Dear IRR News subscriber,

This week marks the second anniversary of the Grenfell Tower Fire which claimed seventy-two lives and displaced and traumatised hundreds of others. As we report in our regular calendar of racism and resistance, the occasion was marked by Grenfell United, which represents the survivors and bereaved, by the projected illuminations of tower blocks in London, Manchester and Newcastle, which drew attention to the fact that two years after the Grenfell Tower fire, these buildings are still not fitted with sprinklers, suitable fire doors or safe cladding.

On 16 June 2016, Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley & Spen, was murdered. And on the third anniversary of her death, IRR News publishes an analysis of far-right and racial violence across Europe. What unites the killings of Lassana Cisse Souleymane in Malta, German politician Walter Lübcke, and organised racist mob attacks, the IRR’s director Liz Fekete explains, is a ‘political culture of nativism’. ‘There is a danger that this culture is being imbibed by young people who are picking up wider messages in society about who belongs and who does not belong and feel a thrill when they enforce belonging with violence’ she concludes in ‘Enforcing Belonging – racial violence and the far Right’.

We are very pleased to report that Europe’s Fault Lines: racism and the rise of the Right by Liz Fekete and published by Verso won the 2019 Bread & Roses 2019 award for Radical Publishing. The judges commended the book’s analysis of the rise of the Right as ‘essential reading for all of us who worry over what might happen next and who are determined to resist’ and concluded that it was ‘a necessary book for difficult times’.

We also draw attention to another ‘necessary book’, the compilation of essays by activists, artists and academics on the Grenfell Tower fire which was published by Pluto Press this week. After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bully, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany, includes amongst other contributions, a forensic analysis of the causes of the fire by IRR News contributor Daniel Renwick who also identifies the chain of corporate and political culpability.

 

IRR News team