Over the last few weeks we have knocked on thousands of doors, handed out at least 10,000 leaflets and delivered a message which Keir Starmer, the courts and the police want to suppress on doorsteps across Finsbury Park. “Amu’s a prisoner for Palestine. They stand for welfare not warfare. We are campaigning for funding for our lives, not genocide and war.”
During that time we’ve also listened to hundreds of stories about just how broken things are for ordinary people. Like the vulnerable tenants from Peter Bedford Housing Association, who are being threatened with eviction by their landlord and their landlord’s landlord (Clarion Housing). We’ve heard from residents about the overcrowding, the mould and damp threatening their families’ health and unaffordable rents.
We worked with parents and campaigners to organise a workshop about re-imagining educational spaces to be places for liberation rather than parts of a pipeline which starts with school exclusions and ends with prison.
Residents have told us how angry they are to see prices for food, energy bills and basic necessities spiraling out of reach, while the government continues to waste billions on weapons and support for Trump and Netanyahu’s wars.
On Friday, we had to watch while Amu, Lewie, Umer, Jon and Dan were denied bail again by a judge whose arguments for keeping them in jail simply revolved around an assumed “ideological motivation” for taking action.
As Amu told a journalist from the Mirror in an interview published last week, if the people who run the prisons and the courts think that punishing people on the mere presumption of guilt will succeed in undermining principled resistance, they are utterly mistaken. In prison, Amu explained,
“You’re surrounded by people that the state has failed all the time – and you can see the people around you suffering the consequences of the cost-of-living crisis or the decision to put loads of money into weapons instead of healthcare and housing. So, I think it just hardens your resolve to do something about it.”
The last few days of this campaign will be critical. We need to mobilise the biggest number of volunteers to date in order to turn the broken electoral system into a megaphone for justice. Please join us if you can and share this message or donate if you can’t come in person.
- Volunteer on 6/7 May https://form.jotform.com/260805306825355
- Donate https://donorbox.org/ici-amu-gib-finsbury-park
- Download our leaflet here
- Take action in solidarity with the Brize Norton 5: https://freebrizenorton5.org/