Keir Starmer is taking Black voters for granted. For decades, Black communities have been a dependable and durable support base for the Labour Party. This is no surprise. Before Labour capitulated to big business interests, it was seen as the party of and for the working classes.

The party continues to enjoy strong support from Black voters but there is considerable unease. On the eve of this year’s General Election, The Voice, the only national Black newspaper in Britain, published an article asking whether it was time for Black voters to abandon Labour. The article detailed the reasons for Black people’s disenchantment with Starmer: inadequate action on anti-Black racism as recommended by the Forde report, disrespectful treatment of Diane Abbott, the cynical attempt to profit from the Frank Hester scandal and Starmer’s defence of Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza on LBC.

Beyond these scandals, the party’s economic offer for our communities leaves much to be desired. Poverty in Britain, as it is across the world, is racialised. The darker your skin, the more likely you are to be at the bottom of the economy. We have seen that the last 14 years of Conservative rule have bitterly cost many communities of colour. Over two million people cannot afford three meals a day. More children in Britain are going to school hungry and living in poorly maintained homes since the last Labour administration. Labour’s refusal to remove the two-child benefit cap when over half of Black families are in absolute poverty sent a message which was received by many. Worse still, the party chooses to maintain this cruel policy while refusing to reinstate the cap on bankers’ bonuses or tax the wealthiest in society.

As people of the global majority, the significance of a Labour leadership failing to oppose an active genocide is not lost on us. For some of us, Gaza is not a far away issue, it is our families facing this terror. Similarly, in Tigray, Sudan, Congo and many other violent catastrophes across the world. As people with recent migrant histories, we are not easily separated from the rest of the world by the UK border. More broadly, we know that the contempt for Palestinians and the racialised international ‘other’ has been consistently applied to us as the internal racialised ‘other’ in Britain.

Keir Starmer’s short leadership of the Labour Party has already built a record of active contempt for Black and other communities of colour. While liberals jump for joy that the Rwanda scheme has been scrapped, just a few weeks ago, Starmer and Ashworth were declaring that Labour will deport more people to countries like Bangladesh. One of Labour’s missions with the new Border Security Command will ensure that Britain’s racial regime is being refined to be more efficient, not less unjust.

But working-class people of all backgrounds will do what we have always done when faced with oppression. We resist and overcome. From the migrant uprisings in places like Yarls’ Wood detention centre during the New Labour years, or Black-led strikes for living wages and protests to stop genocidal wars. We will resist the racism of this government as we resisted the racism of its predecessor.

Tomorrow, over 600 Black Lives Matter activists and supporters will gather at Friends House, Euston from 10 AM to develop the future of anti-racist politics in Britain and beyond. We have assembled a wide variety of panels with discussions ranging from the history of the British Black Liberation Front to the genocidal wars in Congo, Sudan and Palestine. Together, all who participated in protests, fundraisers and organise to abolish racist structures are joining us to think through the next period of struggle and to break bread, share in each other’s work, and joyfully reflect together and move forward.

As abolitionists, we take our lead from Black women elders, who, in the Black Radical tradition, have survived and resisted multiple, overlapping oppressions. From this experience, we learned to grow beyond endurance and towards overcoming the miserable conditions imposed on us. This is why our Festival will open with an intergenerational panel chaired by Lola Okolosie with Zainab Abbas, a surviving member of the Black Liberation Front, and Dorothea Smartt, a member of the 1980s radical Brixton Black Women’s group. We take inspiration from these women as well as many other radical Black women such as the communist Notting Hill carnival pioneer Claudia Jones and Altheia Jones-LeCointe of the Mangrove Nine. They all taught us that we have the power to reverse the incoming Government’s designs for our continued subservience.

Recently in Peckham, we put our bodies on the line to prevent the forced removal of our friends seeking asylum to detention centres, the prison barge and ex-army barracks. We have scaled up our collective capacity to intervene in the incursion of policing into our communities through Copwatch networks. We have supported our comrades taking strike action on picket lines. We have turned out in our hundreds of thousands in solidarity with Palestine and grown the Sudan and Congo solidarity movements. This work will continue. As Nigel Farage plots Reform UK’s cannibalisation of the Conservative Party, now is the time to advance anti-racist movements in Britain.