Dear IRR News subscriber,

IRR News usually closes down for a month in the summer, but there is so much going on, particularly after the EU referendum, that we felt it was important to keep you up to date with the most important developments. Many of them are listed in our bi-weekly Calendar of racism and resistance that we are continuing to compile over the summer.

We also wanted to make sure you had seen a timely new report by social media activists on the spike of hate crimes immediately after the EU referendum. This very thorough documentation and analysis of 645 racist and xenophobic incidents (a third of which were directed at people from a BAME background) has been drawn up by PostRefRacism, Worrying Signs and iStreetWatch. Post-referendum racism and xenophobia: the role of social media activism in challenging the normalisation of xeno-racist narratives, was released shortly after the Home Office unveiled its new Hate Crime Action Plan. This is an irony not lost on the authors who draw attention to the insider-outsider messages of the Home Office, arguing that its ‘hostile environment’ policies towards irregular migrants created the conditions under which racism could be normalised during the referendum campaign.

IRR News team