On Saturday 25th October, many of us gathered to support United Families and Friends’ Campaign (UFFC) 26th year of marching and collectively demanding accountability from the state. It happens every year on the last Saturday of October.
Black Lives Matter UK has always supported these families because we believe this care work is the bedrock of our politics. Their grief and lived experiences reveal the nature of the British state that often discards the lives of those in its supposed care, and disregards the families that they crush under its feet.
How would you respond if your loved one was killed by the state? Either through direct force or systemic neglect – this is the nightmare that UFFC families have to live through.
Not only the overwhelming grief following a violent loss but also having to use your limited resources to challenge state institutions for accountability. They should not have to fight alone and BLMUK alongside organisations like INQUEST ensures that they never do.
Every single family has a story of state violence, cover-up and weaponised incompetence. From Joy Gardner to Chris Kaba, it is often also a story of media racist stereotyping used to excuse the state’s excessive force.
This struggle and care work is highly gendered. UFFC is an almost exclusively women led campaign, outside BLMUK support, it is overwhelmingly mothers, sisters and aunties who carry the campaigns forward each year.
What we do at each annual procession is to collective act against the dehumanising structures of state violence. We listen to the grieving, we renew our pledge to support them to get justice, and we never forget the lives lost or the violence that took them.
We are here to build new collectives towards our freedom, whether it is abolition or otherwise.
This work is not guaranteed to lead to ending this violence or building our freedom. But without this care work, we cannot end this cycle of escalating state violence and disregard. It is vital that we continue to deepen and widen our support for these families at the sharpest end of police and state violence. As by doing so we build a presence that strengthens the foundational infrastructure of our collective liberation.