Dear IRR News subscriber,

Two racist attacks were widely-reported this week – one which took place in August and resulted in a Muslim woman in Milton Keynes losing her unborn twins and the other, more recently, leading to the hospitalisation of a Polish man in Leeds. Both these attacks say something about the serious nature of racist violence following the EU referendum. Yet, at roughly the same time that Polish worker Arkadiusz Jóźwik was murdered in Harlow, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) was announcing that it no longer requires weekly hate crime updates from police forces on the basis that the volume of incidents is on the decrease. This is hardly reassuring, given the severity (if not the volume) of ongoing incidents. There seems to be a narrative developing that the hate crimes that followed the referendum represented a ‘spike’, and now this has abated, we can all move on. The danger here is that, in accepting such a view, post-referendum racism will become the new norm.

This week on IRR News we publish a thoughtful essay by Malcolm James, reflecting on the solidarity and support offered to refugees on Chios in Greece and how ‘care’ has unfolded together with profound cruelty. We also publish our calendar of racism and resistance, a fortnightly resource for anti-racist and social justice campaigns.

IRR News team