The Global Afrikan People’s Parliament position statement on electoral politics in Britain

[GAPP]

THE GAPP-UK POSITION STATEMENT ON ELECTORAL POLITICS

IN BRITAIN

 1^st MAY 2015

The Global Afrikan People’s Parliament (GAPP) is a newly emerged independent, participatory, self-empowering and representative body whose strategic goal is to promote, preserve and protect the best interests of the Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD), particularly those domiciled in the United Kingdom (UK). By ‘Afrikan’ we mean people known as ‘Africans’ or ‘Black People’ of ‘African origin/descent’.

 

As a peoples self-empowering institution of the AHC-NSD, the GAPP operates as the representative political body for people of Afrikan heritage who choose to identify as an Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD). The AHC-NSD is a special grouping of Afrikan people working in the UK to regenerate our community towards sovereign peoplehood in quest of National Self-Determination. This includes Afrikan national autonomy in determining our own destiny in all spheres of life, in familyhood with our kith and kin, and for that matter, in unbreakably interconnected Sankofa-Nkonsonkonso[1] spiritual link with all of our generations of the past and the present and the future. Indeed, with all of our own in other communities of people of Afrikan heritage throughout the Continent and Diaspora of Afrika. GAPP acts in the UK as an institution of non-territorial political, spiritual and cultural autonomy, but connects territorially by way of Rematriation/Repatriation, as a key element of Reparations, to the homeland of Afrika.

 

The GAPP has learnt from the African United Action Front (AUAF), Global Afrikan Congress (GAC), Black United Front Parliament (BUF-P) and Interim National Afrikan Peoples Parliament (iNAPP) building processes, the importance of moving Afrikan people domiciled in the UK towards better reasoning and carrying out a more effective, impactful and fruitful strategy for victoriously challenging, with Black Power as well as Ubuntu Peoples' Internationalist Pluriversality[2], the racist Eurocentric coloniality of oligarchic white power in Britain.[3]In particular, we are concerned about how this coloniality of power, and its excusive assimilationist unipolarity of racist dictatorship under the camouflage of globalizing Westminster Pseudo-Democracy, results in genocide/ecocide for Afrikan people throughout the World. It is our lived reality and experience that a big part of what will bring about the cessation of such genocide/ecocide is the need for us to assert our own Pan-Afrikan unifying counter-power to stop it through the self-determined glocal[4] regeneration of our AHC-NSD within and beyond Britain. This glocal self-repairing of Global Afrikan Sovereignty is the only guarantee of the collective security of Afrikan people, within the interconnected local, national and international processes of Decolonisation, within and beyond Afrika.

 

We release this statement on 1 May 2015, in remembrance of the didactically enriching political legacy of the 19^th century Afrikan-Caribbean Radical Trade Unionist William Davidson, who suffered framed-up murder by the British State on this date. The political ferment around the supposed abolition of Enslavement had catapulted in that period many Afrikan and Caribbean-born Black people into the centre of radical activism in Britain. Davidson was born in Jamaica in 1781 and sent to Glasgow at the age of fourteen to study law. While in Scotland he became involved as an aspiring revolutionary in the demand for parliamentary reform. It is reported that, Davidson became politically active after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which 11 unarmed demonstrators had been killed and over 500 injured. In response to this he joined the Maryleborne Reading Society.

 

At the Marylebone Union, Davidson met John Harrison, a Spencean (a member of the Spencean Philanthropists) and joined as well. There he met Arthur Thistlewood and became one of the Committee of Thirteen that ran the organisation. However, the group was infiltrated by police informants who kept track of the meetings and records of their discussions and activities. An Agent Provocateur, George Edwards, who worked for the intelligence and security agencies of the British State, persuaded the group to initiate a British State-hatched plot to incite the radicals into attempting to blow up the Houses of Parliament on 23 February 1820. The fake plot was intercepted and Davidson as well as others were arrested, put through a travesty of Justice trial in a kangaroo court and sentenced to death. 2015 marks the 195^th anniversary of the execution of Davidson, who was unjustly convicted of high treason with four other framed-up radical colleagues, publicly hanged and decapitated outside the debtors' door of Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820.

Learning the lessons of Davidson's and other Afrikan experiences of political battling for Change over centuries at home and abroad, we in GAPP have developed a three-pronged approach to tackling the issues of political representation in Europe for those seeking to form themselves into an Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD). This three-pronged approach is as follows:-

 

1. The Pledging Our Cause Mutual Exchange Concord (POCMEC) – ‘The Concord’: rallying voting support for individual candidates standing, particularly in marginal constituencies, on party political or independent platforms, for elections to public offices at local, national, regional and international (European Parliament, etc.) levels, upon their publicly declared standpoint of pledging support for our cause of Afrikan Heritage Community Self-Determination in and beyond the United Kingdom/Europe, in exchange for our GAPP-UK critical support for and constructive engagement with them;
2. The Decoloniality Electoral Alliance for Liberation (DEAL) – ‘The Deal’: Building decolonizational work-in-progress alliances with political forces, in and beyond Europe, that are influential in the United Kingdom - upon the principled basis of sharing certain common grounds of Anti-Coloniality in mutually supportive quests for Self-Determination. In this context, DEAL’s are useful for promoting our own cause of Afrikan Heritage Community Self-Determination in and beyond the United Kingdom/Europe;
3. The Operation Represent Ourselves (ORO) – ‘Self-Represent’: entails establishing an independent political party through which GAPP-UK candidates can be fielded to stand for elections to public offices at any local, national and international level deemed appropriately necessary, feasible and viable.

WILLIAM DAVIDSON

 

For Further Information

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[1] The Akan indigenous knowledge conceptualisation of the transferable wisdom inherent in the historical and spiritual links that bind generations of a people, from the past through the present into the future.

[2] The power of unity in diversity that enables all peoples to equitably share in the interconnectedness of humanity.

[3] The Coloniality of Power is a theory of interrelation of the practices and legacies of European colonialism in social systems and forms of knowledge. The theory describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlived formal colonialism and became integrated in succeeding social orders. The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism that prescribes value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.

[4] Glocal derives from the term glocalization, meaning ‘thinking globally, acting locally’ and speaks to the need to adopt an organisational and organising approach that provides clear global strategic direction along with the flexibility to adapt to local/area/country specific opportunities and requirements