingly responsibility for the deaths, despite the police and media blaming the Liverpool fans.

While today is historic, it is a massive step towards real justice which is the police being brought to justice, as well as well as bringing to justice those responsible for the dirty lies against Liverpool fans by the govt and media. The govt has already stated that they consider today as an end to this chapter, but people will fight on to get full justice for their loved ones.

Today's inquest findings comes at an important historical juncture, the UK capitalist-imperialist system is in deep and growing crises linked to the global imperialist crisis which is resulting in the increases in all oppressions, poverty war and western-backed terrorism and war has increased. It's not Black and Asian people and immigrants and refugees that are responsible for any of this crises, it's the UK state and imperialist system is behind the institutional racism of the police, of the state organised child and sex abuse rings, of colluding with terrorists in the Muslim world while they lie and tell us they are fighting terrorism, the tax haven scandals while the poorest are hit harder.
All of these scandals and more should result in the English people taking to the streets in their millions to tear down this govt and system and instead to have a system and society that gives dignity, decent free housing, education and full employment and peace and partnership and to right the wrongs of colonialism with the rest of the world.