Dear IRR News subscriber,

The 1980s was a time when the New Right, with its most influential journal The Salisbury Review, edited by Roger Scruton, had a poisonous hold over mainstream debates on race, nation and culture. Now, in the wake of the ‘no’ vote in the Scottish referendum, David Cameron is building an ever-divisive and dangerous rightwing populism around one of Scruton’s most ubiquitous themes – Englishness. With a nod to Nigel Farage, UKIP and belligerent southern suburban Conservatism, Cameron has championed the forgotten English, promising ‘English votes for English laws’.

An equally divisive figure on the Right who held sway in the 1980s was the Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford. This week, in ‘The rehabilitation of a “race martyr”‘, Jon Burnett shows how Honeyford’s crude ideas about the cultural deficit of BME communities are being resurrected and sanitised in a number of recent articles and even a Radio 4 documentary which revisited the so-called Honeyford affair. We also review the play Albion, focusing on the fictional group the English Protection Army. The writer claims the play explores the question over ‘whether the left wing have to bare some responsibility for the far right’ in England today, challenging liberal views of the far-Right in the process. It fails, disastrously!

Popular racism is examined in depth in the latest broadcast of Race & Class Radio, which focuses on race-related murders since the publication of the Macpherson Report in 1999. And finally, we reproduce a letter co-written by three organisations taking on a series of aggressive Daily Express stories about asylum seekers in the UK.

IRR News Team