3 – 17 September 2024

In this week’s Calendar of Racism and Resistance, we note the aftermath of August’s riots and the arrests and sentencing of the far-right agitators. The Commons Library report ‘Policing responses to the Summer 2024 riots’, which terms them ‘anti-immigration’, but fails to call them out as racist, shows that since 30 August, 1,280 people have been arrested, with 796 people charged. The longest sentence of 9 years, has gone to a 27-year-old who added fuel to a bin fire outside the Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, housing hundreds of asylum seekers. The council leader is now asking the government not to renew the contract for asylum-seeker housing at the Holiday Inn because of the concerns of the wider residents of Manvers. Thus, the extremists set the limits on humanitarianism.

Those limits cannot show more starkly than in the ‘forced’ Channel crossings. We are devasted to note yet more deaths in the Channel since last reporting two weeks ago, with eight people drowning on 15 September. This brings the total number of people to have died in 2024 to 37 because of the UK’s border regime which allows for no safe routes. On Monday this week Keir Starmer, anxious, he says, to stop the boats and hence a rise in nationalist populism, on a visit to learn from Italy’s hard-right nationalist populist leader Giorgia Meloni in successfully stopping migration ‘upstream’, pledged £4m to support her crackdown. Shocked refugee campaigners in the UK called on him to end migration deterrence and create here an ‘effective and compassionate system’ instead.

This week we also publish a book review by IRR volunteer Anne-Ysore Onana-Oteba on the biography of Arthur France, a community activist who founded the Leeds Carnival 57 years ago. His resilient and restless life is beautifully told by Max Farrar, activist, writer and life-long friend of Arthur, in Speaking Truth to Power: the life and times of an African Caribbean British man. Anne-Ysore describes how the book traces not only Arthur’s life story, but also highlights the roles of prominent activists, including Benjamin Zephaniah, John La Rose and Darcus Howe, in forging a strong and united community that fought against oppression and for racial justice.

Finally, it is with great sadness that we note the passing of Tony Bunyan, founder of Statewatch, life-long campaigner for justice and freedom, veteran investigative journalist and IRR’s honorary President. You can read the statement from Statewatch here. Read two of his Race & Class articles, free to download:‘The Police Against the People’, written in 1981 following the riots, which traces the development of police methods and the increased militarisation of policing, and ‘Towards an authoritarian European state’, which traces the emergence of immigration as a ‘law and order’ issue across Europe.