20 August – 3 September

Seven years after the Grenfell fire that took the lives of 72 people and destroyed 151 homes, the inquiry into the disaster has published its report, exposing ‘systematic dishonesty’ by cladding manufacturers, missed opportunities by successive governments, safety issues being ‘ignored, delayed or disregarded’ by a coalition government focussed on cutting regulation; ‘persistent indifference to fire safety’ by the local authority, and no strategy by the London Fire Brigade. All the deaths were avoidable, the report concludes.

The tragedy at Grenfell is not unique but an aspect of what social geographer and Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls ‘organised abandonment’: practices by public and private institutions which ‘operate to further the objective of private profit at great cost to particular populations’ (defined by race and class). Another aspect of organised abandonment is governments’ use of crises to impose punitive new laws and policies without regard to the human cost. This week’s Calendar of Racism and Resistance contains yet more deaths at borders, including the drowning of at least twelve people, six of them children, in the worst single incident in the Channel since the deaths of 31 people on 24 November 2021. We know the current government’s ‘Smash the gangs’ policy, like the EU’s similar policy in the Mediterranean, will not stop the boats or reduce the death toll.

The actions of the far Right are again featured in the calendar, from the fallout from the racist violence in the UK, to calls for a massacre of Muslims in Austria, and the success of the AfD in Thuringia, Germany. A shocking report of a far-right attack on a Rotherham asylum hotel reveals that young and disabled asylum seekers were left on their own in the hotel for hours after staff were evacuated and two asylum seekers said they had to put out fires themselves.

Finally, it is with great sadness that IRR reports the loss to the movement of two staunch activists. Saleh Mamon died on 25 August – a former headteacher, he had been a longtime supporter of IRR and contributor to its publications on topics ranging from the politics of oil in Iraq to school exclusions. As a committed internationalist and anti-racist (among other things he was a mainstay of CAMPACC and chair of his local group Sutton for Peace and Justice), he enjoyed a special rapport with Sivanandan. We will all miss his eager intelligence and endless encouragement. Read more here.

Earlier in the month, Viraj Mendis, a campaigner against asylum-seeker deportations and the persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka, died in Bremen, Germany. It was Viraj who, in the 1980s, took refuge for almost two years in the sanctuary of a church in Hulme, drawing attention to the viciousness of the UK’s deportations policy. Read more here.