Brick by Brick – Building Black Power

The Festival of Collective Liberation 2025 aimed to inspire, organise, and equip Black and multicultural communities in Britain to confront systemic racism, racialised poverty, and rising fascism through collective action, solidarity, and cultural resistance. Building a robust, interconnected movement that links anti-racist, anti-poverty, and climate justice struggles

As one of Britain's leading abolitionist organisations, we created a space for both radical imagination and to develop national abolitionist movement infrastructure. 

Our 2025 programme had three central themes: 

1) Building abolitionist organising against poverty and austerity
2) Creating networks of solidarity in defence of migrants and migration
3) Resisting the fascist seduction in working class communities


Abolitionist organising against poverty and austerity

Britain has endured 15 years of stagnant wages and declining living standards, this impoverishment has been distributed according to racial difference. In Britain, more than 50% of Black children are growing up in poverty and this is worse for Bangladeshi and Pakistani children. By maintaining the welfare cap and two-child limit, Labour is enforcing poverty instead of working against it. Family income is a key factor in driving poverty, job insecurity, low wages, high housing costs and imprisonment all affect this. Poverty rates are higher for those registered as disabled which only adds to further shame to Labour's decision to further restrict welfare support to disabled people. As abolitionists we identify the forms of state violence that deprive communities of resources to survive and thrive as the collective harm that is at root of our problems. 

The narratives of "law and order" and capitalist logic seeks to individualise blame and absolve the state of its violence and organised abandonment which sets the conditions for criminalised activity. We will hear from organisations like Collective Punishment Campaign and Maslaha to discuss not only how prisons impact entire families but how we can organise through mutual aid to push against marginalisation and build power to gain the resources to abolish poverty and prisons. 

Networks of solidarity in defence of migrants and migration

When Starmer's government lines up behind far-right and anti-migrant rhetoric, they set the scene for policies that will further inflict violence towards vulnerable racialised people. The British ruling class has needed migrants as cheap and highly exploitable labour and as scapegoats to deflect attention from the economic crises and deprivation that they impose on the working class majority. However what the ruling class did not expect is how those migrants have resisted, organised and reshaped Britain towards justice.

The anti-racist victories of previous generations have faded and given way to scandals like Windrush and Grenfell. Outrageous convictions, like Ibrahima Bah, who was convicted for "facilitating unauthorised entry to the UK" whilst surviving a perilous journey across the English Channel, indicates that our solidarity is not only vital, it is dangerous and to be discouraged.  The new Border Violence bill seeks to criminalise helping migrants reach Britain while it offers no new safe routes of entry for refugees. We believe that only by caring for each other, we find ourselves and strength to overcome capitalist violence. We have welcomed Free Ibrahima Bah Campaign, Manchester Migrant Solidarity and more migrant campaign groups to show us what prefigurative solidarity looks like under Labour's criminalisation drive.

Resisting the fascist seduction in working-class communities

In 2024, race riots took hold across England. Hotels housing migrants were set alight and white fascists terrorised city centres, targeting Black and Brown people at random. In Walthamstow, Brighton and many other major cities and towns, there were gatherings to resist the far-right. But almost a year on, we have seen the far-right succeed electorally. Most strikingly in May 2025, we've seen Reform take 6 councils including Kent and Nottinghamshire and 2 mayoralties in Hull and Greater Lincolnshire. Major cities are not immune to far-right and fascist propaganda, we've seen Andrew Tate, religious leaders and Black businesswomen take on anti-Trans, anti-migrant and other far-right ideas. We cannot be complacent and discard people who are being seduced by these ideas as they face economic strife and want simpel answers. We must engage and organise to win our communities towards abolition and liberation. We gather to discuss, debate and develop our grassroots organising against the rise of far-right, austerity and anti-migrant violence. 

Beyond protests and electoralism, we are are getting to the core of how we broaden our struggle against the global tyranny of capitalism in our everyday. How we continue to build communities of care that can effectively resist policing here and imperial aggression abroad. How cultural resistance opens up new horizons to imagine a different world.